TANGENTS: Ahnenpaβ

The coughing and hacking continues. It had eased up a fair bit and a week ago I went to the gym and worked out for an hour. Since then the coughing has gotten progressively worse again.

Asthma? Bronchitis?

I don't know. At this point I don't think the doctors have figured it out either. So I continue to hack and cough, lose sleep, and get increasingly tired and frustrated. I'm going to ask my doc to refer me to a lung specialist when I see him next.

In the meantime, I continue to work through the stack of family history documents that I have. It's slow going because I find myself going down side trails, researching the backgrounds and significance of various papers, circumstances, and situations that I find while scanning the documents and photos into my computer.

Over the past several months I have predominantly been working on a document (it's actually a booklet) that had belonged to one of my aunts. It's called an Ahnenpaβ.

Ahnenpaβ literally translates as Ancestral Passport and it was an official genealogical record to be researched and recorded by individuals in Nazi Germany. I went on-line to see if I could learn more about it and found a variety of these booklets in different formats and covers. The booklet covers varied in colour, construction and Font and Images. All the material I found on-line described the Ahnenpaβ as a 48 page booklet. My aunt`s Ahnenpaβ has 80 pages. More on the purpose and content in a future blog post.

Because of the age of the document the colour of the cover has faded and the pages have yellowed. The handwritten entries and the seals stamped on the various pages have also faded. I`ve been using Photoshopto revive the faded colour and sharpness as much as possible. As well as improving the appearance of the booklet, the Photoshopping results t help me to read the contents of the booklet.

Booklet Cover