Can you believe we are almost half way through March? And, spring will be here next weekend? It’s already been in the 90s here in Tucson with a possible 100 (!!!) coming up this week. Makes me worry a bit about summer temperatures.

However, on the very positive side, it’s time for a new challenge from Randy Seaver for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

1)  How was your genealogy day?  Tell us about it – what genealogy-related activities did you do today, yesterday, or another day this past week? Researching, summarizing, transcribing, analyzing, writing, etc.

I’m choosing to write about today’s activities. First, I played with MyHeritage’s Scribe AI, which floored me because it transcribed and correctly identified the language to be a Carpatho-Rusyn dialect that we phonetically written.

I have a small stack of letters written by my Slovak relatives to my grandmother, Julia (Scerbak) Sabo, between the 1920s until she died in 1985.

I had no one to translate them because I knew they spoke an old Rusyn dialect, which originally wasn’t really even a written language. Also, with poor penmanship and likely many misspellings (since schooling was only offered until the 4th grade and not all children attended), I haven’t had much success.

However, Scribe AI did such a fabulous job that I wrote a post about my experience. The best Google Translate could do was offer that it appeared to be a language perhaps related to Croatian.

Scribe AI said:

I can’t speak to the accuracy of the spelling since I can’t even figure out what some of the letters in Maria’s handwriting are supposed to be, but the message seems to be accurate.

I am quite shocked that Scribe AI could identify that the writing was a regional Eastern Slovak dialect – yes, Nana’s family came from the Presov area – or Carpatho-Rusyn – yes, the family was Greek Catholic (today, called Byzantine Catholic), a hallmark indicator of Rusyn heritage.

My second activity was reviewing my knowledge about my Loyalist ancestor, John Adams, as I’ve been invited to share his story with Barbara Tien on Substack this weekend as part of her America250 series.

Thanks, Randy, for this week’s topic. It’s a great one to repeat every once in a while because each day will be different.