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My ancestors are all protestants of varying degrees of religiosity, so church records haven't ever been a reliable source for me. Doing this research to put together my husband's Italian citizenship application really makes me appreciate the catholics though. The county vital records can't find his birth certificate, but the archdiocese still has the baptismal record (online even, since it was long enough ago). His grandparents never returned their marriage license after they got married (although the county will send me a copy of the application), but I'm betting the archdiocese has the sacramental record for the wedding.
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Jun 16, 2022 17:02
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Emily Spinach posted:My ancestors are all protestants of varying degrees of religiosity, so church records haven't ever been a reliable source for me. Doing this research to put together my husband's Italian citizenship application really makes me appreciate the catholics though. The county vital records can't find his birth certificate, but the archdiocese still has the baptismal record (online even, since it was long enough ago). His grandparents never returned their marriage license after they got married (although the county will send me a copy of the application), but I'm betting the archdiocese has the sacramental record for the wedding. Yep. Say what you want about the church's history of abuse, corruption, hypocrisy etc they know how to keep track of their flock. Lucky for me about half my ancestors were Catholic or married Catholics so (where it wasn't banned, anyway; gently caress you England) I have extensive records on those lines.
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Jun 16, 2022 18:46
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Can't say I've had a problem with protestant records (tbf mostly in the Nordic countries & Germany), but I guess it might be different in the Americas?
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Jun 16, 2022 19:00
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Carthag Tuek posted:Can't say I've had a problem with protestant records (tbf mostly in the Nordic countries & Germany), but I guess it might be different in the Americas? The Nordic countries and Germany tend to be rather outliers in how well they kept records. Compared to England/Ireland/Scotland which are haphazard and often have the handwriting of left-handed drunken ADHD sufferers, France (in their defense they've a zillion wars blow through) and the Americas (pfft who cares about records until the 1890s oops another courthouse went up in smoke lol) and don't even get me started on Eastern Europe (though again, wars galore) you guys lucked out and have a veritable treasure trove of data. You're the exception, not the rule.
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Jun 16, 2022 19:39
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I guess. They don't really get solid until 1814 (Denmark) though, before that there weren't a standardized template and registers weren't required to be kept in two copies in separate locations.
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Jun 16, 2022 19:58
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Carthag Tuek posted:I guess. They don't really get solid until 1814 (Denmark) though, before that there weren't a standardized template and registers weren't required to be kept in two copies in separate locations. Swedish records are ridiculous all the way back to the 1700s. Like I don't even know how many times my own mom moved house in her life, but her 7th great-grandma? Its all there. German records you at least have the father's name and sponsors in baptismal records back to the late 16-early 1700s (places hit hard by WWII/awarded to Poland possibly excepted) and even some of those started turning up again after the Iron Curtain fell).
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Jun 16, 2022 20:29
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Especially once you get to the US, you also just don't have the church based bureaucracy. Catholic churches sent copies of their records to the diocese, but even if my 4x great grandparents in western Kentucky were baptized in a somewhat organized church and someone wrote it down, good luck figuring out what church and hoping the records still exist. Hell, just to compare apples to apples here, my great grandparents were all born around the same time as my husband's grandfather in the early 1900s and there's like no chance any of their baptism records survived, again assuming they were baptized in organized churches. Edit: this is all American based, I haven't really looked into European records for my ancestors. Emily Spinach fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Jun 16, 2022 |
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Jun 16, 2022 20:35
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Actually now that I think about it, it's probably more accurate to compare Danish and Swedish parish registers to government records, since they were created by the state church to fairly strict specifications, and indeed the state churches were the civil registration authority until recently.
Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Jun 16, 2022 |
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Jun 16, 2022 21:51
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Oracle posted:German records you at least have the father's name and sponsors in baptismal records back to the late 16-early 1700s (places hit hard by WWII/awarded to Poland possibly excepted) Yeah we can’t go further than the GGG-grandpa who immigrated through Canada around 1850 and then got citizenship in Indiana a couple years after that. From Pomerania. Thanks Red Army.
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Jun 17, 2022 16:20
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Jedi Knight Luigi posted:Yeah we can’t go further than the GGG-grandpa who immigrated through Canada around 1850 and then got citizenship in Indiana a couple years after that. From Pomerania. Thanks Red Army. I don't know if anyone has done an inventory, but I think at least some of the records from East Prussia/Pomerania/etc that were destroyed during ww2 were microfilmed by FamilySearch in the 1930s, and so exist in facsimile. I'm fairly sure I've looked at one, but it was a while ago. Similarly, there was a Danish guy called Lengnick in in the 1800s who was an avid genealogist and championed for the oldest parish registers to be preserved. He did not manage that before many more were lost due to random fires, but he did write literally all priests in Denmark and asked them to do extracts of vital records. Sadly only for "interesting names" and the upper class, but his extracts give information about at least 50 lost parishes. I guess what I'm saying is, even if parish registers are lost, there might exist some "unofficial" or irregular sources for your particular parish(es) — and if not ecclesiastical, then civil. Tax records, land holdings, fines, etc, they often contain incidental info about relations. It's a ton of effort though, cf. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3777244&userid=85617#post465076672 Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Jun 17, 2022 |
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Jun 17, 2022 16:46
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Carthag Tuek posted:I don't know if anyone has done an inventory, but I think at least some of the records from East Prussia/Pomerania/etc that were destroyed during ww2 were microfilmed by FamilySearch in the 1930s, and so exist in facsimile. I'm fairly sure I've looked at one, but it was a while ago. There is an inventory, they didn't get a whole lot of them, and a lot they did get are unindexed. I think you can find the whole list here. Unfortunately for me, a lot of them only start in 1874 or thereabouts. Like I said Poland still holds some of them in their archives, they aren't apparently in great shape or well organized/catlogued and not yet available online in any great quantity but some volunteers are working on it (or at least were before the pandemic). You can find the site and inventory here. And hey maybe they'll have something of interest to you, Jedi Knight Luigi! Oracle fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Jun 17, 2022 |
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Jun 17, 2022 22:47
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I was wondering like a list specifically of those records that were lost in time but still exist in some other form (even if only an extract) for example, here are Lengnick's extracts from those Danish parishes where the records have since been lost. by my count there are at least 25k+ persons mentioned, generally 1700-onwards: https://forum.slaegt.dk/index.php/topic,178274.0.html
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Jun 17, 2022 23:23
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Carthag Tuek posted:I was wondering like a list specifically of those records that were lost in time but still exist in some other form (even if only an extract) Ah. That information is probably in some history grad student's thesis or something, or in a language I don't speak. You don't know what you don't know and all that. This site might be close? Oracle fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Jun 18, 2022 |
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Jun 18, 2022 01:02
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Ooh hey that huge project to recreate the records that were lost in the fire in 1922 in Dublin, Ireland during the revolution by finding duplicate information in other, far-flung counties and records and digitizing it all has completed! https://virtualtreasury.ie/ Go poke around!
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Jun 29, 2022 14:42
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That's awesome! Also, speaking of catalogs and such, FamilySearch now has an email address you can write about errors in the catalog: https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-request-a-correction-to-the-familysearch-catalog No idea if/when they'll get around to fixing them (after all, their catalog was "locked" sometime before Corona for an upgrade, and I haven't since seen any status or estimated time of completion). Anyway, worth a shot I guess! Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 17:54
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So I think I've posted about My Pomerania before but this is a really, really REALLY cool resource.quote:It is a little-known fact that emigration records in Pomerania used to be kept by the police departments in county-level divisions. These records give much more insight than most would imagine, including descriptions of appearances, those traveling with, and supporting documentation for the emigrant. Sometimes, one can gain a better understanding of why the person was leaving or potentially learn about the parents of someone who is a dead-end in your family tree. They are looking to index these records, so if you read old script well please think about donating some time, this stuff is gold.
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Jul 6, 2022 03:58
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Wow. Consider my dad emailed! That range really goes right up against when GGG-grandpa came over (Gottlieb>Heinrich>Godfrey>Reuel>Dad>me). I wonder if he already knew about this website or something similar cuz I remember he told me some document listed Gottlieb’s father-in-law’s name being Bogislav, and Gottlieb left for Canada in 1851.
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Jul 6, 2022 05:35
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loving hell i have an arkivdigital membership paid by my genealogical society and in return i help members look up people who were in sweden before 1930 (also valid itt because i loving love helping people). but theres this guy who is just so excited, just posting about progress and brainstorms in my thread. so many times have i told him "i can help searching AD indexes and maybe explain terms , but if you have a date and parish it is quicker to go to digitala forskarsalen yourself" ugh just do the work yourself you bum
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Jul 23, 2022 10:49
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Sorry thread, been away for a bitCarthag Tuek posted:förresten, hur mår det med att lära svensk? du må mycket gärna säga om jag eller kanske andra ifrån skanditråden kan hjälpa med översättninger osv! Ah jag missade det här. Tack! Sakta men bra. But most of my time lately has been trying to be less poo poo at chess (impossible of course) I may have some AD questions for you at some point, very generous offer that!
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Jul 25, 2022 05:08
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 Here's an interesting Scandinavian study: https://petersjolund.se/du-har-inte...lv5tiGDwWNPWFtA (swedish) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040260822000211 (english) Basically, they looked at everyone in people the town of Skellefteå who were born 1885–99 and charted their descendants for three generations. Turns out about half will not have any living descendants, and only about 30% will have descendants in direct male/female lines. Article goes into the implications for DNA research etc. I would honestly have guessed the number of people without living descent on such a short timeline to be more like 25% Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Jul 25, 2022 |
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Jul 25, 2022 13:01
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Wow, just had a meeting with a professor who's created a model that can transcribe names + birth dates in an entire Danish census in like 1 hour. That normally takes like 5+ years using volunteers.
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Aug 19, 2022 09:59
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Wow. How’s the accuracy?
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Aug 20, 2022 21:31
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It looked pretty good from the samples he showed on the call, but there's no ground truth to compare it to yet. It does have per-letter confidence, and it should be possible to compare to known names and get a decent idea how many are at least real. They talked about letting volunteers confirm/correct its output to get some feedback, but that's under the domain of the national archives (we were just on there as guests, as we have similar upcoming projects). There are of course also converns re GDPR for newer censuses. Also, tbf it does require at least a week for prepping the images (identifying and marking up the relevant fields, etc), but as I understood that could also be done automatically.
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Aug 21, 2022 08:08
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That sounds promising, but I would like to see verification before I’d trust it. Are there any records already human transcribed like on familysearch he could use to test?
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Aug 22, 2022 07:22
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The national archives have a bunch of transcriptions, and they talked some about using them for confirmation. The biggest issue he mentioned is that the data isn't very easy to match up to the images (ie. which row in which image corresponds to which row in the database). Also the volunteer-transcribed birth dates are apparently in several different formats (1/1 1865, 01011865, 1865-01-01, etc) due to changing standards over time (the earliest transcription projects are 30+ years old).
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Aug 22, 2022 08:07
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Found some of his published work: Dahl, C. M., Johansen, T. S. D., Sørensen, E. N., Westermann, C. E., & Wittrock, S. F. (2021). Applications of Machine Learning in Document Digitisation. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.03239 Dahl, C. M., Johansen, T., Sørensen, E. N., & Wittrock, S. (2021). HANA: A HAndwritten NAme database for offline handwritten text recognition. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.10862v1
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Aug 24, 2022 08:36
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Nice, I wrote the Swedish National Archives about what it would cost to scan a certain letter from 1598, as it is signed with a house mark by my great-11 grandfather. They just sent me photos of the entire letter free of charge   Last one is him, with the kind of doubled cross crosslet. Shame its so deep in the fold near the spine, but eh what can ya do
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Aug 25, 2022 19:51
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That's super neat!
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Aug 25, 2022 20:14
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Yea  It's probably the single oldest piece of evidence I can directly attribute to a confirmed ancestor. I have a handful of others that go back to the early 1600s, but there's a pretty hard limit there when tracking common people.
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Aug 25, 2022 20:35
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Jeez you get the coolest stuff.
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Aug 26, 2022 04:04
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Trying to see if one of my ancestors was illegitimate. He probably wasn't, as he carries his presumed father's name, but his birth isn't registered in the parish where that man lived, and that man is known to have had at least one child out of wedlock. Also he had a female servant who had an illegitimate daughter and claimed the father was a soldier named "Niels Nielsen"  Anyway, I've been looking for a way to confirm that they were father and son. My guy was born around 1717. It would normally be a fairly quick check through the accountings over a couple of years to see who was fined for having extramarital sex. However, there was a major reorganization of the crown holdings in 1718, so that means I have to check three different jurisdictions, which cover about 70 parishes, probably at least a thousand pages. Also since I'm checking, I stupidly decided to write down all the names with references so other people can find them. Why, why  e: Welp, about an hours work for 2 years. That makes the whole thing about 14-15 hours work. Just take a couple at a time, should be doable. Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 13:10 on Sep 2, 2022 |
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Sep 2, 2022 12:11
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Recorded 130+ fines for extramarital sex and my guy is not among them, so that was a bit of a waste of time (but I've shared them with other genealogists since that is the right thing to do). However, I did separately find a tingsvidne (lit. "thing witness") which is a transcript of the trial around his one known illegitimate child, from when he got his sister in law pregnant a decade later. It's like 200 pages long, was recorded after he fled the country, and mostly regards the question of guilt in the sad story of the sister in law — she gave birth to a child that she killed by neglect, ie putting it in a box and ignoring it, very PPD  — but it also mentioned that my guy had legitimate children with his wife, and gave an alternate spelling of his name that matches better with my other records.Also, I found out that the other candidate for paternity who bears the name in 20th century printed works, had an indeed very different name in the original sources. It is too different to be a spelling difference (think Bowen vs. Butler), so this other guy simply can't be the father. So, by process of elimination, I have concluded that I'm a legitimate descendant. It is the only reasonable explanation considering the names, places, and dates in play. Whew, that only took 5 years of research 
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Sep 9, 2022 15:40
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Carthag Tuek posted:Recorded 130+ fines for extramarital sex and my guy is not among them, so that was a bit of a waste of time (but I've shared them with other genealogists since that is the right thing to do). quote:However, I did separately find a tingsvidne (lit. "thing witness") which is a transcript of the trial around his one known illegitimate child, from when he got his sister in law pregnant a decade later. It's like 200 pages long, was recorded after he fled the country, and mostly regards the question of guilt in the sad story of the sister in law — she gave birth to a child that she killed by neglect, ie putting it in a box and ignoring it, very PPD
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Sep 9, 2022 19:20
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thanks lol a missing answer like that is basically like a burning ember in my mind. i cant leave it alone until literally all available sources have been exhausted. even if it means leafing through thousands of pages on a slow connection, i have to at least skim them. ps still a dude but no worries
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Sep 9, 2022 21:48
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lol we asked the professor guy how much it would cost to run his name-recognition thing on a certain archive we have, sent him some sample images. just for an estimate. then yesterday our site got all sluggish and we scrambled to find out wtf, turns out one of his students/employees set up a scraper to download all our images (350k+ in that series alone). told him to knock it off & ask for a hard copy next time
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Sep 23, 2022 14:00
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Carthag Tuek posted:lol we asked the professor guy how much it would cost to run his name-recognition thing on a certain archive we have, sent him some sample images. just for an estimate. then yesterday our site got all sluggish and we scrambled to find out wtf, turns out one of his students/employees set up a scraper to download all our images (350k+ in that series alone). told him to knock it off & ask for a hard copy next time Does this guy have anything to do with ancestry's announcement about their hardwriting recognition software?
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Sep 23, 2022 16:44
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Oracle posted:Does this guy have anything to do with ancestry's announcement about their hardwriting recognition software? I don't think so. I've only met a bunch of Danes & this looks like an internal Ancestry thing But yeah, poo poo is moving fast in that area! This was the state of the art in recent years (okay 2014 was longer ago than I remembered!): https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=2841382&pagenumber=151&perpage=40#post435486291 Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Sep 23, 2022 |
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Sep 23, 2022 17:26
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https://antigonejournal.com/2022/10/descendants-mark-antony/
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Oct 21, 2022 09:00
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Well! FamilySearch finally answered me regarding the inaccessible film! They added a new email address to their help page at some point since July, which I only discovered this Friday: https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-request-a-correction-to-the-familysearch-catalog So I wrote them Friday morning, got a reply Friday afternoon (Utah morning) & it's available today. Very quick turnaround if you ignore the complete radio silence over the preceding 3 years lol
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Oct 23, 2022 18:14
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I recently had the chance to walk the area in Sydney that my ancestors lived in during the 1860s. Yep, that's a lovely brutalist police station sitting on top of most of the places they lived. Ah well, it was nice to wander the area anyway.
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Oct 24, 2022 05:46
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