Family history von Kleist - machine translation

Our knowledge of our ancestors from the 13th to the 19th century is based on the books of our old family history, completed in 1886. This includes 4 volumes of biographies in German. These volumes have been digitized for several years and expanded with updates and limited transfers from the continuation in 1980, when a biography begun in 1886 was supplemented in the continuation.

A distant goal was always to translate into English in order to give the numerous family members in the USA who no longer understand German access to the history of their ancestors.

This is not easy on the basis of the existing text, as a foreign world of classes, nobility and a special relationship with the princes of Pomerania and later of Brandenburg and Prussia is described using words that are no longer common today. When creating the 2nd edition, the spelling of the German words from 1886 was largely adopted, even if it does not correspond to today's spelling, as they are readable for Germans. However, this does not apply to most translation programs.

As a first step, a dictionary with the most important names in the family history was compiled a few years ago so that a translation program would not try to translate them. In addition, there were a number of words with different spellings and words that are now uncommon with a translation from a contemporary dictionary. In total, around 4,500 lines of corrections were collected. On this basis, the machine translation hardly produced a correct sentence. The number of corrections was still too small.

Therefore, from autumn 2024, the number of corrections will be roughly doubled based on the error messages from the older program used to date.

With these corrections, two more powerful programs are used for the new machine translation, ChatGPT for the old biographies, SYSTRAN for the biographies of the 19th century.

These programs used only partially adopted the images from the German edition. Notes are only translatet with SYSTRAN. In particular, most of the pictures are missing. At the end of the project, the English translation will be adapted to the German edition.

So far, all the volumes of the biographies, but not the volumes with documents and most parts of the old history, are machine translated without later correction. If users send suggestions for corrections, these will be incorporated, even if they are only brief.

The first Kleist emigrants entered the USA between 1880 and 1900. From the house Warnin came two brothers, one went to New York. He has descendants today. The other is supposed to have gone to California. We don´t have information about his destiny. Around 1900 a nephew of them went to California.  His only grandson was Roy Hugh who has many descendents. One Kleist from the Rhenish Branch immigrated to the US and built a factory for music instruments in Tonawanda. After having sold it later he returned to Germany,but his son remained in USA. He has many descendants. As result of the Russian revolution one Kleist from the house of Kerklingen came 1923 to the US via Shanghai. After World War II one Kleist from the house Galten emigrated and settled in Pennsylvania. Another cousin from the house Susten-Gawesen went to Chile and from there to Canada. Many descendants from both cousins live today.

The links to the raw translations can be found below

To make it easier for those members of the family who want to find their ancestors, they can access a list of their ancestors of the respective house under "Ancestors".

Registers of the biographies of the family history with search options for the sons, daughters, wives and sons-in-law can be found here. Help: webmaster3@v-kleist.com

The rough translation of the continuation of the family history up to 1980 is in the internal section for registered family members.