Letting Dialects Drop a Clue

 

Can you speak Swabian? Well, neither can I. I suspect a lot of people in the United States wouldn't even realize it if they heard someone speaking that dialect. But if a German-speaking immigrant met another immigrant who spoke Swabian, I suspect the two could somehow find a way to understand each other. Even more important, just knowing there is such a language might guide us in untangling the origin of some Metzger ancestors in my mother-in-law's heritage.

For instance, consider this question: if Johann Metzger's son remembered that the household language of his childhood was German, why was his mother said to have been born in France?

Johann Metzger—or John, as he was listed in American government records—married a woman by the name of Mary Ann Wiest. The wedding took place in Perry County, Ohio, where John Metzger's family had settled at the end of their immigrant journey. The straightforward marriage entry in the county records—in English, incidentally—showed the date of their marriage as August 24, 1852. Though I haven't yet been able to find John Metzger's entry in the previous census, his intended was easily found in the household of Theodore and Cecelia "Weast" in the 1850 census. 

It was in that census, though it was hard to read the handwriting, where I first gleaned the idea that the Wiest family had emigrated from France. Just to be sure, I followed the family from Ohio to Dubois County, Indiana, after John and Mary Ann's wedding, to see whether that birth designation was repeated in subsequent records. Sure enough, France was the answer for the subsequent census in Indiana, as well as for the following two decades' records. It wasn't until after John's 1896 death, when Mary Ann lived with her eldest son Frank, that he reported her birthplace as Germany.

Was that simply a matter of changing the information to the politically correct designation of the time? I don't think so. Again, reading between the lines, I believe that unexpected birth designation for a German-speaking immigrant can provide us a clue as to the family's origin: the borderland region once known as Alsace and Lorraine, now in France. Their centuries-old borderland disputes make that one location a likely candidate for such mixed messages over the decades, true, but just looking at the history of the dialects spoken in that region over the years can give us an idea of why someone said to have been born in France could actually be a native speaker of a German dialect.

Which is why I began by asking about the Swabian dialect. Years ago, many who lived in Alsace spoke a dialect similar to Swabian, which is a form of high German. Yet, Alsace is considered to be part of France, not Germany. Similarly, what is now the neighboring Lorraine also has a German-speaking population in the northeastern part of the region, known as Moselle.

Just knowing these details about the languages and dialects spoken throughout the history of these two regions can help point us to the possible homeland of the immigrating—and "German" speaking—Wiest family of France, and perhaps, the origin of the Metzger family, as well.