note: This is reprinted from our old blog and was originally published in May of 2015.
Transcribing foreign language records is not always as difficult as one might expect. There’s a difference though between transcribing and translating.
This image comes from the “family register” of the Immanuel Lutheran Church in Harmony Township, Hancock County, Illinois, and is part of the digital images associated with Ancestry.com‘s “Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Records, 1875-1940.” As mentioned in an earlier post, the index Ancestry.com currently has to these records does not include the family registers, but if they were microfilmed they can be viewed on Ancestry.com.
The notations on the image below only transcribes the first names of the family members listed in the entry. I used the script guide from an old Family History Library research guide to help me through the transcription process.
The entries for Christina geb. Uffkes and Benjamin Rolfs are shown below. The individual letters in “Christina geb.” have been circled in the image below:
They are a pretty close match to the sample images in the guide to Gothic script.
Pastor had very nice handwriting.
Too bad others didn’t.
One response
One of those “you have to know what you’re looking for” entries. If you fight your way through a few names it gets “easier”. Not Easy, easier than the first name was!