At first sight Kurrent looks like a row of wavy lines. The letters are narrow and slanted, and many of them look alike. Anyone who knows only today's Latin script will not recognise even a word they would read at once in print. The good news is that parish registers are not letters or novels. They are forms in which the same words repeat: son, daughter, wife, farmer, died, buried. You learn to recognise those as pictures, and the rest comes with them.
Schwabacher, Fraktur and Kurrent: three different things
In Czech, everything written in old German script is loosely called "švabach", Schwabacher. Strictly speaking, Schwabacher is a printing typeface from the 1480s, probably named after the town of Schwabach near Nuremberg. The famous Czech Kralice Bible was printed in it. Schwabacher was followed by Fraktur, another printed blackletter typeface. What the priest writes by hand in the registers is Kurrent: a cursive script that took hold in the Czech lands in the 18th century and pushed out an older Czech handwritten form of the same type. In Czech texts it was replaced around the middle of the 19th century by the Latin cursive we use today. In German texts people went on writing it, in Austria as the normal official hand, and in Germany it was officially abolished only in 1941.
One thing about Sütterlin: it is a later German school version of Kurrent, introduced in Prussia around the First World War. It never reached Austrian schools before 1938, so do not look for it in registers of the 18th and 19th centuries. When someone tells you a register is "written in Sütterlin", they mean Kurrent.
Up to three scripts meet in a single record. The printed column headings are in Fraktur, the record itself is in Kurrent, and names and Latin words the priest often wrote in Latin script. You can see it in the register of births of Horákov near Brno from 1856:
Register of births, Horákov 1856: printed headings and the first lines of a record
[tištěno frakturou:] Zeit der Geburt und Taufe. Monat, Tag. Hat getauft. | Haus Nro. | Namen des Täuflings | Geschlecht: Knaben, Mädchen | Ehelich, Unehelich | Eltern: Vater, Religion katholisch, protestantisch; Mutter, Religion | Pathen: Namen, Stand | Hebamme [pod tím kurentem:] 7/8 Jänner, Johann Nowotny Coop. | 44 | Maria …
Headings: time of birth and baptism, month, day, who baptised | house no. | name of the baptised | sex: boy, girl | born in or out of wedlock | parents: father, religion Catholic, Protestant; mother, religion | godparents: name, status | midwife. The record: born on 7 and baptised on 8 January, baptised by the curate Jan Novotný, house no. 44, Marie.
For a beginner, the printed headings are the best textbook. Fraktur is easy to read, and once you know what the heading of a column says, you also know what is written by hand below it. The column Haus Nro. holds the house number, Vater the father. Tables of this kind were introduced by Emperor Joseph II in 1784; there is more about them in the article on the year 1784.
The alphabet and the letters that get mixed up
The whole Kurrent alphabet is shown in a table from a letter writing handbook of 1866. On the left is always today's letter, next to it the small and the capital letter in Kurrent:
The Kurrent alphabet, 1866
You do not have to learn it all. At the start it is enough to know where Kurrent fools you most often:
- e looks like a Latin n. Two short strokes side by side. Someone reading it as Latin script sees "der" as "dnr" and "Eheweib" as "Ehnwnib".
- n looks like a Latin u. So "Sohn" is easily read as "Sohu". To tell them apart, a real u has a small arc above it. An arc above a letter is therefore a hint, not an umlaut.
- Words like "unehelich" are a fence. u, n, e, h, e, l, i, c, h, e: nothing but vertical strokes. Count them, and look for the arc above the u and the dot above the i, which is often shifted one letter further on.
- s has two forms. At the beginning and inside a word it is the long ſ, a long stroke down below the line with a loop at the top. At the end of a word or of a part of a word (Haus-nummer) it is the round s, which looks like a 6.
- h has a loop below the line and is easily confused with f or with the long ſ.
- A stroke above m or n means in a German text that the letter is doubled: m with a stroke is mm. In Latin records, though, a horizontal stroke above a letter usually means a left out m or n (Joañes = Joannes).
- Capital letters differ most from Latin script. Learn them from the words you meet them in: S in "Sohn", T in "Tochter", H in "Haus".
Start with a short record
The easiest are younger records from the middle of the 19th century and short death records. They have fixed columns and only a few words. Like this one from Hostěnice near Brno:
Death, Hostěnice, November 1843
24ten/26 November | 13 | Martin Říčanek Viertler in Hostienitz | 1 „ 1 | 60 | Lungensucht | Anton Klimeš Coop. | Leopold Nedopil(?) Coop.
Died on 24, buried on 26 November 1843, house no. 13: Martin Říčánek, quarter-farmer in Hostěnice; Catholic, male, 60 years, consumption. In the last two columns the curates Antonín Klimeš and Leopold Nedopil(?).
A record like this can be worked out even without knowing the script. The date, the house number and the age are digits, and you know the name from other records. That leaves a few words: Viertler (quarter-farmer), in Hostienitz (in Hostěnice, a Czech village in German spelling) and the cause of death, Lungensucht. And each of them will appear in the book a hundred more times. By the way, the age of 60 is overstated: Martin was born in 1788, so he was 55. Ages at death were often just estimated.
A record line by line
The next step is a longer sentence. The record of the death of little Johann of Horákov in 1866 has five lines. We show them one after another, and for each one what to notice:
Death, Horákov, June 1866, the name column
-
Johann, unehelicher
A capital J in Kurrent, then the "fence": u-n-e-h-e-l-i-c-h-e-r. The little arc is above the first u.
-
Sohn der Maria,
Sohn is son. The e in "der" is two short strokes, like a Latin n.
-
ehelichen Tochter des
The same word as in the first line, only without "un": born in wedlock. Tochter is daughter.
-
Franz Hromek, Viert-
The surname is written in Latin script and looks different from the text around it. Viert- continues on the next line.
-
lers in Horákow
The end of the word Viertlers: of a quarter-farmer. The village name is written the Czech way with an accent, but with the German ending -ow.
The whole sentence reads: "Johann, illegitimate son of Maria, legitimate daughter of František Hromek, quarter-farmer in Horákov." The other columns give the age, 3 months and 26 days, the cause, Masern-Ausschlag, that is measles, and the signature of the curate Theodor Wolf. Five lines, and you already know about three people from three generations.
A harder record: three deaths in one house
Older hands tend to be more economical and abbreviate more. This detail is from January 1810, from the register of deaths of the same parish. Try reading it yourself first, and only then scroll down to the transcription:
Deaths, Horákov, January 1810
d: 21ten gestorben, begraben d. 23ten Coop. | 44 | Katharina, Tochter des Georg Hromek ¼tler von Horakow | 1 – – 1 | 5 | an Fraiß. — d: 21ten gestorben, begraben d. 23ten Coop. | 44 | Marianna, Tochter des Georg Hromek ¼tler von Horakow | 1 – – 1 | 1 Tag | an Fraiß. — d: 24ten gestorben, versehen und begraben den 26ten Franz Ratoschek(?) Coop. | 44 | Innocentia(?), Eheweib des Georg Hromek ¼tler von Horakow | 1 – – 1 | 30 | an hitzig[em] Fieber.
On 21 January died, and on 23 January was buried, Kateřina, daughter of Jiří Hromek, quarter-farmer of Horákov no. 44, aged 5, convulsions. The same day died his newborn daughter Marianna, one day old, convulsions. On 24 January died their mother Inocencie, aged 30, fever; she received the last rites and was buried on 26 January by the curate František Ratošek(?).
What to notice: the fraction ¼tler is an abbreviation of Viertler, the quotation marks „ one below the other mean "the same as above", though in columns they can also mean an empty field or just fill the end of a line, and Coop. is cooperator, that is curate. The word Fraiß (elsewhere Fraisen) means convulsions, and it is the most frequently recorded cause of death of small children in the registers. It is a symptom, not a diagnosis. What hides behind such words we take apart in the glossary of Latin and German.
And one more thing you learn from the script: Marianna's date of birth is not recorded, but from the age "1 Tag" (one day) and the date of death it follows that she was born on 20 or 21 January. This is how records complete each other.
How to learn it quickly
- Start with the names you know. The surname, the first names in the family, the name of the village. FamilySearch suggests building your own alphabet from them: a letter you have once read in a familiar name, you will recognise elsewhere too.
- Go from younger books to older ones. A hand from 1880 is more legible than a hand from 1790, and the words are the same.
- Stay with one scribe. Every curate wrote a little differently. Once you have read ten of his records, the eleventh reads itself.
- Keep a glossary. A snippet of the word and its reading next to it. After a few evenings you have your own table, exactly for your parish.
- Mark an uncertain place with a question mark and move on. It often becomes clear three records later.
If you want more, the English language FamilySearch Wiki page on German handwriting is a good start. Czech handbooks exist too: Ivana Ebelová's Klíč k novověké paleografii (Karolinum, 2nd edition 2020), with twenty Czech and twenty German samples with transcriptions, and the Učebnice čtení starých textů published by the Czech Genealogical and Heraldic Society.
And what about software?
Today software can transcribe handwriting too. The best known is Transkribus, which has models for registers in Latin, German and Czech and gives a free account 50 credits a month, roughly 50 pages. For every line it shows how sure it is. It is useful for a first reading and for finding a name in a long book. But names, house numbers and dates are exactly the places where it makes the most mistakes, and those are the most important for a family tree. So always check whatever you take from the transcription against the original. We work the same way: the computer reads the record, a person checks it.
If you have no time to learn, you can start with a finished reading: we will find the first record of one ancestor for free, with a transcription into plain English. How to get to the right book is in our step by step guide.
