Doing genealogy has taught me to be
creative doing my research. Since my ancestors are recent immigrants, I have
been using European Church records from almost the beginning.
I feel very lucky now that I took
Latin in high school, since it’s really getting a work out as I use church
records in pursuit of my ancestors. Norway, Sweden, Hungary, Germany, and other
European countries had state religions which were very strict about recording
the vital events in the lives of their citizens. These records were usually
kept by clergy members who had been well educated and were written in a mix of
Latin and the native language of the country.
As I looked at the records, I
realized that the names were usually written in Latin, so they were easily
read. Finding the meanings of the column headings was a task for Google
Translate.
In the case of my paternal
grandmother’s family who lived in Milwaukee after they immigrated, I needed to
use some of the German language newspapers to completely understand the details
of a drowning death. Fortunately, I made the acquaintance of a gentleman in
Milwaukee who has indexed the German language news papers and he was able to
provide me with obituaries and their translations as well as other news
articles about the family I was researching. For this family I have all their
death notices in both English and German.
There was a book written about my Norwegian
great-grandfather in commemoration of his 150th birthday which I
have a copy of but it is in Norwegian, so I can’t read it. I do have the author’s
permission to translate it but that’s a project for another year.
There are similarities in the Scandinavian
languages which helped me with tracing my husband’s Swedish ancestors.
To help me with entering data into my
program, I have a chart giving a numeric code for typing foreign letters, so I
can enter names and places with the correct diacritical’s.
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