My grand-mother Erna Boldewahn spoke German and English. My mother remembers sitting at the kitchen table with her mother and her mother’s cousin, Mary Schoblaski listening to them speak German.
The dialect was most likely a variation of Platt Deutsch (Low German)
What’s in a name? Those odd immigrant names really took a beating in the US. Our German great-grand-father’s name was “Boldewahn” But it was spelled:
Baldewan Boldwahl Boldean
Boltewahn
My favorites are: Oldewahn Bolderwack
and Baltimore
To be fair, the name was often spelled in the German church books as Bolduan. The Nagel family think that these spelling variations are due to how cursive writing was taught in Germany before the 1940s. The script was stylized and ornate and is hard for many of us today to read. It was called the “Sütterlin Schreibschrift”. After WW2 the modern “Latin” script was taught that most of us are familiar with here in the USA.
Baltimore, 1884 Oshkosh City Directory)
Bolderwhack (1920 Oshkosh Rural Address Book)Oldewahn (1930 Oshkosh, WI newspaper)
Boltewahn or Boltewsku (1930 US Census)
Bolduan (German Church Register 1851, Gruenwald, Kreis Neustettin, Pommern)
