User:Caileigholdroyd/Sandbox/Portuguese script

hello my name is Caileigh McGraw Oldroyd and i am presenting part one of two of reading dates and localities for the Latin American catholic church finding aid project if you have any questions please reach out to me at caileigholdroyd@familysearch.org

Please forgive my accent and pronunciations. Portuguese is not my first language.

Information has been gathered from the Portuguese Genealogical Word list on the FamilySearch Research Wiki and BYU Script tutorial both of these are listed under helpful resources on the instructions page for this project

One thing that is helpful to note is that the standardization of portuguese did not happen until around the late 1700s and even then not many places had access to dictionaries and so some spellings if you know portuguese, it may seem incorrect but really they were just spelling it how they would phonetically pronounce it for instance in this first line it says y became i pereira became pereira it is phonetically the same but the y was then changed to an i and then there's other instances that are similar to that that you just should be aware of a rule of thumb is we are always going to write what we see so we're not going to try to guess what the individual was trying to write in modern portuguese we're just going to write what they wrote if the municipality was called pereira we would write it exactly how they wrote it with a y or an i however they wrote it

another thing you should note is that oftentimes in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin records they used abbreviations you can see these in these images uh the first one you'll probably see quite often no so senor or no senora they usually just did an abbreviation of ns another word you'll see abbreviated is fragile which means parish and also parochial which you can see on this table on the right they usually use superscripts for this kind of thing and you'll just want to be aware and whenever we write these on the spreadsheet i'll go over this in more depth on the part two instructions but we'll just write it as we see it you don't need to have access to creating a superscript or know how how to do that we can just write it for instance if it was the parochia abbreviation we would just write it p-a-r-o-q-a um and we'll have a specialist come through and standardize everything before it goes on the wiki lastly that third image on the bottom is a really great example of both use of uh more ancient spelling and um abbreviation so they abbreviated the word nosa senora mai dos homens and mai is spelled with uh kind of a past version of how we would spell my if you know portuguese which means mother so in the modern version we use m a e with a diacritic over the a um but in this instance they spelled it m-a-i which is probably just them phonetically spelling it out so don't worry about trying to change that into a modern spelling just write it as you would see it so we would write it in this antiquated form on the google spreadsheet

the next thing you should note is that years were often completely spelled out with words instead of numbers so for instance this is written as de mil novecentos e cinco we can use this chart which is also on the genealogical words list page on the family search research wiki to kind of translate this so we can look and see that male is one thousand no vicentos is 900 and cinco is five so we can translate that into 1905 in english and you can write that in number form as we will be finding years which will be explained more in part two

one other thing you should note is that a lot of catholic church records follow a similar format um older kind of like pre-1850 would use a format after that they often had templates kind of printed out but they usually keep this same format that would be starting with the date of the entry in the parish that the uh the event happened in the municipality the event happened in and then it goes on to explain the person the event was happening to their parents and sometimes their grandparents we won't be taking down any people's names in this project we're just taking down the nate the date the parish and the municipality and as you can see on this image on the left hand side it says gmail

cuatro which is the year and then it goes on to say fragisia and you can see those nice little abbreviations of gnosis

so in just the first two lines we already get the year the parish and the municipality um in one of those entries so just be aware that that's the usual uh format for these catholic church records

lastly we have a helpful resources section under the instructions that you should use it has a link to the portuguese genealogical word list on the research wiki it has two links to the byu script tutorial that you can use to compare handwriting this is especially useful whenever you're trying to read old records in the cursive you can't quite tell if it's an a or an e or an o you can compare those to those examples on those pages the next link is to the santa catarina brazil genealogy page on the research wiki it has a list of municipalities that you can cross-reference with these are modern municipality names so if there's any old or former municipality names mentioned in the records it might not be so helpful but a lot of the municipality names say pretty true to what they are today um the other link is to the all parishes tab on the google spreadsheet which i'll explain and it'll make a lot more sense in part two but that also has a list of modern parishes that are existing today that you can kind of compare their names to and lastly i linked to google i often use this if i need help or don't quite have the spelling of a municipality because the handwriting is strange and i'll kind of put in my guess of what the spelling is i'll put santa catalina which is the state that we're researching in right now and then brazil eventually we will go on to other um states in brazil and other places in latin america hopefully um so of course you would change that second part to whatever state or whatever province that it applies to and that should bring up some results that kind of guide you to the correct spelling of your municipality or perish place

and lastly please remember to watch part two of these instructions so you can get a more detailed information on how to actually fill out the google sheet thanks so much for volunteering

hello this is kaylee oldroyd with part two of latin america catholic church records finding aid instructions

the first thing we're going to be doing is we're going to be looking for the parish name one thing you should know about parish records is they were often kept in books they would contain opening statements or cover pages an opening statement would look like a paragraph and it's going to be on the very first inside page of the book or it could have a cover page also one of the very first pages and these just serve to show what's within the record so it would say it's within a certain parish in a certain municipality and a certain event type so an event is a baptism a confirmation a marriage or an obituary sometimes it will contain other special records that the priest may have taken but those are the main ones that we'll be looking at um occasionally for this example we would be seeing that there are two parishes within one book that's pretty rare it doesn't happen all the time but it does especially in more developing communities depending on the history of that place so you'll be looking for the buzzwords fragisia or parochia so those both mean parish and portuguese they're used kind of interchangeably depends on the priest and so i trained my eyes to kind of look for those words within the first few sentences in this first photo on top i can see that it says this book will serve to record the baptisms of the free people of the parish of gnosis and your might the solomons and aradangua and we'll read at the end the parish of santo antonio dos angels in the sidaji the laguna which is the city of laguna 25th june 1878. so a majority of this book is probably just no senora maida um but i did see because i looked for that buzzword fragisia that there was a second one included again that's pretty rare to find multiple parishes in one book but it is possible so um just train your eye to look for fragisia and read the name afterwards if it's the same then it's probably just continuing to talk about the parish if it's different it's probably saying that there are multiple and i would just put that in the notes that there's another parish mentioned um and then a specialist will go through and we'll sort it at another time this bottom photo is an example of a cover page and it just says livro ji batismos which just means book of baptisms of the parish of aran vangua and this one used the word parochia and if you watched part one you know that sometimes the spellings are a little bit different so don't um be freaked out freaked out by that just look for the words you should be good um the last thing i wanted to mention is that parishes could go by either a patron saint um and or a municipality so they are used kind of interchangeably for instance this parochial um

could also be the exact same parish as um this fragile g no senora maidos almonds um they just usually use those names interchangeably we will always just write what we see though so we're not going to try to guess which one is which um just write what you see

so the next thing we're going to find is the municipality name the municipality name typically comes after the parish name so again if you look for that buzz word fragisia and then for example on this photo says frida gino senora da concepcion so that one's saying that it's in the municipality of baja velia and that's pretty much how it always is it's always it's typically always in that order um and if it's not i'll give you a little bit of a workaround for that in just a bit so i um you can find information within um opening statements and um event entries so that was again like the baptisms the marriages the obituaries sorry skipped a page while i was still talking all right the next thing we're going to find is the date range so books are typically in chronological order we're going to be finding the date range by looking at the very first entry and looking at the very last event entry and if you're kind of confused by that don't worry i'm going to show you exactly how you do that in just a minute so again from the first video you watched we know we can look at the wiki page if we need some help kind of translating dates so here this one says gmail novi centos and we know that after translating that it just means 1905 so that would be the beginning one and then you go to the last entry you do the same thing look in the first line to find that year and then that's how you find the date range

if there's no opening statement or it's too hard to read you can always look inside the events again events are baptisms marriages confirmations obituaries anything like that it should have these events and it will start off with a name you can see on this one i kind of blocked it out sorry but it says bernardina and her last name um and then it'll start off with this format so it always goes date parish municipality within those first two lines occasionally there might be a few that are not like that because the priest did it his own way but you should be kind of able to figure it out because they will do it the same in books and make it pretty uniform so if you look at this one it says gml

and that means 1884 in english and then we see that buzzword fragisia g and then we have a nice little abbreviation like we learned in that first video uh which basically translates to no senora

so we've got those three things that we need already in this one entry so we got the date the parish and the municipality again we will write things just as we see it so on my sheet i would just put it typed out 1884. of course i'd find the last date and i'd find the range then for the parish name i put in s dot even though i know that probably means no senora

santa catarina one other thing i want you to know is on these sheets you do not need to be able to have these diacritics so if you have an english keyboard just leave those like cecilia's and the other diacritics out you can just type it just the best you can in regular english characters

lastly um we have a notes column and you can use this for a variety of reasons you can put that maybe you skipped something because you tried your best to read through the documents but they were really just too hard to read and then a specialist will come back and they'll fill in the information you can write spelling uh if you're unsure of uh spelling you think you almost got it but you're not quite sure if it's an a or an e or an o or something similar and then lastly if you come across slave records we also want those in the notes so the way that you can tell if it is a slave record book is if it says the word escravo if it is a portuguese book if it's spanish it'll say esclava or asclavo um and that's that's how you know they typically put it pretty big um and we'll just want that in the notes column so that we can make sure that those are a little bit more prominent and people know um to search in those if they believe they have enslaved ancestors or not

uh next up we'll be going over the instructions page we'll go over how to use the film browser and a live descript play of the project here is the instructions page so you will get here by going to the wiki projects and you'll find this on the list this is going to be called a finding aid project so it looks something similar to this whenever you open it up eventually these will have these links i'm recording the video right now and then you're going to open up the task list right here and that's the first thing you would do so that you could get to these links so i have links to all of the books that we're going to be looking through i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to open this one and i'm going to show you how to use the film browser so i would click this link i open it up and it's going to take me to a specific part of this historical records collection and you'll see here that we have a plus a minus and that can be used to zoom in you can also use either your mouse or if you're on a laptop you can um use two fingers kind of like you're on a smartphone and zoom in if you're using a mouse um the little toggle in the middle to scroll on a page will also zoom in and zoom out for you so right now i'm using my fingers but you can also just use the plus the minus so that you can zoom in and read the records at a comfortable level for your eyes the next thing about the film browser is this is really helpful whenever you want to go all the way to the end to find that last entry you can just scroll all the way down another way you can do this is just typing in right here and pressing enter and that will take you to the page that you want to go for instance i know that there's only 102 pages here because of this right here and so i pressed that in there and it took me right there so i can click that easily and i can scroll down here and zoom in or zoom out do whatever i need to there's also some helpful tools over here that you can use for instance if this was a little bit too difficult for you to read you can adjust the image you can adjust the brightness which doesn't sometimes doesn't help but sometimes may help depending on it sometimes it's easier if it goes darker and you can kind of read the the pin a little bit better there's the contrast which also sometimes helps kind of make the letters a little bit more bold and if you want to apply it you can apply it there or you can press cancel you can also automatically invert this and this is really helpful for if the ink is very very light i wouldn't do this on this one but if the ink is very very light this will make it pop up more and you can sometimes read it a little bit better and to just get it to go away you just click it again um you can also turn the pages for instance if something happened and the book is upside down you can flip the pages there and that's pretty much it that's what i use to go through so let's go ahead and start from scratch let's start from where you would start if you were doing this project so the first thing you're going to do is you're going to put your name next to one of these links and that means that you're taking care of that link you're going to be reading it the next thing you're going to do is you're going to again click that link

and then we are going to be looking for this information the actual parish name the actual municipality name and the actual date range so first things first we look here and we are going to zoom in so we can read it this one has a opening statement it also has this priest put a nice little header up here so i'm actually going to read this one because it looks a little bit easier to read than the opening statement and it says it has the obituaries for the parish of senor bonji zeus so i already have and it also has the dates which is nice i'm actually going to check those anyways but we're going to put the parish name right here so it says senor bonji zeus so i'm going to put that right here senor om j zeus and then we're going to take um this right here because that's the municipality that this is in and i'm going to put it in column e and again i'm putting it exactly as i see it if i were to research this i would find that the it is now um p a r a t i instead of y but i'm putting it exactly as i see it you don't have to do any research anything like that and then i'm going to read the entries so again this is going to be the first baptism entry we can tell because it has a name right here and it starts with a date so the first date we're looking for it says jamil

so that would be 1874. if you need some help again use those wiki pages down at the bottom of the instructions page right here you can find it scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll all the way down right here i can click that and it would open up that page if i needed help um and i can look here for numbers and i could translate it that way if i needed that kind of help next thing i'm going to do i'm going to click here to browse multiple images i'm going to scroll all the way to the last page and i'm going to read the last entry so i'm going to zoom zoom zoom in and try my best to read this uh year right here so it says jim novicento which would be 1908. so i'm going to put that here 1874 to 1908 and that would be it i didn't see anything um that would warrant me putting anything in the notes um again the the point of this project is to get the different um correct municipality names and the correct parish names so um don't you don't need to put in the notes that the municipality of parity is different than this what's on here um that's going to be already assumed but if there was something weird for instance

or you couldn't read it then you could always put that in the notes column right there and again remember from the earlier instructions if you are to see um on the opening page if it says something um like escravos over here something like that really be sure you put that in the notes other than that it's pretty straightforward the hardest thing is going to just probably be reading the handwriting and again if you need help just put something in the notes and we'll have someone come by and double check it thanks so much guys