Taking a “Stand”

Horse Teams from author's collection

If you’re like most of us, once we start researching a specific group of records, we get immersed in the euphoria of finding the records of our ancestors without stopping translating the actual documents until much later. It is common to want to find and save those records first but without writing down a plan, it is easy “loose” or misplace those records. If we’d only taken the time to  transcribe and translate our finds, we probably would be further ahead of the game. Let’s look.

I have mentioned Germanology Unlocked several times in this blog. I’m a huge fan and anyone who has German records to translate can benefit from the articles, classes, and books available. I’m including a link to an article: Understanding the "Stand" Column in German Genealogy - And Why It's So Important (Guest Post by Ken Weaver) - Germanology Unlocked.  I had seen this word Stand in old records but was a bit confused as to whether it was someone’s occupation or something else. It turns out that traditionally it noted someone’s social status as well as their occupation. This article does an excellent job of explaining how the class system determined someone’s “Stand.”  And for me, coming from a family of blacksmiths and farmers, it explained that there are many names that  just describe farmers, depending on local dialect and location! Who knew? Here’s a quick link: German Genealogical Word List • FamilySearch. Look for the section entitled Types of Farmers. And there appears to be differences in the status of farmers too. Usually, I have just looked for the word Ackerer or Bauer to determine if they were farmers but now, I want to go back to the records to see what I am missing. Perhaps they were farmers with more social standing or more of a day laborer. The nuance gives us a better idea of how our ancestors lived in their village. Were they comfortable in their occupation or were they on the lower end of the ladder? Surprisingly, some occupations, that we would view with interest, were not viewed as highly as others.
 
While we talked about one piece of information, there are other key pieces of data with which you can do the same thing. When we step back to understand our ancestors, it helps to look at what their village life was like and to understand the “rules” of those times. I hope you enjoy reading more about “Stand” and perhaps this will encourage you to take another look at those old German records to see what other kernels of knowledge you can identify. Happy translating!