My Big Mistake

 This Week's #52Ancestors Prompt is Big Mistake

While I have made many mistakes in my genealogical research, the biggest one was likely in researching my Clark line. I knew that my paternal grandmother’s mother was Margaret Clark. She married Robert Halliday in Iowa. Robert was a coal miner who was born in England. There might have been some connection to Pennsylvania, and it seemed her family also had coal mining roots. But I didn't know where the family came from or even when they arrived in this country. Pennsylvania and coal mines were the extent of my knowledge when I started. 

For some reason, Pennsylvania got stuck in my head, and I started researching Clarks in Pennsylvania. I had no specific location. Never mind that Clark is one of the most common names in the U.S.. Never mind that I knew nothing about Pennsylvania. Never mind that I barely knew anything about genealogical research. That’s where I focused. 

This was long before the internet, and I had few resources to turn to. I joined a Clark Family Association based in Pennsylvania and combed through each issue of their journal for a clue to my Clark family. Of course, I never found anything. I would have been better off throwing darts at a dartboard. This misguided research was a BIG MISTAKE. 

Except there was a nugget of truth to the story. 

Margaret Clark’s father was Alexander Clark.  He was born in Coaltown, County Fife, Scotland in 1834 to Alexander Clark and Grace Christie. Alexander and Grace never married, but Grace filed for child support. Alexander married Mary Callendar in October of 1854 in New Monkland, Lanarkshire, Scotland. He had already started working in the coal mines. They had six children born in Scotland before they moved to the United States in 1869. 

IN 1870, THEY WERE LIVING IN FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA. So, there was that nugget. They moved to Trumball County, Ohio, where Margaret was born in 1872. By 1880, the family had relocated to Richland Grove, Mercer County, Illinois. At some point, they moved to Appanoose County, Iowa, where Alexander and Mary remained until their deaths. Alexander died in June of 1912. His wife, Mary, died in 1903. Margaret married 25 December 1893 in Appanoose County to Robert Halliday. She died in Chicago in 1948. 

The moral of the story is to make notes on all those bits and pieces you hear from your family. But until you have some evidence, don’t chase a common surname in a big state like Pennsylvania unless you know what you are looking for.

The Languages We Know (and Those We Don't)

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.