Old German Handwriting - Ja, There's a Technique to Understand It!

Trying to research your family history from the old place? Well, if one of your prior family hailed out of Germany before 1941, perhaps you may come across information as well as reports developed in Old German Handwriting.



This could provide a true challenge for you given that at this time, even most older Germans are not likely to be unable to read this style of handwriting. To people not out of Deutschland of yore or even for younger Germans, Old German Handwriting is very totally different from the German written nowadays that anyone looking at it may not have the ability to tell it besides hieroglyphics.



Many people may perhaps recognize the other label that your type of cursive handwriting goes by - altdeutsche Handschrift. Altdeutsche Schrift (which means old german Writing) is the previous type of this backletter (meaning “broken”) handwriting that is used in Germany. It originated from the 16th century and changed the Gothic letters that printers had been using during the time.



The actual German Minister for Culture commissioned typography artist Ludwig Sütterlin to develop a modern handwriting script in 1911 and yes it had been this kind of cursive form he created, which eventually exchanged various other, older scripts. Today, anybody make reference to Sütterlin handwriting scripts, they will be speaking about some of the older handwriting styles.



In 1941, Germany prohibited all backletter typefaces as a consequence of misunderstanding that they were Jewish. Yet, up over the post-war period, lots of Germans still utilised this handwriting style. Even through the 1970s, Sütterlin had been tutored to German schoolchildren, eventhough it was not the main form of cursive tutored.



The script itself is really stunning and elegant. As an example, the Sütterlin lower case “e” appears like two slanted bars. Nevertheless aesthetically appealing, reading through it can get very confusing, because a lot of the letters actually seem to appear like differing letters. One interesting point with regards to the letters themselves is they may and possess been suited for blackboards for mathematical purposes, since the characters are very distinct.



For a German-speaking people,translating writings in the Old German Handwriting is actually impossible as there is a real radical variation in the styles of all the letters. Gorgeous, yes. Easily readable, absolutely no. Thankfully, you can find people out there who happen to be knowledgeable about this brand of handwriting and may have any ancient papers or ancestral papers quickly and easily translated.



For people who are trying to find their family trees or perhaps attempting to translate old letters, documents, or records that are created in Old German handwriting, the company Metascriptum is happy to to help. They offer translation and transcribing services that can anything you have and simply put it back into English. If you happen to encountered German handwriting that looks very old and doesn't resemble current German, the chances are it happens to be Sütterlin, and Metascriptum will help.



Check out further information to transcribe old German handwritings at -


Suetterlinschrift uebersetzen