User:Sarafina120

Hi there, thanks for visiting my personal wiki on familysearch.org. I have been doing genealogy for about 21 years and taking clients for about 2 years. I have researched France, Canada, UK, and all over the US. I have indexed records from South Africa, Australia, Netherlands, France, and the US. I run a blog at [fallinapples.com] and will try to keep this up to date as well. Hope this helps you find the treasures that your ancestry holds for you once you unlock its secrets. How to do genealogy in language you cannot read fluently? If you have been doing genealogy for any length of time, or have tried to help on any of the online indexing programs, you know that there are a plethora of English based records online. Most of those are American or Canadian. So how do you get information to records abroad other than actually visiting the town abroad? While this sounds like a trip of a lifetime it is not really cost effective for the average income person. My husband is first generation American, his mother and grandmother being from Bar-le-duc, France. So while I did receive a packet of several generations from a cousin, I could not source it. To solve this I searched the internet for "French records online" with this simple search i learned that they call their records "archives" and that there are several "departments" or states that have them scanned in for us to peruse. The catch? you guessed it, they are in French. I overcame this tiny bump by first using google translate to find the words for&#160;: birth, death, baptized, married, son and daughter. With these six words and my 6 years of school level spanish (not the same as conversational), I was able to get through the newest records available which seems to be around 1850. I also learned how the records are set up thus making it easier to peruse for the name, I learned the months of the year. The records once we hit 1790 ( pre revolution) they change to paragraph format, but armed with the words you have learned through the previous generations you should still be fine. you also get the words" legitimate" and "natural" referring to children born in or out of wedlock. When I source these I either grab the actual image or use recordseek to grab the text in its native language. I still struggle with the marriage bans because they are full paragraphs, but I will crack the code eventually, and i do recognize them even if i do not know everything it says it is enough to use for sourcing my husband's ancestors.