Greetings to all
Thanks Joel Russell for your story. My ancestry also provides an example
(at least to me) of the use of German in the households of rural vs urban
America.
My ancestors spoke German in the Home. My grandmother when first attending
the
one-room schoolhouse could not communicate in English, so had to listen.
There were
three siblings attending the school. When they wanted to 'practice' their
English; they crawled
and hid among the pilings beneath the corn crib. If their father ever
caught them speaking
English at the home place, they got whipped. After years had gone by,
and the children
grown to adulthood, (the children had let the German slip away) the
parents would speak
to each other in German when they did not want the children to understand
something.
Other Germanic ancestral families just used less and less of it through the
years, so that
now-a-days only a few 'favorite words' remain to be heard occasionally.
And now
here we are today with modern electronic and online translators. What a
miracle to
visit with our cousins on the other side of the world. Wonderful. Bye.
Maurice Woolsoncroft
wrightcroft@earthlink.net