Genealogists often need to have a basic understanding of more than one language. Besides reading old handwriting, we read it in an unfamiliar language. Fortunately, we have tools to help us.
I took four years of high school French, and it turned out that I’ve been able to put that to good use. My sons have deep French-Canadian roots. Records in Quebec - and some in Kankakee County, Illinois, where they ended up, are all in French. With the help of a good dictionary, a French word list from Family Search, and Google Translate, I’ve read most of the records I’ve encountered. Add in using Transkribus and other AI tools, and it all becomes even easier.
One of the things I’ve found most helpful is ensuring I understand what I’m looking at. To that end, the book French Language Lifelines for the Anglo Genealogist by Sandra Goodwin has proved to be just that - a lifeline. It has helped me decipher unknown words, understand what information is typically included in specific records, and provided additional word lists. If you are doing French-Canadian research, I highly recommend it. (Thanks to David Ouimette for telling us about this book!!)
I started researching a friend’s roots in southern Colorado and New Mexico a couple of years ago. This was a new world for me. I took two or three quarters of Spanish in college, which helped me with the language. Again, word lists from FamilySearch and Google Translate have helped. I think two things will prove useful in helping me through the challenge of understanding Spanish documents. The first is George and Peggy Ryskamp’s book Mastering Spanish Handwriting and Documents - 1520-1820. The second is the BYU handwriting tutorial, which covers various documents. And again, Transkribus and AI will likely prove to be helpful.
I’ve got several German families I’m researching - my own and other projects I’m working on. German was out of my wheelhouse, so I did about six months of DuoLingo German language. Of course, six months isn’t long enough to learn a language, but it gave me some basics - sentence structure, vocabulary, and familiarity with the language. I think this fundamental knowledge has helped, again, along with all the standard tools, in deciphering German documents.
The other language(s) I’ve tried to understand a bit of is Hebrew and Yiddish. I’ve got a couple of projects I’m working on with Jewish roots, and the language was a brick wall. A couple of years ago, I took a great Jewish genealogy course at SLIG coordinated by Emily Garber. There were great resources included, and I’ve got a few that, at the very least, can help me read tombstones (with a lot of work). I haven’t been brave enough to dig into other documents. And, of course, there’s often the challenge of many of the records being in Cyrillic. I don’t think I’ll be willing to dig into that in any depth.
I’ve also encountered Polish, Czech, Norwegian, and Swedish documents
as a genealogist. Each language has its challenges.
Fortunately, we have all those great tools at our fingertips that can help us
understand the basics of each document. The process remains the same for each
language. Do your best to transcribe the document precisely as it is written - manually
or using Transkribus. Then the document is translated using word lists, Google Translate and/or AI. Ensure you understand what you are looking at, what the
document is about, and what information it might contain. Using all the tools
we now have, genealogists can “read” almost anything. (Except for those written
with very, very bad handwriting. Bad handwriting occurs in EVERY language.)
The #52 Ancestor Prompt for this week was LANGUAGE.
