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Verbeia
Verbeia
2:40 AM
I speak reasonable German but all my ancestors are from the UK so I haven't needed anything other than English in my genealogical research. If I get back far enough I suppose I might need Latin. But not the kind I learned at high school, alas.
American Luke
American Luke
I wish I spoke German. about 60% of my research is in Germany
@Verbeia Being in the UK, do you ever have to read Gaelic languages?
Unfortunately, I've got to go for the night, but I'll be back at about 12 or 1 PM UTC
Adios (<-- what I remember of spanish :P)
 
7 hours later…
Verbeia
Verbeia
9:59 AM
@AmericanLuke not so far - just to clarify, I'm Australian. It's my ancestors that were all in the UK. So far I haven't encountered any Gaelic in my genealogical research. And the only time I've encountered it in the rest of my life was the time I was on holiday in the UK, turned the TV on in the hotel room and happened on a game show in Welsh. Boy it sounded funny, and the panelists on the show thought so too.
ColeValleyGirl
ColeValleyGirl
10:31 AM
All my ancestors are English or Welsh so far. I can handle the English OK :) but the welsh is a challenge. Some things are easy to get around -- gravestones use a limited set of phrases and words, so I can usually puzzle them out (with a crib sheet or my trust welsh-english dictionary) but newspapers are a real challenge.
Luckily, I've got a Welsh-speaking friend so if my efforts with Goggle Translate suggest something is worth following up, she'll often oblige with a translation. And staff in archives in Wales are usually very helpful, especially if you're in a welsh-speaking stronghold like Caernarfon.
 
1 hour later…
lejonet8
lejonet8
11:57 AM
@AmericanLuke How do you handle your research in Germany then? Through research services? I speak next to my native language German also English, French and Swedish. English helps a lot (software, foreign websites covering German ancestry (e.g. in former German territories) and of course sharing general topics and advice on the internet). I wished genealogy.stackexchange.com would attract more users from Non-English speaking countries and thus would bring its superior concept to a local level.
 
2 hours later…
American Luke
American Luke
1:38 PM
@lejonet8 It's a challenge at times, but usually I can get a good guess at a meaning with Google Translate
For the area I'm interested in, I haven't found any digitized newspapers, wills, or anything, so I haven't had to do much translation of documents
Obsolete occupations can be difficult to translate, but a lot of my German work is on familysearch
 
5 hours later…
bgwiehle
bgwiehle
6:31 PM
Oh well, I always seem to show up on this chat page after everyone has gone for another week.
Re this week's topic, I've got English & German, but my high school French is pretty rusty. Taught myself enough Latin to deal with older records. Someday I'll probably need more Hungarian, Romanian and Polish to deal with archives and secular documents.
The biggest issue I've found is that handwriting is harder to decipher if you don't know the language - letters might be formed differently than you are used to, markings may be random spots or intentional diacritics, and of course, word spelling v…
ColeValleyGirl
ColeValleyGirl
6:43 PM
Ah, I'd forgotten about Latin. Very useful here in the UK when dealing with manorial documents and very old parish registers.
Good point about language problems and palaeographic problems compounding each other. Not so bad it you're dealing with a number of documents of the same type that tend to use the same phrasing but if it's your first time with a particular document type, it can be tough.
Alas, my French and German are unlikely ever to be called on in my research.
They're both rusty, but seem to perk up if I need them.
American Luke
American Luke
7:20 PM
room topic changed to Genealogy weekly chat: All-day chat every Saturday about a unique genealogy topic announced at meta.genealogy.stackexchange.com/q/1750/56 (no tags)
room topic changed to Genealogy weekly chat: All-day chat every Saturday about a unique genealogy topic announced on meta (no tags)
room topic changed to Genealogy weekly chat: All-day chat every Saturday about a unique genealogy topic announced at meta.genealogy.stackexchange.com/q/1750/56 (no tags)
Ok, how's that room description? steps back and admires work
@bgwiehle If I ever get back far enough that I need latin, I'll be thoroughly impressed with myself :P
bgwiehle
bgwiehle
7:35 PM
@AmericanLuke My Transylvanian Saxons switched from Latin to German in the church registers in the 1820's. (In Dunesdorf, it was 1824, between one entry and the next). I would have missed a lot of history if I hadn't tackled the language challenge. As @ColeValleyGirl said, a lot of phrases get repeated. The nuances are tougher.
American Luke
American Luke
Interesting. I'm just heading into 17th century Baden-Wurtemburg and everything is still in German
I might eventually need to know some serbian/croatian language, but I'll get there when I get there :)
bgwiehle
bgwiehle
Transylvania was in a multi-cultural empire and, I think, Latin was still used as a lingua franca. I'll have to check a site I know of with excerpts from Hungarian Catholic and Reformed records to see they used Latin that late too. Maybe Jewish and Orthodox records too.
American Luke
American Luke
Do you ever have a one-off record that is not latin?
bgwiehle
bgwiehle
8:00 PM
I did find some death annotations (added later, of course) that were in German and in the Latin baptism section, but I couldn't find anything longer in a quick scan of my transcriptions. And the occasional word in German or Hungarian for which the pastor or recorder didn't remember the Latin.
Did you know of the blog 100 Years in America? http://100inamerica.blogspot.ca/
Lisa seems to have had a lot of success with both long-distance and in-Croatian research.
American Luke
American Luke
That could come in handy when I get to researching my ancestors from the area :)
Right now I somewhat stuck there, though
All I have is a death certificate that lists "Yugoslavia" as the country of birth, but this was before the kingdom of yugoslavia was formed. So, I got a bit of research ahead of me there
bgwiehle
bgwiehle
8:23 PM
Religious affiliation and ethnicity will probably be key factors if you can't pin down a place more precisely. Surname distribution might help for a rarer name. Watch out for name changes, intending to be more American. I wonder how some of the families I've researched out of Transylvania would ever find the records back, when, for instance, the censuses say they were from Germany (and Austria and Hungary and Romania).
bgwiehle
bgwiehle
8:34 PM
Bye!
American Luke
American Luke
8:45 PM
Thanks for the tips @bgwiehle :)
 
3 hours later…
Canadian Girl Scout
Canadian Girl Scout
11:38 PM
My lack of Chinese is definitely a barrier. I think that I will need to hire a Chinese researcher to make any headway on those lines.
American Luke
American Luke
Do have a large chinese ancestry?
Canadian Girl Scout
Canadian Girl Scout
@AmericanLuke 50% :D
American Luke
American Luke
Have you learnt a little chinese, or just avoided that line for now?
Canadian Girl Scout
Canadian Girl Scout
I can speak a few phrases and read a few characters, but I studied the other half (German) in school. I've got the basics of German and French down so far. Also, my mother is Cantonese.... whereas if I was to learn a Chinese language today, it would probably be more practical to learn Mandarin.
@bgwiehle @AmericanLuke I have newspaper articles in German (obits) that apply to my relatives. What I find more difficult than the language, is reading the blackletter font. It just seems like a sea of ink with very little white space. My eyes have such a hard time deciphering each letter.

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