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| Format | Book Whole |
|---|---|
| Author, Monographic | Baumann, Elda Ottelie |
| Title, Monographic | German Surnames in Potosi |
| Place of Publication | Madison |
| Publisher | University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| Date of Publication | 1938 |
| Extent of Work | vii, 192 pp., tables |
| Abstract | One. . .major reason for investigating surnames. . .is that they are an integral part of the American language and furnish us with valuable evidence concerning the development of our own speech. . . . I chose Potosi, Wisconsin, because it was an isolated German community in a section predominantly British and American from the time of its settlement until the present, and consequently should be characteristic of other such communities in the Middle West. . . . The first step. . . was to copy. . . the names of each family recorded in the 1850, 1860, and 1870 census records as having been born in Germany, each birth and marriage in these families which was listed in the church records from 1840 to the present, and each entry in the county marriage records. . . . [This] gave me a fairly accurate genealogy of the German families, a record of when they had come, how long they had stayed, what their occupations and financial status had been from 1850 to 1870, and what vicissitudes the spellings of their names had gone through. Next, I [interviewed] the oldest living German settlers and their children and grandchildren to fill in gaps. Provides a brief history of Potosi; a general history of German nomenclature; and then deals with the changes in spelling and pronunciation (orthographical and phonetic modifications) of the German names in Potosi, with an attempt to explain them. |
| Notes | Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1938; includes bibliographical references; not held by MKI Library |
| Call Number | Memorial Library UW Madison Theses Basement North AW B3272 |
| MKI Terms | Names, Personal -- German -- Wisconsin -- Potosi/ German Americans -- Wisconsin/ Genealogy/ Wisconsin -- Grant County/ 19th century |