This presentation will introduce “German Heritage in Letters,” (germanletters.org), an initiative to find, collect, and share online, correspondence that sheds light on the effects of immigration from German-speaking lands to the United States on families and communities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Thursday, October 15, 6:00-7:30 pm
German Society of Pennyslvania
611 Spring Garden Street, Philadelphia
Free
Virtual
RSVP info: https://www.germansociety.org/classes/german-heritage-in-letters-from-family-research-to-digital-history/

Between 1850 and 1920, more than five million individuals emigrated from the German-speaking lands to the United States, and over the same period over 300 million letters were exchanged between Germany and the United States. This presentation will introduce “German Heritage in Letters,” (germanletters.org), an initiative to find, collect, and share online correspondence that sheds light on the effects of emigration from the German-speaking lands to the United States on families and communities on both sides of the Atlantic. The project is an innovative effort to create an online collection of primary sources that combines correspondence from institutional libraries and archives with letters contributed by members of the public. The talk will focus on the relationship between family researchers and the project, discussing how project contributors have gathered information about their family letters using strategies like transcription and translation to in-person research and travel, and will describe how the German Heritage in Letters project enhances this work by taking advantage of the revolution in digital historical content both to gather more granular information about the individuals who wrote and sent these letters as well as to embed the letters in current scholarly research about the events and eras they describe.