baden-wurttemberg@rootsweb.com writes: >He married in Syracuse a girl from Danzig and they had eleven kids. My dad >said they never spoke German around the kids. They were Americans. I find this extremely interesting and of course it is all too true. To be assimilated, one had to give up or deny one's roots and especially one's language. We have a bilingual family at this time and have had for 30 years. We would not be the same without the two languages (and another one or two thrown in occasionally). This all enriches our lives and as a person who did not inherit the German, Dutch or French from those who came before me in the family, but had to learn Spanish, etc. through pretty hard work, I can only say that I wish that "American = English" belief had not been so quickly believed by the immigrants. It is so easy to raise bilingual children and it is even good for the brain - like the Mozart effect. If anybody has any suggestions for reading on the Germans in the Rochester, NY area and how they maintained their cultural identity in the 19th century into perhaps early 20th, I'd be very interested. I only know there is at least one cemetery full of headstones in German. Just a little more on the language issue: I have an old photo of men and a boy standing around a sawmill that was in Penfield, NY. It was the "March & Somebody" mill. I suspect many of those in the photo spoke German or at one point had been native speakers, since the owner had come as a boy in 1854. The census records indicate that more than one of the sons married a first-generation woman whose parents were from Germany. I found that my first March line, the 37-year-old who brought his family, still signed his name with an ümlaut 12 years after his arrival and that the name for his passport did not match the butchered versions of his name in every census. They called him Charles Moerz; he called himself (and signed his application for the passport) Karl Mörz. When I found him returning through Hamburg in Feb. 1867 he was no longer German but 'American'. Wonder if he considered himself that? Maybe I am just cranky at not being able to get at more records to see where these people came from and so piece together or visit the European part of their lives. And not even being able to get the original version of another, perhaps Prussian, line has not helped. Seems like there were a lot of illiterate people running around in the 19th century, and not all were the immigrants arriving in the US... or if not illiterate, they were definitely monolingual. Kathleen Kathleen March Professor of Spanish Department of Modern Languages & Classics 201 Little Hall University of Maine Orono, ME 04469 207-581-2088