The story of how I came to possess and transcribe/translate this family prayer book record is one of almost epic proportions in itself. Last year my sister Ruthie told me that our cousin Helen Hottenstein had given her an old prayer book published in Danzig, Prussia and that it had a lot of German writing with what looked like dates inside the front cover and asked if I wanted it? When I picked myself up off the floor I gasped, “Yes!” While waiting to receive the book in the mail I prepared to translate it with the help of an online German-English dictionary and had even obtained lists of pertinent German words and samples of old German handwriting to aid me. After all, my father had taught me a few German words like “Mine Gott im Himmel” and I had even learned to pronounce German well enough to sing it in the Mansfleld State Freshman Chorus.  I had recently finished transcribing the “Letters to Mary BURNS Gorham” written 140 years ago by poorly educated people hadn’t I? No problem… When the book arrived I found that I couldn’t even make out the letters well enough to even begin translating. 

I then e-mailed my dear friend, Tri-Counties contributor and Musselman cousin June ROWE Howard and enlisted her assistance. She said that she had minored in German and had spent a year in Germany and it just so happened that there was a German exchange student spending the summer with the family across the street and she would be only too happy to translate it for me. I breathed a sigh of relief and sent her copies of the prayer book inscriptions. A week and a half later June wrote to say that they had had a little trouble deciphering the handwriting (I did not even smile, let alone chuckle), but that the exchange student’s parents had come to visit her for a few days and were able to interpret the old styles that are no longer taught in German schools. Gott sei Dank, Hallelujah! 

Dave Kester