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2024 Week 10 : Language

 Although my husband Martin's dad was Polish, Martin and his siblings were brought up in Scotland in a non-Polish speaking household. Polish was only heard when his father's sisters came to the house or spoke on the phone or when other Polish people his father knew visited. His father's sisters had both married Poles and had brought their children up to be bilingual. Martin's mum was a Scot of Irish descent. What a missed opportunity! Now, late on in life, Martin is attempting to learn Polish, but how much easier would it have been for him to have learned it as a child!

His lack of Polish language hasn't helped when we have been working on the Polish side of his family tree. Trying to understand the documents held in various repositories has been a challenge. To that end, he has had to seek help from an amateur genealogist from his grandfather's hometown in Poland. 

Whilst doing research on his father's early life in Poland and on his Polish grandfather, Martin has managed to get hold of documents written in various languages: Polish, Russian and German. It is surprising how much we have been able to discover despite our language limitations, though, as a speaker of German, I was able to help with some of those. 

Martin obtained official confirmation of his father's family's incarceration in a Soviet labour camp written in Russian. His grandfather's WW1 prisoner of war records were obtained by me writing in German to the Austrian War Archives in Vienna and the resulting records were of course in German.


We also have a letter written in German by Martin's grandfather when he discovered that his family had been sent to a labour camp in the Soviet Union. The letter was intended for the German Embassy in Moscow, but he decided not to send it in case it placed his family in greater danger.


Latin has also been useful - with Poland being a Catholic country, most of the church records of births, marriages and deaths are written in Latin.

Martin's grandfather's birth notice from the archives in Sanok

When Martin and his cousin Chris visited where Martin's father and Chris' mother were born and raised, they had to use their combined language skills. In Lviv train station all the notifications were of course in Ukrainian. Chris didn't know the Ukrainian alphabet and Martin didn't know the Ukrainian language. However, Martin was familiar with the Greek alphabet, which is very similar to the Ukrainian one, so was able to pronounce the words even although he didn't know what they meant. As Ukrainian sounds similar to Polish, Chris was then able to work out the meaning of the notices.

Chris also acted as an interpreter in Ukraine, translating Martin's questions, which were in English, into Polish for a local Parish priest, who, although Ukrainian, spoke Polish, who then himself translated the questions into Ukrainian to ask the administrator of an archive!! The whole process then had to be repeated in reverse!

Knowing other languages can make life easier and can make research easier. I seem to have learned all the 'wrong' ones, as I have yet to find any French, German, Spanish, Norwegian or Danish ancestors!  (Unless you count those Vikings!) 

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