On occasion I have mentioned items from our family history that Carolyn (Peters) Stucky shared for posting on the blog. Among those items were photographs (here), a 1944 newspaper that Henry Buller had read while being held prisoner by the Nazis (here), an agricultural workbook that Henry had created years earlier (more on that later), and letters that Grandpa Chris’s sister Sara had collected over a number of years, spanning 1907 to 1931.
Most of the letters are written in English and are easy enough to read. However, seven of them, written between 1925 and 1928, all sent by Marie Siebert, are in German cursive. I have limited ability to decipher German cursive, so when I was scanning the larger batch of letters for posterity (i.e., archiving), I initially thought that I would not spend time to capture something that I would probably never read. At the last moment, however, I changed my mind and scanned the entire batch. I am happy that I did. Why?
Recently the world has been abuzz with excitement about the promise (or the dangers) of artificial intelligence (AI). Many of the claims (and fears) are way overblown, in my view: AI will neither save nor destroy the world. That being said, some AI-powered apps are quite good. Several translation programs now produce remarkably accurate and idiomatic renderings of one language into another, of German, for example, into English.
Another application that recently came to my attention is an AI-powered program that recognizes and analyzes the handwriting of the scribes of the Great Isaiah Scroll found at Qumran (see, e.g., here). This got me to thinking: if AI could be trained to recognize the Hebrew script written by scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls over two thousand years ago, then perhaps someone had already developed an app that could read (i.e., recognize) German cursive written in the early twentieth century. It turns out that someone has.
The online app Transkribus (see here) was the the first option that came to my attention, and it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. I uploaded a page of a letter from Marie to Sara (the one shown above), and within 15 seconds the app had worked its magic and produced a reasonably accurate transcription of the letter.
The screen shot above gives a good idea of how the app works. One uploads a .jpeg image of the text to be transcribed, then Transkribus “scans” the image multiple times and outputs the transcribed text seen. Another nice feature of the app is that holding one’s mouse over a particular line of text highlights it on both the image and the transcription. In this example, I held my mouse over the second line of the letter body, which prompted Transkribus to draw a line around the text in the image and highlight in gray the corresponding text in the transcription. This feature is helpful for making close comparisons between the original text and AI-generated transcription.
The resulting transcription is reasonably accurate but not perfect. Note, for example, that the 8 of the year at the top is missing. Further, the salutation is broken into two lines: Liebe / Consine Sara (as are several other lines), and the 3 in line 8 of the transcription is a phantom (the app is reading a blank space). Finally, in a few cases the app seems to misread a word.
Still, with the transcription providing a head start, it is not difficult to correct the few errors and produce a serviceable text. In this case, Transkribus enabled me to recover the entire two-page letter with a fairly high degree of confidence:
Jan 20, 1928
Liebe Cousine Sara:
Ich habe in letzter Zeit viel an dich gedacht so will ich den mal ein paar Zeilen schreiben. Ich habe ein paar mal gefragt wie es dir geht und es würde gesagt es geht dir gut. Aber freilich weiß ich aus Erfahrung das wenn man nach einer Operation auch gut tut. so fühlt man mitunter doch noch sehr sich Glecht. wünsche sehr das Du jetzt ganz gesund werden könntest und wieder mit neuem Mut in die Zukunft blicken. Ich weiß ja Erfahrung wie einem an zu Mute ist wenn die Hoffnung verschwunden ist. Aber die auf den Herrn harren kriegen neue Kraft u.s.w.
Seit Letzten Mittwoch haben wir in der Kirche sehr schöne Abendversammlungen gehabt. Gestern abend war zum letzten mal. Rev. P. P. Wedel von Kansas war der Redner. Du wirst vieleicht gehört haben das er kommen wollte.
Bei deinen Eltern bin ich noch nicht gewesen will aber nächtens hin zu gehen. habe aber schon mit deiner Mama in der Kirche gesprochen. Das Wetter ist eine Zeitlang sehr schön gewesen, jetzt ist es ziemlich kalt. Zum Schluß wünsche ich die Gottes Segen.
Auf wiedersehen,
Marie Siebert
Translated into English, the letter reads as follows:
Dear cousin Sara:
I have been thinking about you a lot lately, so I wanted to write you a few lines. I have asked a few times how you are doing, and I was told that you are doing well. But of course, I know from experience that, even if you are doing well after an operation, you still feel very weak at times. I sincerely hope that you will now be able to recover completely and look to the future with renewed courage. I know from experience how it feels when hope is gone. But those who wait on the Lord will gain new strength, etc.
Since last Wednesday, we have had very nice evening meetings at church. Last night was the last one. Rev. P. P. Wedel from Kansas was the speaker. You may have heard that he was coming.
I haven’t been to see your parents yet, but I want to go tonight. I already spoke to your mother at church. The weather has been very nice for a while, but now it’s quite cold. Finally, I wish you God’s blessings.
Goodbye,
Marie Siebert
And just like that, albeit with a huge assist from technology, we have a window back into our family past some ninety-seven years ago. The day the letter was written, 20 January 1928, was a Friday. As we see on the envelope below, the letter was postmarked the same day. Obviously, Marie wrote the letter early enough in the day to have it postmarked in the Lushton post office the same day (the postmark actually says “A.M.”). This also means that the evening meetings at the church, presumably Bethesda Mennonite Church in Henderson, Nebraska, had begun on “last Wednesday,” or 11 January, and had finished on the Thursday evening before, or 19 January.
What else can we glean from the letter and its envelope? The letter was mailed from Lushton and was addressed to Sara at the Mennonite Hospital in Beatrice, Nebraska. Earlier (here and here) we discovered that sometime in 1927 (we think) Sara had taken a job at the Mennonite Deaconess Home and Hospital in Beatrice. Thus it is not surprising that the letter was addressed to Sara there. However, the body of the letter indicates that in January 1928 Sara was not a worker but rather a patient at the hospital. Marie references some sort of an operation and her hopes for Sara’s continued recovery.
Who is Marie Siebert? Note first that she identifies her as Sara’s cousin, so we know she was a relative, not merely a close friend. As far as I can tell, she was the daughter of Cornelius Siebert, who was Sarah Siebert Buller’s brother. That would make her a first cousin to Peter P Buller (Sara’s father) and thus a first cousin once removed to Sara herself. If I have identified the correct Marie Siebert (I know of no other reasonable possibilities), then she was nearly seven years older than Sara: born on 24 November 1892, Marie was thirty-six when the letter was written; born 30 September 1899, Sara was twenty-nine at that time. Sadly, Marie died less than five years later, a week shy of her fortieth birthday.
One person referenced in the letter remains: P. P. Wedel. In all likelihood, this individual was the elder at the First Mennonite Church of Christian (Moundridge, Kansas). According to the GAMEO article on that church, written by none other than P. P. Wedel himself (here), Wedel served as elder from 1917 to 1951. Another GAMEO article describes Wedel as “a longtime leader in the General Conference Mennonite Church” (here). Given Wedel’s prominence in Mennonite circles and his proximity to Nebraska, the P. P. Wedel mentioned in these GAMEO articles seems almost certainly the one who led the evening meetings that Marie references.
Still, several questions remain unanswered: What operation had Sara undergone? Further, since Marie says that she knew from experience how weak one feels after an operation, what operation had she undergone and when? For now, these details must remain unknown. Perhaps another letter or document from some other time will shed light on them and allow us to fill in even more blanks in our family history.
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