Another Language – 52 Ancestors # 20

I have learned over my years of researching family lines (both direct and collateral, for my families as well as my husband’s), that there are many points in our history where other languages were mother-tongue or parents’ language or the language that records were written in.  I’m not sure what my first experience of this was, but one that comes to mind was discovering German newspaper listings in Cincinnati for some of my collateral Schenk line (I wrote of Cousin Jessie being raised speaking German as well as English).  And at some point not long after that I discovered that a work friend read German – had done a college semester in Germany – and so I had a willing translator for small bits.

Of course I assumed that some of my husband’s family records would be in Russian or Yiddish, and sure enough, I discovered via a gravestone that it was tradition for many Jews to have stones that had Yiddish as well as English carved into them.  Again, I discovered several willing friends who could help translate – one of whom still does it for me and is proficient – and I discovered to my delight that often part of what was written in Yiddish was the name of the father of the person.  This is a real boon especially for women ancestors but even for men when you are trying to link a family or don’t have much information going in.

Probably the next place I encountered another language was an Irish line (another collateral line) although in the beginning it wasn’t so much that there was another language, per se, but that I had to learn about researching in another country and all the details that requires learning about.  I’m still not sure what homeland is, or of the order of governmental and church administrative units making it sometimes tricky to know where to look for the information I need.  I haven’t yet found anyone in my circles who reads Irish!  Luckily most of the records I have come up with so far are in English.

The most recent time I have run into another language was just this past winter when my husband’s young cousin came back from a trip to visit her grandparents in Vietnam and sent me a listing of the relatives with dates and places (just as I had hoped she would!).  I rapidly discovered that the usual Vietnamese name order is different than I am used to: family name, then one or more middle names, and then one given name, which is the Chinese system of names more or less.  Of course the place names are also exotic to me, and as with researching in Ireland, the various administrative units are new to me and I haven’t really begun learning how to research there.  The years of fighting and foreign powers running the government makes this even more tricky I suspect.

The other relatively recent other language I have run across in my genealogy research is the genetic genealogy and DNA testing language.  These of course are not languages like Yiddish or Irish, but disciplines that have their own “language” in the words and terms used.  There are a multitude of different terms and techniques to learn about, as I have begun to want to learn how to use this recent development in my own research: autosomal DNA, mitochondrial DNA, YDNA, centiMorgans, SNPs, and the ever-popular MRCA or most recent common ancestor which is what we all look for with anyone who matches us.  Usually, in my experience, this is actually an ancestral couple to start out with.  I’m always interested in ways to fish for cousins and this is the current hot thing!