ROOTS & BRANCHES

Earlier this month Germanology Unlocked’s Katharine Schober returned to the webinar stage from her maternity leave with an excellent presentation on Archion.de, the Germany-based Protestant church records mega-website.

Schober went over the basics of the site—including the fact that the digitized church registers on it are only browsable, not searchable—before getting to the exciting news that Archion has now partnered with Transkribus, an artificial intelligence enhanced translation software, to provide transcriptions of the digitized church registers on the website.

While Schober noted that these transcriptions should be considered a “rough draft” that needs to be checks by human eyes, experience, and just plain common sense, this is certainly an advancement that will benefit the many people intimidated at the first sight of the archaic German cursive script in which these registers are usually written.

Some of Archion’s registers have already been transcribed, but thankfully the process for those that have not been is pretty quick—there’s now a button on the standard Archion toolbar that allows you to ask for the transcription to be created, which often comes back in minutes.

As Schober noted, the quality of the transcription varies. I immediately tested it out on some records with which I was working and found mixed results (in one sample I did, the transcription turned from German to English in mid-record).

Since Archion’s home page menu allows users to select German or English for use on the site, I thought maybe that had an impact on what language Transkibus would use for the output, but running a couple of more tests didn’t prove that to be the case, so the jury’s out on why some translations may happen.

Another test I did involved an obscure place name in a marriage record that would be helpful for me to know.

The place name looked like “Drendling” to an expert translator who works for Germanology Unlock, but Transkribus came back to “Dreudlingen.”

I was pretty sure the “u” was incorrect because other u’s in the record had the U-bogen stroke mark above the letter that is found in much German handwriting, and this place name had no U-bogen. I also was confused by the addition of the -en suffix.

However, I was told that a scribble after the “g” indicated an abbreviation leaving off the -en. And when I used various research aids for a village name phonetically close to Drendlingen or Dreudlingen, the best guess was “Treuchtlingen,” a town far enough away from the place of the record that the pastor recording the marriage might have misheard it. A reminder that Archion is a for-pay site, although you can freely browse to determine what parishes’ registers exist and have been digitized. Subscriptions are available for various terms, starting at just 19.90 Euros (about $23 as this is written) for a month of use.