> Von: LStass1@aol.com > We are trying to find any info on our family name Stasswender. I > posted a query over a year ago and got no response. My > husband grandparents came from Germany from a small > town named Eggstatt. No, they didn't! Why? They came from EGGSTAETT. You left the a-umlaut in the town name. Umlauts are very important in the German language. Never forget to leave them, otherwise you are looking for a different town. Because many American software programs are not able to show the German umlauts I have put an 'e' behind the 'a'. Umlaut means, that there are two dots upon the letter 'a'. [...] > We have written back and > forth for every Christmas and more often in the beginning, trying > to get the family history, but they don's seem to know or be > interested. Or....they didn't understand enough English to be able to send you their family tree? In which language did you correspond? There's a volunteer translation service for genealogists behind the scene of news:soc.genealogy.german. It is free and run by Arthur Teschler and his staff. I am not sure at the moment but I believe you find more information on http://www.uni-giessen.de/~gk72/trans.html . If this fails go on http://www.genealogy.com and click a little bit around there and you will find the right link for this translation service. Many genealogists already use this free service. They send their English letter per email to this service, get it translated into German within 24 hours, and then they print out the translated letter and send it to German cousins, archives, churches etc. After they've received the German response, again, they send it to the volunteer translation service, get it re-translated into English, and now understand what the Germans wrote. On http://www.teleauskunft.de which are the German White Pages on line you might find the addresses of other Stasswenders in Germany. -- Best regards/Gruss, Johannes Sempert from Germany Only a Genealogist regards a step backwards as progress.