GDG- Dogberry

[128thpa at comcast.net]

 the plays of Shakespeare were very popular in Germany at 
> the time, cf. Mendelsson"s Midsuumer's Night Dream. Some 
> say that The Bard is better in German than English. 


Exactly!  You can't make assumptions of an entire group.I research the 128th Pa that has a very high population of Germans.  I have probably read hundreds of letters and they run the gamat from very rudimentary to extremely articulate.  A really good book to look at this topic is Damn Dutch: Pa Germans at Gettysburg by David Valuska and Christian Keller.  To quote from page 9: "It is important to note that the modern stereotype of the Pa Dutchman . . .[ is] an erroneous image of the DuTch of the 19th century Pa.  The majority of the Pa Dutch in the 1860's were Lutherans and German Reforrmed, as they had been since the 1750's"

Paula