Week 46: Different Language

 I am going to play catchup here, so these next few posts are going to be a little squished together in terms of posting time.  

Different language posed a problem for me.  Most of my European ancestors were English, at least the ones I know anything about.   There are some Dutch ancestors on my mother's side (religious refugees, Dutch Reform, who ended up settled in the Hudson River valley in the mid 17th century) and some Alsatian ancestors on my father's  (again, religious refugees, Huguenots this time) who ended up in Loudon Virginia in the second half of the 18th century.  It is anyone's guess which language, German or French, the Alsatians spoke daily, though their names were all Germanic for one or two generations.  The Dutch presumably spoke Dutch initially.  However, there are no remnants of any of these languages in the names or speech of any modern family members.

It's a different situation in my husband's family.  Both of his parents had fairly recent German immigrants as grandparents or great grandparents.  My late mother-in-law claimed that her grandparents did not speak English or maybe not a lot of English.  In any case, their cooking methods (boiling the daylights out of vegetables) and a few words survived into Edith's vocabulary.  Towards the end of her 87 years, a new word emerged from Edith:  she began describing certain things as "sharp," including tacos.  Now, this made no sense to us in the context she was using the word and we began to think this might be a sign that her mental powers were declining.  It was not until after she had died that I found out that the word she was using was a German description of spicy food.  I'm sure that it surfaced from her childhood, a remnant of those grandparents who spoke German and cooked those vegetables down to their constituent molecules.