Trying to decipher altdeusch. That’s a birth certificate from 1931. I am not able to read the surname (i.e. Mutter der Frau), the first name I believe to be Babette. Is someone able to read this?

6 comments

1. Point of order: that’s not “Altdeusch”, which isn’t really a thing — “Althochdeutsch” was an earlier stage of German spoken from the 8th to the 11th centuries. This is modern German, with the printed type in a face called “Fraktur” and the handwriting in a scrawl that is probably Latin cursive rather than the German “Kurrent” hand.

   My first thought was that the name ends in “-urr”, because that looks like two Rs on the end — but only if it were written in Kurrent, and the rest of the handwriting is clearly not Kurrent.

   The weird thing is that the first letter looks more like the “f” in “Hausfrau”, or possibly a lower-case Kurrent “t” — in any case, it doesn’t look like an upper-case letter to me. But it doesn’t look as if part of the word is missing for some reason — a problem with the copying process leaving a blank space — because the dotted line is unbroken.

2. I read it as “Fürst”

3. I read it as “Fürst” but I really don’t know.

4. I propose “Nuhr”.

5. I think the first name is Lisbeth, not Babette.

   First of all, because Babette wasn’t a common German first name then (while Lisbeth was). And the end is definitely “eth”, not “ette”. Just compare it with the end of the place name, which ends in “-bach”.

6. Lisbeth Funke maybe…?