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
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!
ReplyDeleteThere 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,
ReplyDelete