Do you have ancestors who were non-English speakers? Do you know where the ancestral home is and know there are (unindexed) church records, but you’ve shied away from searching them? Is it because you don’t speak the language?

Not speaking the language should never be a deterrent to accessing foreign language records because there are many work-arounds.

Here are a few tips:

1. Many church records, particularly birth/baptisms, marriage and death/burial records are in column form. The format makes it quite easy to figure out the details in the record. The columns typically are labeled as name of the infant, or couple marrying or deceased, age, parents if a minor, cause of death, when died/buried and where and a column for miscellaneous comments. Sponsors and witnesses are also recorded.

Let’s look at a Slovak church record, which is the baptism of my great grandmother, Maria Kacsenyak in August 1859 (which is not in the cropped image, but appears on the page itself:

She was baptism #82 in 1859, born and baptized on 14 August. She is female and legitimate, her parents are Michael Kacsenyak and Anna Haluska, both RC (Roman Catholic). They lived at house 33 in Felso Sebes and witnesses were Michael Baran and Anna Kokos from Kaji. She was baptized by “Idem” (same priest named above). If she had died in infancy or childhood, the priest might have noted that day in the last column with a cross and the date.

Here’s one more example, taken from Danish records:

Johanne Elisabeth Jensen is entry #257 in her Copenhagen parish. She died 24 May and was buried on 30 May 1895. She was a widow with her address in the bottom right corner, aged 81 when she died.

2. If the record is written in, say, Cyrillic script, try Google translate first. I entered his name in English and asked to translate into Russian to see his name in Cyrillic.

I knew from experience that “Michael” would be entered as “Mihaly” in these records. I could then, like a kindergartener, go thruogh the pages looking for Mihaly in Cyrillic or Scerbak in Cyrillic, matching the letters with his name. Yes, it takes some time, but it is not particularly difficult to do.

3. Another option is to join a Facebook group. There are literally thousands of genealogically themed groups online and most are a mix of Americans seeking help and natives willing to help and/or seeking relatives who emigrated to America.

4. Check FamilySearch to see if church records from your ancestral towns have been digitized and indexed. Back when I first researched my great grandfather, Frits W.O.E. Jensen in the 1980s, I only knew he was supposedly from Copenhagen and born c1845. Today, his baptismal records pops up in the indexed records.

5. While you’re in FamilySearch, be sure to check out the FamilySearch family tree. There are millions of names in it today and someone might have done the hard part for you and attached the record you’re seeking.

I didn’t add Frits to the tree, FamilySearch did and included his baptismal record. Someone else added his confirmation record!

Researching church records in another language is really not such a daunting task. I hope I’ve inspired you to pursue an excellent genealogical resource.

Religion has been a very important part of our ancestors’ lives. Today, however, it seems to have a less prominent role in people’s lives, which, in turn, might provide a less clear cut path to locating those all-important church registers, minutes and other religious resources.

As we look for our family members in church records, it’s important to think outside the box. My dad’s side of the family tree is Slovak and Nana said “everyone” was of the Greek Catholic faith, more commonly called Byzantine Catholic today.

While that is true for Nana’s side of the family (the only church anywhere near the village was Greek Catholic), it isn’t true for Nana’s husband – my paternal grandfather’s family. Yes, my grandfather was raised in the Greek Catholic church. However, looking at the family tree, his father was Greek Catholic, but his mother Maria was baptized as Roman Catholic. Maria’s father was Roman Catholic, but her mother Anna was Greek Catholic. The same pattern repeated itself with Anna’s parents, as her father was Greek Catholic and her mother, Roman Catholic.

Source: Google Maps

The two family villages, Vysna Sebastova and Ruska Nova Ves, are only six miles apart and just close enough together to recall the old adage that young men went courting young ladies within about a five mile radius because that was as far as they could easily travel in one day.

It just so happens that Vysna Sebastova has a Greek Catholic church, but there is a Roman Catholic church in Ruska Nova Ves. It is easy to see how young people met each other from neighboring villages. They might have even met half way with wagons on a commerce day.

Why is this important? Because church records are not maintained in any single repository, like a town, county or state government agency. That is true not only for American church records, but for church records in many other countries. Those important baptisms, marriages and burials are housed at the local church level.

It was not an unusual occurrence to have a Roman Catholic marry a Greek Catholic in that part of Slovakia. In fact, from c1840, the priest wrote in GC (Greek Catholic)/ RC or LC (Roman or Latin Catholic) after the bride’s and groom’s names in the church registers. That’s how I realized I needed to toss the genealogical net further out than the Greek Catholic church, in spite of Nana’s statement.

Although my Slovak ancestors are the example here, think about your ancestors both in Europe and the United States. Protestant religions are numerous. In my own tree, I have identified Puritans, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, Lutherans and the list goes on. As the years approach modern times, it because much more common for a bride and groom to not only be members of different church parishes, but also from families with different religious beliefs.

While Roman Catholicism is but one religion, ethnicity mattered. too. If one of the wedding couple was Italian and the other Irish, or Polish, or Slovak, you probably have two different parishes to search for those vital events.

The most common pattern I’ve found is that marriages took place in the bride’s church, but baptisms and burials happened in the groom’s parish if the newlyweds settled down near his family.

Keep in mind, though, that it is not impossible that a bride married at her husband’s church or that the newlyweds remained in the bride’s neighborhood.

The lesson to be learned here is to read ALL the little details on each church record you find. Perhaps you’ll be lucky, like I was, and the priest or minister will note religions of the participants.

However, if you find a marriage record in one church register, but can’t find other family records even though you know they lived nearby, throw out your own genealogical net to catch records hiding in the registers of a nearby church.

Happy hunting!

 

Church Records Are An Under-Used Resource!

Yes, you read that correctly. I believe church records are a very under-used resource in genealogy research.

I will say right upfront that some church records are difficult, if not almost impossible to access. It is rare to find, say, Roman Catholic church records accessible online, with the exception of burial records in an affiliated cemetery.

Some churches lost their membership, closed the doors and records they kept were probably tossed in the trash over time.

And, yes, like wooden county courthouses, early churches also caught fire. If their records were housed in the church building, they went up in flames, too.

For the many church records that can be easily accessed, there is often no accompanying index, which puts off some researchers.

However, that doesn’t mean that all church records are inaccessible or long gone. Reading page-by-page often provides an in-depth point of view about our ancestors’ religious lives.

In fact, in addition to vital record events such as baptisms, marriages and burials, there are a variety of church records that can provide a researcher with daily life details not available elsewhere.

Here are ten types of information that can be found in various church records:

1. Membership List – A list creates an instant FAN club for a family! Who were their family members, associates and neighbors?
2. Wedding Attendees – Quaker meeting minutes often list the names of all the members who witnessed a marriage
3. Home Address – Even small villages where some of my ancestors lived have house numbers (they are one-road villages) that begin with #1 at the bottom of the hill, continue up the hill to the church location and then continue again down the hill back to the starting point.
4. Mother’s maiden name – By the early 1800s, many baptismal records include the maiden name of the mother.
5. Exact date of birth – Many Catholic baptismal records note both the date of birth and the date of baptism
6. Arrival and departure from a town – Dated membership lists may note the addition of a new family to the congregation or the removal of a family to a new location. Sometimes, the previous and new residences are even included!
7. Family/Neighbor Disagreements – Members such as elders might have had responsibility for mediating disagreements between two or more church members. In fact, the early Puritan church in Massachusetts kept tight control over the lives of its members.
8. Immigrant’s Town of Origin – Many churches, particularly Catholic ones in my experience, often record the European village of origin of immigrant parents when a child is baptized or married. Lutheran churches also recorded previous residences of German and Scandinavian members in their records.
9. Minister’s or Priest’s Observations (Notes) – European churches often noted births out of wedlock and mentioned person/families that left the parish. In the later 1800s, most of the people left for the United States.
10. Job Titles and Social Status – Church records often note details about the lives of its ministers, deacons, elders, etc. and occasionally, in vital records, note citizenship status of those marrying and dying. Slovak church records in the 1800s note citizens, renters and those living in the village on a temporary basis. Other categories include servants, the church cantor and the village miller.

BONUS – History of the Church Itself – Last, but not least, the history of an individual church building can provide social and religious context to your family and the development of a community.

A word of advice from someone who has spent many hours poring through microfilmed and digitized church records. You will be amazed by the amount of information that can be gleaned. Making the extra effort to obtain records directly from churches or reading a hundred pages of un-indexed church history will bring many benefits. I guarantee your time will be well spent.