Centuries-old German Documents Find Their Meaning At UC

Manfred Zimmermann is an expert at peering into the past and bringing it back to life, even if it spans centuries of history.

Zimmermann, a medieval German language and literature specialist at the University of Cincinnati, recently employed his skills for two Cincinnati women who needed help doing just that.

While helping their grandmother move, Kim Schmitz and her sister, Stephanie Eckhoff, found five parchments, some dating back to the time of Christopher Columbus’ voyage to North America. The parchments had lain inside a cardboard box for untold years, but since they were folded and guarded from light, they stayed preserved.

"We just flipped them open to see what they were about," said Schmitz.

When their grandmother asked the two recent UC graduates if they wanted to keep them, they eagerly accepted.

"I guess she wondered why Kim and I would want such old pieces of parchment," said Eckhoff, "But that is the way Kim and I are -- we have old pictures of grandparents and great-grandparents in our houses, out for people to see."

Knowing only that the documents had come from their grandmother’s second husband, Len, the two sisters set off to find out more information.

"I had gone to the Cincinnati Museum Center," Schmitz said, "but after two weeks they were unable to decipher them."

Eventually, she found her way to Zimmermann’s office, where he is asked several times a year by community members for help with old German documents.

"Because Cincinnati is a very German city, you get a lot of people who are interested in their heritage," Zimmermann said. "I get stuff on a regular basis, like Xeroxed copies of 19th century church records. I usually do it free as a service to the public."

However, the sisters’ find is unique, Zimmermann said, because he has never had a member of the public bring in such old documents, which range from 1492 to the 1600s.

Even though Zimmermann has been working with Middle-High German (the German language of the period ca.1050 to 1500) and with even older variants of the language since his student days at the University of Marburg in Germany, every parchment still provides it own riddle, he said.

Going through the documents and transcribing them took Zimmermann about 10 hours.

Every scribe had his own idiosyncrasies, Zimmermann said, and you need to familiarize yourself with the particular style of handwriting. Once you crack the quirks, you crack the code.

"Working with the original material is what I find interesting," Zimmermann said. "This is the original stuff. How long has it been since someone has read it?"

Eckhoff said she was not surprised to find someone who could donate their time to help her sister and her, because it seems that at UC professors always put students, or former students, first.

"The professors there are always willing to help students in any way," Eckhoff said. "You can always get a hold of a professor if you need to."

Zimmermann, who previously edited a book cataloguing medieval German documents, provided the sisters with English summaries of the parchments and a German transcription of what each one said. In addition, he also sent the texts to the German state archives responsible for the region the documents originated in. It turned out the sisters’ find contained nothing extraordinary, but are legal documents which detailed various loans people had taken out in the Rheinganu, a well-known wine country near Frankfort, Germany.

For example, one of Zimmermann’s summaries reads, "Hans von Pfannrode and his wife Margaret, from the village of Ruwental, take out a loan from Magister Peter Negelsbach, priest at Eltville, and his altarists and give as security several named and described vineyards as well as their house and barn."

The importance for local history lies in the fact that the vineyards and other pieces of real estate are defined by listing the adjoining properties and their owners by name, Zimmermann said. That way, researchers get not only a partial list of property holders in the town at a given point in time, but also a picture of the distribution of land and land ownership in general.

Even though they revealed nothing astounding, the parchments are still a neat find, the sisters said.

"I was not let down in any way," Eckhoff said, "I love old treasures like those because it’s a part of history that no one probably even knows exists."

Estimating their value to be around $200 dollars each, Zimmermann said there is often a disconnect between monetary value and historical value when dealing with such things.

"They are historical documents that are invaluable as such," he said. However, one never knows how valuable such finds might become to the right person.

Meantime, Schmitz and her sister plan to keep looking for more information about who the people on the parchments were and how they ended up with their grandmother.

"You never know, they may be a part of Len's family," Eckhoff said, "and I think Kim and I will try and find that out, somehow."

"Needless to say," Schmitz said, "we are going to keep them folded and hopefully preserved for another 500 years."