Ancestry Magazine

Why it's helpful to know your ancestral tongue.

“Jean-Baptiste’s pig got into my garden and destroyed my crop of peas. . . . Pierre’s son chopped down my trees and hauled them away for firewood.”

When Canada was known as New France, notaries recorded all administrative, justice, and land-parceling matters. Their records produced anecdotes like the one above. These notarial acts read like the raw material for Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock, a novel set in the last days of French colonial governor Frontenac. The intricately detailed acts can also help create the family histories of those who read them. But they were, of course, recorded in French.

Marjorie L. Chapman, a longtime New England family historian and member of the American French Genealogical Society, studies her French Canadian ancestry through such documents. “I sometimes get tangled up in the French and have to ask for help. But I’m grateful for at least understanding enough to get the gist of most things.”

Chapman comments that once you have your “cast of characters,” then “you want to know who they were and how they lived. You can read the history of New France in English, but these notarial acts add such an extra dimension. Now you know who were neighbors, who were friends, who were witnesses at the signing of a marriage contract, what goods were passed on to the next generation. You start to see who was quarrelsome, petty, prosperous, respected, greedy, whatever. Little stories begin to shape up.”

Parlez-vous Français?
To make these discoveries, however, you have to know French. Members of other ethnic groups also need to know their ancestral language to capture the sagas of their forebears. “Although it is not necessary to know a foreign language to compile the names of ancestors, it is very useful when trying to flesh them out,” says Chapman. She often journeys to Canada on genealogical quests.

With increased travel opportunities and expanding use of the Internet, mastery of a foreign language is becoming even more advisable for family historians. Those who don’t learn their ancestral language—or languages—won’t be able to interview sources in their homeland; they won’t be able to access and study all the documents available online.

No one argues that you can’t do your family history without knowing a foreign language. Those who don’t learn a language can rely on translations and translators. Chapman notes, however, that in her experience, “Translations often miss the point.”

Family historians can also make use of genealogical glossaries if they don’t have competence in a needed language. The Family History Library publishes foreign-language glossaries, available in family history centers. Various ethnic how-to genealogical books include vocabularies. Experienced genealogists consider these glossaries a worthy, but limited, aid.

Genealogist Rafael Guber, a frequent contributor to Ancestry, comments that family historians need to know the terms relating to birth, death, and marriage records in their ancestral tongues. Guber estimates that this would involve a vocabulary of one hundred to two hundred words.

I looked up my late father’s books on our family history in Norway, and found that he included a glossary of about 250 Norwegian words. Most of these words-gudmor for godmother, folkekirken for state church-relate to the church records of Norway, a common genealogical source. To read local histories, correspondence, or contracts in Norwegian, however, such a vocabulary would prove inadequate.

George Ryskamp, who wrote the chapter “Tracking Hispanic Family History” in The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy, has found that glossaries have pluses and minuses. On a recent research trip to Portugal, Ryskamp used the Portuguese lexicon from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While the list helped him to study parish registers, few of its terms related to the notarial documents.

Ryskamp agrees with Chapman that it is those kinds of documents-wills, inventories, partitions, marriage contracts-that give genealogists the theme of a life history. Glossaries will probably not have an adequate list of words for notarial records. A genealogist will need to be able to read and comprehend the texts. “You need more than just a formula knowledge of the language to be able to understand them,” says Ryskamp, who teaches Latin American and southern European family history at Brigham Young University. Through such records, “you’re really getting all of the details about what was going on in a person’s life.”

Using a glossary, therefore, won’t enable a family historian to compose an ancestor’s storyline. In fact, it might not get someone much beyond listing the dramatis personae.

“I think genealogy has to be more than putting together phone books full of dead people,” comments Guber. “After all, you can’t even call them!”

A Jewish Resource
Guber cites another intriguing foreign-language source that will impart both details and life stories for those researching Jewish ancestors: the responsa literature.

“For at least fifteen centuries, there has been a literature in the Jewish community where people from all over the world would ask rabbis questions relating to Jewish law,” Guber explains. “Often these books, as they were compiled, included the names and the communities that these people came from—from where they asked the questions—and the rabbis would write back to them. It was basically Q and A, and there are hundreds of thousands of pages of this. There are patterns.”

An interested Jewish family historian needs, says Guber, “the ability to sit down and read these books, which are usually written in Hebrew. . . . And if you can do it, you have a list of names and places.”

Guber discussed the responsa literature in his first article for Ancestry (15:1, January/February 1997). There, he noted that the questions and answers usually pertained to religious subjects, but sometimes involved family matters, such as the choice of a spouse.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker
Because of his ability to read the literature, Guber has approached a solution to a mystery in his own lineage. He was puzzled to find recurrences of his family name (originally Gubernick) not where his father was born, in Talner, the Oblast province of Kiev, but in scattered cities: Trisk, Chernobyl, Romistrovka, Skvir. “Of those I met who were able to identify their ancestral town and who were not among my first and second cousins,” he wrote in his article, “I could find no one else who mentioned Talner among the places of family origin in Ukraine.” Gubernick, he remarked, was not a common name.

“There are eight communities,” he told me, “where a particular famous Chassidic rabbi had eight grandsons, who each became rabbis of these diverse communities. In six out of eight of these communities, my family name appears. It’s not the same as the family name of this rabbinical clan. However, the wives of the rabbis in the communities had an additional task. . . . They were matchmakers. So it was a very common occurrence to write to your sister-in-law in whatever community she was in, and say, ‘There’s a young man here, and he’s looking for a young woman’. . . These kinds of correspondences would flow around. As a result of this, my name of Gubernick appeared in six of the eight communities.”

Guber observes that “at this point, it’s anecdotal.” He does not yet have certainty that these Gubernicks are related to him and that they appeared in those particular cities due to the rabbinical clan’s matchmaking. If he is right, however, his ability to read Yiddish “had a direct linear genealogical benefit. It helped me find members of my family, even going back generations, in my direct patrilineal line, whom I had not known before. This is a result of knowledge of language and history. Had I not been able to read some of these primary documents in the original, I wouldn’t have been able to create my postulate. I couldn’t have postulated this as a possible scenario to be investigated further, because I never would have reached that point.”

Foreign and Ethnic Newspapers
Other types of ethnic, foreign-language correspondence can make family histories flower. Cliff Watts, president of New England Computer Genealogists, reports that he and his wife, Lynn, “know both French and German, and they have been of great value in our work.” He points out that his wife’s family came from a town near Stuttgart; when the ancestor who brought Lynn’s surname to Baltimore arrived in 1822, his family had been living in that village for three centuries. “By placing a short query in the Stuttgarter Nachrichten, a daily newspaper, Lynn even made contact with relatives still living in one of the ancestral homes.” Also, he notes, Lynn “gained a great deal of information and understanding because she could read records, newspapers, and other materials in German.”

Immigrants’ ethnic newspapers within the United States often relate ancestral biographies. James L. Hansen points out in his “Research in Newspapers” chapter in The Source that “as in religious communities, in foreign communities a person had a better opportunity to be recognized. Where the local English-language newspaper glosses over or carries one-line death notices of persons of foreign birth and tongue, the person often received detailed notice in his or her ethnic newspaper.” Hansen notes that those who don’t read the language can translate items word-by-word—the content of obituaries is fairly predictable—or get someone to translate them. Yet, to mine these sources for the context of ancestors’ lives, genealogists need to know the language.

Ethnic newspapers are available within the United States; that’s where they came from. Researchers can contact the appropriate ethnic societies, or study collections such as those at the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota-St. Paul.

Bon Voyage
Even many foreign-language resources that originated overseas are held in U.S. repositories. Yet, with increased travel opportunities, many family historians-and professional genealogists-will want to go to foreign countries to see additional primary sources.

For those who do travel, foreign-language study is even more imperative. “Even in major state archives, you may not find all that many personnel who speak English, although that will vary from country to country,” says Ryskamp.

Ryskamp recalls that on his recent Portugal trip, while he found more archive employees who spoke English than he had expected, “there were a good number—including some in key sections that I needed information from—who did not speak anything but Portuguese.”

In Portugal, he observes, “when you get out dealing with priests and other people at local levels, a knowledge of the language, to be able to communicate in it, is essential.” A lesser alternative, he says, is to bring an interpreter along.

Guber notes that Americans often expect to traverse the world without any knowledge of foreign language. “When we’re in a foreign country and they don’t speak English, we just shout louder.” Yet, for genealogical travelers, “if our ultimate goal is to put ourselves into the hearts and minds of our ancestors, there’s no better way to do it than to learn the language.”

Surfing the ‘Net
The Internet is another increasing incentive to begin foreign-language study. Ryskamp says that when he went to a district archive in Portugal, “I was quite surprised to find out that they had a home page, and were very active on the Internet in terms of putting their catalog materials on there.”

Referring to my own Norwegian family history, Guber suggested that, since I know my family’s town of origin, I could “contact the village librarian via e-mail and ask, ‘Are there any books about the history of the town that might mention the names of families?’ The librarian will say, ‘Yes, we have them—in Norwegian.’” To carry this out, I would have to be able to read and write in my ancestral language.

Where to Learn
For the genealogist who wants to realize all the advantages of learning a foreign language, the next question is how to do so. Apparently only one foreign-language course geared to genealogists exists. Brigham Young University, says Ryskamp, offers Latin for genealogists, to enable them to study legal documents in a variety of countries. Ryskamp maintains that foreign-language study for a genealogist is much the same as it is for anyone else. He advises, however, that “it would help at some point to take a good handwriting class.” This will make it easier to comprehend older forms.

In gaining a foreign language, family historians will find, as Marjorie Chapman did, that “the enjoyment of genealogy comes mostly from the imagination, that is, rebuilding an ancestor’s life by using documents and letters.”

Margaret Moen, a St. Paul, Minnesota-based freelance writer, has contributed articles to America’s Civil War Periodical, and Dance Teacher Now, as well as to Ancestry.