Fine. I Admit Defeat.

Or at least, I admit defeat temporarily.

I still have four more photographs of armorial memorials on the exterior of the Frauenkirche in Munich,, Germany, that I have been trying -- unsuccessfully, I might add -- to identify and write about for you.

I did a whole lot of checking on-line to see if there were clearer photographs of these memorials, or any websites that would give me more information about the individuals memorialized, all to no avail. A couple of sites had additional photographs, but they were no clearer than the ones I already had, and none of them identified any of these armorials by surname or anything else.

So that was more than a bit frustrating.

Then I tried getting ChatGPT to read and translate the texts on these memorials for me. It seemed to be doing an okay job of that, but then I caught it making some stuff up, and skipping an entire line on one memorial.

Fine, I thought, let's try Claude. Claude did better -- in that it didn't lie to me as much as ChatGPT did -- but these memorials have been sitting outside in the elements for a long time and parts of the text are pretty worn and/or cracked, and Claude let me know when I it couldn't read a word or when it was trying to extrapolate from what letters of a word it could make out.

But "better" isn't "good", and was still insufficient for my purposes.

Further, ignoring the texts and researching for the coats of arms was also getting me nowhere. Admittedly, such research generally does go faster when I have surnames that I am confident in to use, and that was not always the case here. But still, even having some of the surnames, and guessing at some of the others, kept getting me nowhere (with one potential, but only potential, exception).

So I pretty much gave up on properly identifying any of these memorials and was about to move on, when I ran across a book title that gave me some hope: Die Epitaphien an der Frauenkirche zu München.

Published in 1986, a description of the book (which is, obviously from the title, in German) told me that it "contains comprehensive historical documentation for roughly 120 funeral monuments and epitaphs embedded into the exterior brick walls of the cathedral" and that it "provides extensive cultural and genealogical context for each monument. It traces the histories of the prominent Munich patrician families (such as the Ligsalz family), clergy members, court officials, and military figures memorialized on the building's facade."

Well, glory hallelujah! So I did another internet dive and found a copy for sale by a seller on Amazon. So I have right now, as I type this, that copy on order, and it is scheduled to arrive at my door sometime between October 29 and November 19.

Now, is this the final solution to my identification problems? No, it is not.

For one thing, mein Deutsch ist nicht gut. I know only a smattering of words, mostly from my studies of World War II, and thus many of which will not be useful in understanding this book. For example, I don't expect that my knowledge of, say, the words schwalbe, wasserfall, panzerfaust, or even sturzkampflugzeug to appear in the descriptions of these memorials.

For another, given what appears to be the main thrust of the book (based on its title) is on the epitaphs, I don't know how much it's going to say about the coats of arms which are my main interest.

Still, between my poor German, my ability to get translations of words, sentences, and even paragraphs that I am interested in, which can be taken directly from the "the text and inscriptions carved into the stones" (as the book's description states), I expect to be able to come much, much closer making the identification of these people and their coats of arms that I have been able to up until now.

So, I am admitting defeat, but only temporarily. I will move on to other items of heraldic interest and photographs of other coats of arms in the meantime, and will come back to these as yet unidentified arms after my copy of Die Epitaphien an der Frauenkirche zu München arrives in a few weeks.

But I am using this post to remind you, and myself, that, as Shakespeare said of true love in A Midsummer Night's Dream, "The course of heraldic identification never did run smooth."