Is that Pronounced Jaeger or Yaeger?

My last name is Jaeger. This is the backbone to my knowledge of my family history. Quite frankly, it is my entire knowledge of my family history. From what I know about my family history, a couple of the first Jaegers decided to get on a ship in Germany and sail on over to the United States, planting the Jaeger roots in Cincinnati in the mid 1800s. According to my family, a conflict arose when my German ancestors began the English speaking process regarding the pronunciation of my last name. Does the “J” make the traditional English “J” sound, or is it instead pronounced like the English “Y”? Unable to reach a consensus, the Jaegers and the “Yaegers” went their separate ways. Because this is a current family perception of the first Jaegers, its accuracy remains questionable, formulated only from generations of storytelling.
My knowledge of my family’s history is limited, to say the least. In fact, it may even be a collective memory within my family that serves as a simple and unarguable explanation to the pronunciation of my last name. The majority of people outside of my family who see my last name and then hear it aloud question its pronunciation, and because it is tied to my ancestors, it is quite possible that the conflict among them about the pronunciation became exaggerated over time. Maybe my family focuses on this aspect of our history because it not only explains why our name sounds the way it does, but spices it up as well. The first Jaegers in Cincinnati might have simply decided to pronounce the name any way they wanted, but after generations and generations of dealing with a mispronounced last name, that simple decision grew into an incident of family warfare.
This change in the memory of my family’s origin illustrates how a family’s history actually has little to do with what actually happened hundreds of years ago, but instead is all about how the present generation wants to tell the story. Because of this and the fact that I know little else about the history of my family, the identity of my family as a whole is cloudy and almost inexistent, for there is very little memory to give my family a sense of where it came from and where it has been all these years. The current perception is what shapes my family history, and that perception is the apparent family-dividing complication that my last name presents. So the next time I’m sitting in a new class and I hear “Alison Yaeger” in the roll call, I remember not my first ancestors, but my family’s perception of them and the significance of that perception in recognizing my family identity.

Alison J.
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