Tombstone Tuesday - The long and short of inscriptions

Information on a tombstone can be presented a few different ways. One of the simplest ways is as a name and two dates, sometimes just the years.  For example, the inscription for my wife's second great uncle, Albert Labiak, is done in this style.

In other cases, you have inscriptions in regular prose with complete sentences, as in the case of the inscription for my 7th great grandmother, Ruth (Denison) Kingsbury (image on Find A Grave):

Here Lies the Body of

Mrs. Ruth Kingsbury

wife to Deacon Joseph

Kingsbury she Departed 

This Life May 6 1779

 Ætat 93

She left five Children

61 Gran Children 132

Great Gran Children

15 Great Gran Gran 

Children

However, this style is not very common in English, especially for more recent inscriptions.

A more common way of composing tombstone inscriptions in English involves a kind of abbreviated style of writing.  It is an example of economics influencing language; the effort and expense of inscribing a tombstone favors brevity.  Instead of full sentences with a subject and a verb, past participles are used. This style is used on the tombstone of my 3rd great grandparents, George and Prudence (Martin) Savage:

 

One reason that it useful to recognize these different styles is that understanding the language of tombstones in English can help you approach tombstones in other languages.  Over the next couple weeks I will show how particular styles are favored in different languages.

Funeral Card Friday - Franciszek Labiak

In Blessed Memory of

Franciszek Labiak

He fell asleep in the Lord
on December 30th, 1953
Funeral, January 4th, 1954
at Five Holy Martyrs Church*
to Resurrection Cemetery

*Literally: Church of the Five Holy Polish Brothers and Martyrs

Polish is a very tough language to have to deal with. Like Latin, it is a highly synthetic language (see here), so you have to know some grammar to use a dictionary effectively. Fortunately, there are some very good resources for genealogist. The Polish Genealogical Society of America has many resources that may help you with your ancestors' Polish records, especially if they lived in Chicago. They have a translation guide for Dziennik Chicagoski obituaries (here) that can help you translate keywords, Polish first names, and the names of Chicago area churches and cemeteries. Although intended for obituaries, the guide is also useful for tombstones, funeral cards and really almost any genealogical records.

It is also worth tracking down contemporary English language records for your ancestors, as these may help you translate the Polish document. However, be careful as the information may not be exactly the same. In the case of Franciszek Labiak, who went by the English name Frank, there is an obituary in the Chicago Tribune from January 1-3, 1954. It reads:

Frank Labiak, late of 3106 W. 47th street, beloved husband of Anna Pearl, nee Heltmark; loving father of Bernard, Francis, Walter, Edward, Sylvester, Chester, Leo, William, and the late Gertrude, father-in-law of Veronica, Josephine, Margaret, Elizabeth, and Helen, brother of Agnes Schultz, Anna Dombrowski, Catherine Czesycki, Mary Deardowski, Josephine Vitek, and Samuel Labiak, brother-in-law of Casimir Schultz, Bernard Czeszycki, Michael Deardowski, and Charles Vitek, grandfather of 11 grandchildren. Funeral Monday, Jan. 4, at 9:30 a.m., from chapel, 4358 S. Richmond street, to Five Holy Martyrs church. Interment Resurrection cemetery. Union Town, Pa., papers please copy. Lafayette 3-4480.

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.