I purchased this beautiful “religious document” at an antique shop, thinking it was a baptismal certificate, only to find out after I got it home and used Babel Fish for the words I could decipher, that it is a death certificate (probably more religious than official) for an infant, I believe, which is unsettling.
So far, I know that “geboren” is “born”, “entschlafen” is “passed away”, and I managed to figure out that “begraben” is handwritten underneath, which is “buried”.
The handwritten part is super hard to decipher- I can’t even make out the name. The "r"s are weird, the "g"s are weird, the "a"s are weird (this I realized after I figured out that the one handwritten word was “begraben”), but knowing that, I can only place those letters in a few places in the handwritten text.
Anybody here good at deciphering old-school german handwriting?
Looks like Sütterlin handwriting, the standard German handwriting taught at the time.
It’s not an official document but seems to be some kind of document to be displayed in memory of someone.
As far as I can read it:
Zum Gedächtnis
an
Georg Hahn
Sohn des Herrn Wilhelm Hahn u.
seiner Ehefrau Caroline, geb. Grebe
geboren am 13. Maerz 1907
entschlafen am 14. Maerz 1907
begraben am 17. Maerz 1907
Auf Wiedersehen!*
In memory
of
Georg Hahn
son of Mr. Wilhelm Hahn and
his wife Caroline, née Grebe
born 13 March 1907
died 14 March 1907
buried 17 March 1907
Goodbye until we meet again!
Wow- thanks so much! Yeah, I knew it wasn’t official, but wasn’t sure about the meaning of such a document (did people really display death remembrances? Or were they given by a church just to keep as a remembrance?)
I wish I could make out the seal at the bottom, but it’s too deteriorated to make sense of.
Does it seem morbid for me to display this? Should I try to find a relative and return it? I guess I’m all confused about such a document, because I’m not sure I’d want to display this if it were my own child, but I’m a weird, emotionally retarded American.
The 1905 Wisconsin state census lists a Wilhelm Hahn, age 44, and his wife Caroline in Oconto County, with children Dora, 20; Lena, 12; Genetta, 6; Katie, 4; and Edward Korth, 21, probably the hired man or boarder. There is another Wilhelm and Caroline, too old to have a baby in 1907, and a William and Caroline. Can pursue if you like.
I note that the month is written Maerz, not März. Was it common to use the ae spelling when handwriting? I thought that was only for circumstances in which the umlaut wasn’t available.
I talked to a tech support guy at Ancestry.com because their research model wants you to work backward, to find ancestors. I was trying to find descendants. There really isn’t a practical way to do that other than searching obituary records, and I think the 1940 is the latest census posted? But great-grandchildren should still be living. The tough part is that, aside from baby Georg, all the children were girls, who tend to get married and change their names. But I still can do some looking later.
Thanks for your help sigmagirl- after skimming the names, I hadn’t realized they were all girls. I do remember when looking for someone once, that some of those ancestry sites list sibling names, but I don’t know how thorough a record this old might be.
