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52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks – Week 20: Languages

I am working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow. I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails Into the Past. I’m looking forward to writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways.

I had to deal with a foreign language early in my genealogy research because my father’s paternal side is German. My father’s maternal side is Irish, but so far those records have been in English.

I studied German four years in high school and four quarters in college, so I wasn’t afraid to research in German records. Though once I found them, I didn’t realize the lettering would be so difficult to read!

I lucked out in knowing where to look in German records. The marriage between my great-grandparents, Johan Anton Hork and Julia Ann Sievert, gave the birthplace of Johan Anton as Oberhundem, Kreis (county) Olpe, Westfalen. It is important to know the name of the village in order to find local records.

The Family History Library had microfilm of church records for this area and I tackled looking for his baptism. The book with these baptism records did have an index and I found Johann Anton. It wasn’t too hard to read most of this.



As I worked my way back in time, the handwriting got harder to read. Looking for Anton’s father, Joseph, I found the Hs looked way different. It took a lot of practice and help from other researchers to transcribe these records.


I also used letter guides I got from the Family History Library, that can now be found online here.


German wasn’t the only language I’ve worked with. My husband’s maternal line is from Sweden and I used Swedish records to find several generations of family. My best resource was a book called Your Swedish Roots by Per Clemensson & Kjell Andersson.

And for a client, I tackled French Canadian records. The handwriting was easy to read, but I used the French Word Lists from the FamilySearch Wiki to understand the words used in the records.

So languages I’ve used in genealogy include:
  • English
  • German
  • Swedish
  • French
  • Spanish
  • Latin



Copyright © 2018 by Lisa Suzanne Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.

Comments

  1. Lisa, I'm very impressed with your efforts to read these handwritten documents! I can barely decipher printed German when looking at old passenger manifests from Hamburg with preprinted headings at the top. Congrats to you!

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  2. There is no foreign language interest in my research, so I gave this week’s “52 Ancestors” a miss. But I was keen to read how other bloggers dealt with the issue, and you have given us an impressive account of how you researched in other languages, not just in one other but five! It certainly adds interest to family history activities,

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