• St. Louis, November 19, 2019 •

We had a wonderful turnout for our St. Louis Digitization Day! Our event, held in cooperation with the St. Louis County Public Library and hosted by the St. Louis Genealogical Society, provided an opportunity for us to learn more about the important historic documents many families have to offer and to help families learn more about their records. The event included introductory remarks by Karen Goode, officer of the St. Louis Genealogical Society, Scott Holl, head of the history and genealogy department at the St. Louis County library, and Atiba Pertilla, project manager of German Heritage in Letters. 

Two experts in Kurrentschrift transcription and translation, Carmen Freeman and Katherine Schober, gave consultations to people who brought their letters to the event. Contributors shared specific documents and the transcription experts provided summarized translations. This was a particularly helpful and even moving event, since in almost all cases the correspondence was more than a century old and the present-day family members had never known anything about the subject matter of their historic documents. Volunteers from the Genealogical Society managed the scanning of documents for inclusion in the project website; family members were given digitized copies of their documents loaded on to “Wunderbar Together” USB drives to take home with them.

Professional transcriber Katherine Schober discussing the contents of a historic letter with a contributor to German Heritage in Letters

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