Project News Items

• Migrant Connections Receives Volkswagen Stiftung Grant for AI-Based Research
  June 01, 2025

  

  The Migrant Connections project has received support from the Volkswagen Stiftung to launch the project "Let the People of the Past Speak! Turning 19th-Century Migrant Letters into Speech," which will use artificial-intelligence tools to reconstruct the sound of German dialects.

• Three New Transcription Projects!
  May 21, 2025

  

  Three new transcription projects, representing letters from the 1860s to the 1910s, are now open for citizen scholars to work on.

• Interview with Digital Assistant Vanessa Tissen
  July 16, 2024

  

  Vanessa Tissen, a digital history scholar at the University of Mainz, was interviewed about her experiences working on the Migrant Connections project.

• We’re Now Collaborating with mit:forschen!
  June 14, 2024

  

  Migrant Connections is now accessible for citizen scholars interested in participating in historical research projects thanks to the mit:forschen! portal

• Explore the Long History of American Dreams—or Nightmares
  October 31, 2023

  

  A new special exhibition on 200 objects, 40 people, and 300 years of German migration to the United States by Das Haus der Geschichte Baden Württemberg

• New Article on “Migrant Connections”
  October 11, 2022

  

  Our Migrant Connections research blog features a new article on German and German-American engineers.

• "Migrant Connections" launched!
  March 23, 2022

  

  The new research infrastructure "Migrant Connections" was launched with an online symposium featuring scholars of migration, archivists, and citizen scholars.

• COESO Blog Post on "Expanding Migrant Knowledge"
  October 06, 2021

  

  Project staff Daniel Burckhardt and Jana Keck describe our new project "Writing Across Borders," a component of the COESO project to develop and sustain citizen science research in the social sciences and humanities.

• Coming Soon: Migrant Connections
  September 13, 2021

  

• News: Citizen Scholars Going Above and Beyond
  July 14, 2021

  

  Sometimes, the citizen scholars who work on our collections conduct their own research to shed further light on the people and places mentioned in the letters they are studying. Two members of our transcription group from Saarland, Eva Tietjen and Regina Kunz, embarked on this path to learn more about the family networks of immigrants Charlotte Fischer von Höfeln and Eugen Klee. We asked them to discuss their motivations as well as the results of their research.

• Interview with Saarland Citizen Scholars
  June 21, 2021

  

• Our Genealogy Book Contest Returns!
  June 01, 2021

  

  We are excited to share the news that our genealogy book contest is back! Thanks to sponsorship from Wunderbar Together we are once again offering people who contribute their letter collections to German Heritage in Letters a chance to win a package of books for researching German-American genealogy.

• National Genealogical Society Award for “German Heritage in Letters”
  May 18, 2021

  

  The German Historical Institute was honored to receive one of three “SLAM! Idea Showcase” prizes awarded by the National Genealogical Society to projects which are innovative models for family history research.

• Interview with Historian and Transcriber Uta Dorothea Sauer
  February 19, 2021

  

  Project intern Timothy Neckermann interviewed historian Uta Dorothea Sauer to learn more about her background and what she has found fascinating about working on the Crede collection.

• Interview with Family Historian Jay Silverberg
  December 16, 2020

  

  We interviewed Jay Silverberg to learn more about how his family's historic letters, his research into the stories they revealed, and his advice for other families who have inherited immigrant letters.

• Meet Transcription Coordinator Stefan Israel
  November 10, 2020

  

  We asked transcription coordinator Stefan Israel to share more about how he became interested in German handwriting and what he finds most rewarding about his career.

• News: German Immigrant Letters Contest!
  October 15, 2020

  

• News: A Virtual Family Reunion
  September 16, 2020

  

  The German Heritage in Letters project is bringing together in digital form two collections relating to the Klee family of Otterberg covering the 1890s through the 1920s.

• October 15 Talk: “From Family Research to Digital History”
  September 01, 2020

  

  Project manager Atiba Pertilla will be sharing German Heritage in Letters in “From Family Research to Digital History,” an online Zoom presentation sponsored by the German Society of Pennsylvania on October 15, 2020.

• Transcription Challenge: Who Was Friedrich Wilhelm Hess?
  August 11, 2020

  

  In this challenge, we invite volunteer researchers to help us transcribe letters sent to doctor and author Friedrich Wilhelm Hess by his family.