The "Real" Name

Have you ever had a relative correct you saying that your ancestor's "real name" was something other than what you have on the family tree or in your genealogical database?  Maybe this real name is the name that appears on a baptism record or the one that they preferred to be called.  Unfortunately, a name is not the same as a date.  An ancestor's birth date is an immutable fact.  Whether or not records are consistent or accurate, there is an objective birth date that can never change.  Names are much more changeable and contextually-defined facts.  I have a name that I use in official contexts and others I use in informal contexts.  You may have a nickname that family uses, one that friends use and one you use at work.  And these may change over time.

The proliferation of names is made even more maddening when other languages are added to the mix.  How can you decide what is the "real" name? Let's look at one example.

Case of Johann Georg Schöndorf
I have discussed my Schoendorf line before (here and here).  Records for this line are in French, German and Latin.  Records for Johann Georg Schöndorf who lived in the 1700s are in both Latin and French.  In his marriage record, a French record, he is "Jean George Schöndorf".

In his son's marriage record, a Latin record, he is listed as "Johannis Georgii Schöndorff".

There are two issues here.  First, the name is in Latin and, second, the name has a special form because it is possessive. This form is in the genitive case.  If we want to cite the Latin name, we should convert it to the nominative case, which is what is used as the default.  In this case the name would be "Johannes Georgius Schöndorf".  For more on Latin, check out this post.

But,  I know he spoke German, so what do we do? Do we convert the name to German or not?  It seems unlikely that he would use the Latin and French forms outside of records.  Fortunately, we have examples of the German name in his signature on the same two documents.

In this case it is probably safe to use the German form, but what if the only records you have are in Latin and not the local language?  Ultimately, you get to decide what name to use. The most important things to do are be consistent, so others will understand what you are doing, and recognize the reality that for some questions there is not always a clear or final answer. When you are transcribing a record, you should keep the name as close to what is found in the record and, to clarify, you can add a standardized name in brackets, such as "Jean George Schöndorf [Johann Georg Schöndorf]".

Tombstone Tuesday - Willard Davis

WILLARD

DAVIS.

DIED

Sept.12.1883.

Æ.79ys.8ms. 
et 7ds

My fourth great grandfather, Willard Davis, is buried in Baldwin Cemetery in Baldwin, St. Croix Co., Wisconsin.  He was born in Franklin County, Vermont, and moved to Baldwin around the time of the Civil War

Ashes to Ashes

One thing that this inscription illustrates is the persistent use of Latin.  Although the use of Latin is more strongly associated with Catholicism, the language remained a mark of learning among English-speaking protestants.  The motto for the oldest university in the United States is the Latin phrase Veritas "Truth".  Latin is especially common in abbreviations.  Even, today, abbreviations like etc. are common.  So, if you can't figure out what an abbreviation is, consider the possibility that it might be an abbreviation of a Latin word.  In this inscription, we find the abbreviation Æ. for Latin Aetatis, meaning "of the age (of)". Of course, you can probably guess the meaning from the context.  The word aetatis may also be abbreviated as Æt. or Ætat. as it is on the tombstone of Ruth (Denison) Kingsbury (here).  Also, notice how the A and E are written as a single character.  This letter is called "ash" and was originally used in English to represent the vowel in ash.  It still has this use in phonetic transcriptions, like ash [æʃ].  This letter was also commonly used to represent the Latin combination "ae" even though this combination doesn't have the same sound.     

A tip for identifying the language of a document

When approaching a new document, the first thing you need to do is identify the language it is written in. Then, you'll be able to find an appropriate dictionary and other tools that will let you make sense of it. There are a number of ways to do this, but you often need look no further than the first three or four words.  Many records like birth, baptism and marriage records follow very common formats.  One feature of these documents is that they often begin with the date the event occurred or was recorded.  So, simply by knowing a few common expressions you can quickly and easily identify the language of a document.

My Schoendorf line lived for several generations in Peppenkum . Although now a part of Germany, this area was ruled at various times by both France and Bavaria.  Records for this predominantly Catholic area are written in at least three different languages, Latin, French and German, depending on the period and context of the document. For example, I have three different documents (all available at the Family History Library).  The first is from a marriage record in a church register from 1782 for Johann Georg Schoendorf and Catherine Conrad.
  

Source: Film 351837

The first words are "L'an mil".  L'an is a contraction of the French words Le, which is the definite article "the", and an, the word for "year". Mil is the word for "thousand".

Next is the marriage record for their son Johann Schoendorf and his wife Anna Maria Klinlger from 1817.

Source: Film 351839

The language has changed; in place of French we find the Latin phrase "Anno Domini milesimo".  Anno means "in the year".  If you just wanted to say "the year", you would use annus, but Latin has special endings that tell you what function the word plays (see this post).  In this case, the ending -o tells us that it means "in the year".  Domini means "of the Lord". Here the ending -i tell us that Dominus has a possessive function.  Finally, we have the word milesimo (usually millesimo).  For now, let's just say it means "thousand".  I have a post planned for dealing with Latin numbers, which are a bit complicated.

You may have noticed the similarities between the French and Latin words for year an and anno and those for thousand mil  and millesimo.  This is because French, like all Romance languages, descends from Latin.

The final record, from 1866, is the civil registration of the birth of Caspar Schoendorf, the grandson and great grandson of the above couples.

Source : Film 1057430

Once again we encounter a new language.  This time it's German.  The first four words are "Im Jahr ein tausend", which translates as "In the year one thousand".  This is almost a word-for-word translation of the English.  The only tricky part is the word "im" which combines the preposition in "in" with the definite article dem "the".

Because English is a Germanic language, you will notice the similarities between German and English.  The word Jahr, where the initial J is pronounced like English Y, is similar to the English word year, and tausend is very close to thousand.

The first few words in all three documents contain the same two words, "year" and "thousand".  Think of these as keywords; since you are very likely to encounter them in a document, they can help you identify the language.  It may not help for every record, but it is at least one way of narrowing down the possibilities.

Dealing with synthetic structures in Latin

In a previous post, I talked about two different ways of organizing language and then in a later post showed how to deal with possessives in French. Today, I want to discuss another way that languages indicate the meaning of and relationships between words. In many languages, a word will change form depending on its function. In language like English or French, much of the work is accomplished by using separate words. In Latin, the same is achieved by changing the endings of the word. Let's see how this applies to possessives in Latin

Take the following church record:

Many of the names are no doubt very familiar looking, but have unfamiliar endings.

Ladislaum
Antoni
Mariae
Catharinam
Stanislai
Vincentius
Francisca

There are two different sets of endings, a masculine set (-us, -i and -um) and a feminine set (-a, -ae and -am). You are probably familiar with the ending -us and -a from famous Roman names like Julius, Octavius and Augustus or their feminine forms Julia, Octavia and Augusta. This form is called the nominative and is the form which you can look up in the dictionary. The two other forms have different funtions. The endings -um and -am are the accusative endings used to indicate the object of a verb.

Julius amat Octaviam.
Octaviam amat Julius.
Julius Octaviam amat.

These three sentences all mean the same thing; the word order isn't important, the endings are everything. The final pair of endings (-i and -ae) are the most important for identifying possessives. These forms are called genitive and are used to mark the possessor.

We can now return to the marriage document. Let's take a single line.


We have an ampersand (&), which is a special form of the conjunction et "and". We have two names, Stanislai and Antoninae. Both are in the genitive and should be translated as "of Stanislaus" and "of Antonina". The final puzzle is the word filiam. Now you should be able to recognize this as an accusative form and look up the form filia in a Latin dictionary. You will discover that it means "daughter". The line above means "daughter of Stanislaus and Antonina"

You should now be able to identify and translate these types of structures providing family relationships in Latin documents.