Anglicization of German Names
American history is romanticized as a story of immigrants. Almost every American, including myself, can trace our lineage to multiple immigrants from Germany, but getting there is always a straight path. Anglicization of our German ancestors' names poses a large but surmountable obstacle to our genealogical research. Records and indexes are filled with our English speaking ancestors butchering the spelling of foreign names. German, French, Polish, all of them.