Google Translate versus Professional Translation

As a professional genealogist, one of the things I do is translation.  I'm a member of a group of professional genealogy translators that was started to help raise awareness of the benefit of using a professional translator with specialized genealogical knowledge, as opposed to finding a general translator or just using Google Translate (or some other machine translation option).  The group formed about two and a half years ago, and so far we haven't made much progress.  Why we haven't made much progress is often a topic in our monthly online meetings.

The biggest problem we seem to have is conveying why it's better to use a professional translator, particularly one with specialized genealogical knowledge, as opposed to simply popping over to Google Translate and using its "automagic" translation.  Google is awesome, right?  It does so many cool things, and the translation is always improving.  Why should I go out and actually *pay* someone when I can get it for free at home?

Well, for one thing, machine translation is far from perfect.  Yes, it's improving all the time, but it still misses the mark quite often.  A wonderfully entertaining article by Fred Hoffman (a professional translator) that points this out is available online in the October 2016 issue of Gen Dobry!.  Another article by Fred, this one in the November 2009 issue of GenDobry!, truly makes clear why relying only on modern machine translation is no substitute for effort taken to find the correct meaning of an obsolete word.

Then what's a genealogist to do?   To be fair, Google Translate does have its place.  If you don't understand the language a record or document is written in, absolutely go to Google Translate, enter the text, and see what Google comes up with.  It is rarely perfect (or 100% accurate), but you should be able to get the gist of what's going on.  After that, if it seems as though the document is relevant to your research, find a professional translator to do a more accurate, more nuanced translation.

But why not just settle for what Google gives you?  I equate that rough translation Google Translate gives you with the ubiquitous family trees on Ancestry.com and other sites.  Since the vast majority of those trees have no sources listed (or list only other trees as sources), I look at them as hints and possibilities.  I use them to mine for ideas for research.  But I never rely only on them, because I have no idea where the information came from.  They're stepping stones on a journey, but not the final destination.

Google Translate gives you hints.  It's a "rough draft" of the meaning of your original text.  But translation is an art, not a hard science, and machine translation still has many years to go before it can truly compare with what a professional translator can do.  So it's a stepping stone on your journey to an accurate translation of your document.

And once you've decided you want to find a professional translator, where should you look?  Well, for genealogy, I recommend going to the Association of Professional Genealogists site and clicking on the link for "Other Searches" under the "Find a Professional" navbar.  On the "Advanced Search" page, you can scroll down and choose "Translator" on the "Service Category" pop-up and your desired language right below that.  Then look through the results.

Of course, not every language is available.  About 30 people come up for French, 25 for Italian, nine for Russian, and even three for Czech, but none for Finnish, Greek or Slovenian.  So what to do if no APG members work in your language?

The next place to look is the American Translators Association.  Near the top of the page you can search for a translator (or even an interpreter) by your beginning (source) language and then the language you want it translated to (target).  ATA of course has members who translate from French, Italian, Russian, and Czech, but you can also find Finnish, Greek, and Slovenian, along with many more.  The advanced search allows you to look for a specialized knowledge area; unfortunately, ATA doesn't list include genealogy on the list, which is why you're better off starting your search at APG.  Professional genealogists are generally more familiar with terminology that appears in documents important to family history research and often have come across obsolete terms in old papers.  Most ATA translators focus on modern-day language and may misunderstand older terms.

IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Florida (in July!)

Here I am at the 37th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, in Orlando, Florida.  (Who schedules a conference in Orlando in July?)  As expected, it's miserably humid, but the air conditioning in the hotel is working perfectly.  (Some attendees think it's too cold, but I'm very comfortable.)  As I told everyone before the conference started, people in Florida take their air conditioning seriously.

The conference started bright and early Sunday morning.  The first session I attended was "Outreach for Societies and Organization Leaders", one of a series of eleven, running through the conference, aimed at genealogical societies.  Outreach has been one of the issues lately for my society, so I headed over there.  I got some good ideas and a handy worksheet to take home and discuss with my board.

I'm giving five talks here at the conference, the most I've ever been scheduled for.  I'm very happy to say that they are spread out over the conference, with only one on a given day.  The first one was "Jewish Genealogy:  How Is This Research Different from All Other Research?", on Sunday.  After two time changes, it ended up at 4:30 in the afternoon (which was much better than the original 7:30!).  I'm happy to say it went very well, with several good questions from attendees.  One woman found me on Monday to let me know that the talk helped her knock down a brick wall!

Talks by Mark Fearer, on immigration laws and documentation, and Banai Lynn Feldstein, on her new Crowd Sourced Indexing, rounded out the afternoon for me.  Then, before the evening keynote, I attended the IAJGS presidents' reception for the first time, standing in for the real SFBAJGS president, who had decided he didn't want to go to Florida in July.  It was great to network with everyone, but I was very surprised to discover that the light snacks provided were not kosher and that there was no kosher option for observant attendees.  That seemed to be a significant oversight (or blunder, depending on your perspective).

The keynote was great.  Robert Watson of Lynn University gave an entertaining, informative talk about Alexander Hamilton and his relationship to Jews and the American Revolution.  Apparently Hamilton has been a favorite historical subject of Watson's for some years, and now I know a lot more about the "bastard orphaned son of a whore and a drunken Scotsman."  Since I have not seen the musical Hamilton, I learned on Sunday that Hamilton was taken in by the Jewish community of Nevis after he was orphaned for the second (or was it third?) time.  There he learned to speak Hebrew, to add to the seven languages he already knew.  Apparently Hamilton, who was incredibly intelligent and a prodigy when he was young, wrote a significant number of George Washington's speeches and letters, including many of the latter sent to Jewish congregations around the United States.  Watson was a wonderful speaker; it was easy to see why he was twice named Teacher of the Year by students at Lynn.

Monday started out far too early (7:00 a.m.!) at a breakfast hosted by FamilySearch, which is working on finding and digitizing ever more records.  The meeting was held to reach out to researchers in the Jewish genealogical community to help identify records of interest.  I'm hoping something can be worked out for records from the Jewish Cuban community.

I tried going to some talks in the morning, but I abandoned one after the speaker spent the first 15 minutes talking about personal reminiscences rather than the stated topic, and another when the speaker used words of one syllable and enunciated everything as though he were talking to kindergarteners.  (I know, I'm so fussy.)  Then I headed off to the IAJGS Media Lunch, where several bloggers, tweeters, and others discussed ways to help publicize next year's IAJGS conference in Warsaw, how Jewish genealogical societies can take advantage of social media, and how International Jewish Genealogy Month can be updated to become a more effective outreach tool.

In the afternoon I learned about finding Israeli burial data from Daniel Horowitz, then went to a talk purported to be about one thing but that actually ended up promoting a Web site.  That was . . . disappointing.  I left early and spent the rest of the afternoon in the new "mentoring" area, helping people who came by looking for research advice.

The evening wrapped up with two presentations.  Dr. Alexander Beider, who is well known in Jewish genealogy for the many books he has written on Jewish names, spoke about the historical, linguistic, and onomastic facts supporting the commonly accepted theory that Eastern European Jews migrated there from Western Europe.  That talk was followed by Dr. Harry Ostrer discussing the genetic evidence that supports the same theory.  It was quite an interesting evening, and I think I'm going to somehow find the money to buy Dr. Beider's book about Yiddish dialects.  Once a language geek, always a language geek.

My commentary on days 3 and 4 of the conference is here, and that for days 5 and 6 is here.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Genealogy Sayings in Latin

I have to admit, this week for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver has come up with a truly unusual challenge.

Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is:

(1) Find some of your favorite sayings, aphorisms, jokes, etc.  They can be genealogy-related, or not.

(2)  Translate them into Latin using Google Translate (https://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=TT).

(3)  Share them with us in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook status line or Google+ stream post (impress your nongenealogy friends with your Latin skills!).

(4)  Of course, you could translate the Latin you read (on my blog or the blogs of others) back into English (or your native language) using Google Translate too, to see who was really funny, or mean, or romantic.  If you want to be really fancy, you could translate your sayings into any other language using Google Translate and really confuse all of us.

I'm going to start by admitting that with all the languages I know, whether well or at a more basic level, Latin is not one of them.  I have managed to studiously avoid it all of these years.  So whatever Google Translate gives me is what I'm going to post.  I don't know how to clean it up.

That said, these are some of my genealogy truisms:

• Loquere ad seniorem domus membra primum.

• Numquam sperare in indicem ad in viscus.

• Quod si vos non petere, quod non statim responsum est.

• Fideliter cibi de jigsaw sollicitat similis investigationis.

• Conatus a singulis singula exemplum scriptum est potestis familia membra.

Somehow I doubt I will be impressing anyone with my Latin skills.  And this exercise will definitely point out the dangers of relying strictly on machine translation to do your work for you.



Addendum, Tuesday, May 3, 2017:

These are the original sayings in English that I translated into Latin using Google Translate:

• Talk to older family members first.

• Never rely on only the index entry.

• If you don't ask, the answer is always no.

• Genealogy research is like a jigsaw puzzle.  (Like it says at the top of my blog.)

• I accidentally deleted my original phrases, but this was something close to "I try to get copies of all records for family members."  Unfortunately, I can't recreate the same translation!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Write Your Names in Viking Runes

Nothing fancy this week for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.  Randy Seaver found an online tool to instantly transcribe words into Viking runes, courtesy of PBS (specifically of WGBH in Boston, the station that gives us Antiques Roadshow):

1) My friend and CVGS colleague Karen Y. found this fun Web site -  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/write-your-name-in-runes.html.  Click on the "Launch Interactive" button, enter your name or some phrase of your choice, and see how it looks in runes.  

2)  I thought it would be ideal for a fun and fast SNGF project.  You can impress your friends and grandchildren with it, and maybe it will be a chart-storm on Facebook.

3)  Share your runic names or phrases with us in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this post, in a Facebook post or a Google+ post.  Please provide a link to your response if you can.

If you want to put a name or phrase into runes, this is the fastest tool I've seen.  So here's my name:

And because it's so easy, I did a mystery transcription also:

This actually relates to the runes, at least a little.

I Started Learning to Read Hebrew!

I've been wanting to learn to read Hebrew for many years.  As a Jewish researcher, I've always known it would be a useful skill.  In addition, as an officer of a Jewish genealogical society, though it isn't a requirement, I thought I really should know something about the language.

So I've had it on my (very long) list of things to do for several years, but there were always reasons I didn't manage to do it (like money, time, and all those other things that get in the way of getting things done).  But then I read about a free (!) five-week class at Congregation Beth Israel–Judea in San Francisco.  And I figured out that I could take BART to the synagogue and didn't have to drive (because I hate driving in San Francisco).  It was perfect!

The Hebrew Reading Crash Course (yes, that's really what it's called; look at my little diploma up there) was a lot of fun.  It teaches one letter at a time and has you practice syllables, then starts putting the syllables together into words.  The next thing you know you're actually reading Hebrew.  I even recognized some of the very few Hebrew words I know (such as the prayer over wine!).

The instructor (the Rebbetzin of the synagogue) warned us that Hebrew as taught in the course is very formal and somewhat archaic, and also that the extremely helpful vowels which are used throughout are not usually found in everyday Hebrew writing.  But I figure I'm off to a great start.

The class is offered through the National Jewish Outreach Program, which also has a Hebrew Reading Crash Course II.  Everyone in the class told the Rebbetzin that we'd love to take the second course.  And there's even a Hebrew Writing Crash Course!

Of course, everything in the textbook is printed Hebrew.  At some point I know I'll have to learn to read handwriting, and eventually I hope to learn to read Yiddish also (which uses the same alphabet but is definitely not the same language, the same way that English and French use the same alphabet).  One step at a time . . . .

"Roots: Our Journeys Home" - Anthony Bourdain

So CNN decided to jump into the genealogy program pond also.  It began a theme week of programs featuring family history journeys, Roots:  Our Journeys Home, on October 12 with Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown.  The idea is that hosts of several of their regular programs will take some kind of genealogical journey and learn about their roots.  Instead of creating a stand-alone program, the family history apparently will be integrated into the existing programs.

If the genealogical search in Parts Unknown is comparable to what will happen in the other programs, I'd say there's not much worth watching.  The promo material from the CNN Web site said that we would see an "investigation into the puzzling history of the Bourdain’s great, great, great, grandfather, Paraguayan émigré Jean Bourdain" (let's ignore the poor editing, shall we?).  Unfortunately, the amount of time devoted to Bourdain's family history was less than ten minutes (and possibly as low as five minutes) of the one-hour episode.

Bourdain already knew that his great-great-great-grandfather, Jean Bourdain, had immigrated to South America from France sometime during the 1850's and had disappeared by the 1880's.  Jean went to Argentina first and then to Paraguay, and after that the family didn't know what had happened to him or when or how he died.  Bourdain said he really wanted to know how his third-great-grandfather had died and where he was buried.

We learned quite a bit about the history and food of Paraguay, which is what the program normally is about anyway.  (Because I'm a language geek, one of the most interesting factoids for me was that Paraguay is the only country in South America to have an indigenous language as an official language.)  But what did we learn about Jean Bourdain?

There was a French colony in the Paraguayan jungle called Nouveau Bordeaux (actually Nouvelle Bourdeaux).  Bourdain and a guide visited what is left of the colony, but they didn't actually say there was evidence that Jean Bourdain went there.  It seemed that only three documents were found that mentioned Jean Bourdain:

• something that appeared to be a letter that said Jean's son, also named Jean, had gone to Montevideo, Uruguay in 1860 to work with his uncle in the hat business
• information from somewhere that said Jean the elder had come with 200 boxes of "fireworks" (which generated a discussion of whether they really were fireworks, which the locals couldn't have afforded, or if the word was a euphemism for weapons and Jean was actually a gun-runner of some sort)
• an 1858 death record for Jean the elder that did not give a cause of death

The researchers were able to determine in which cemetery Jean was interred but could not find his grave.  Bourdain walked around the Recoleta Cemetery in Asunción, found nothing, and looked disappointed.  The researcher told Bourdain that it was likely that something else had been built over whatever grave Jean Bourdain had.

And that was it.  Not a very impressive beginning, in my opinion.  And I'm left wondering why the family didn't know when Jean the elder had died, since Jean the younger didn't leave the area until two years later.

I'll still try to watch some of the programs scheduled for later in the week.  I am pretty sure I'll miss every episode of New Day; 6:00 a.m. makes it way too early for me, whether it's Eastern or Pacific Time.  It's a shame, because Chris Cuomo's story sounds interesting, and I'm wondering if the Spinozas from whom John Berman descended were Sephardic Jews.  But I've already put the programs that air later in the day on my schedule.  I am particularly looking forward to the journeys of Wolf Blitzer and Sanjay Gupta.  And maybe I can catch the others later On Demand.

When Names and Languages Collide

1803 obituary of Justus Fox

When doing family history research, I often caution people not to worry about spelling.  Until well into the 20th century, most people were either poorly educated or functionally illiterate.  Spelling was done phonetically, and a person's name could be spelled multiple ways within one document.  In the United States, one of the things that helped codify spelling was passage of the Social Security Act.  Suddenly you had to prove you were a specific person, the same person every time.  Consistent spelling made that a lot easier.

But what if the problem isn't spelling, but pronunciation?  I traced one of my family lines back to a man named Justus Fox in Philadelphia.  He was born in one of the German states and immigrated to the British colonies in North America around 1750.  The family name was formerly Fuchs and was Anglicized to Fox.

When I began to find information about Justus Fox, my mind automatically pronounced his name as "justice."  My first language is American English, and it came naturally.  But then I started thinking about it.  "Justice" (which I have seen spelled as Justus) is seen as a given name in today's society, but it didn't make sense for a German-born man in the mid-18th century.  And then I started to think about German pronunciation.  The letter J does not sound the same as in English.  It has a Y sound; for example, the German word for yes, ja, is pronounced "ya" in English.  When I applied that logic to my ancestor's name, I got "yustus" and was easily able to figure out that Justus is the German equivalent of the name Eustace.  I also found there have been many well known men named Justus.

Another instance of pronunciation affecting research was when I was working on my half-sister's family.  Her mother's ancestry was all Irish all day long, both sides.  My sister's grandmother had done some work, which my sister gave me as a starting point.  Her grandmother didn't have many documents but had written down what information she knew about births, marriages, deaths, and family stories.  One story her grandmother wrote about was a portrait of her mother that had been painted by a Mr. O'Kane.  I thought it was interesting but, beyond wondering whether the portrait was still in the family somewhere, it didn't seem like anything that would help with my research.

I started looking for the family in censuses and found several I was sure were the correct people.  But I found one I wasn't sure about.  The husband was gone, which was plausible.  The mother, listed as a widow, looked right, and one person listed as her child seemed to be correct, but another person that should have been a child was listed last in the household as a boarder.  But all of the names were common Irish ones, and I didn't see enough for me to make a determination.  So I saved that census and looked for other documents.

One day I pulled out the census page again and tried to figure out if there were other clues I could use to decide if it was the right family.  This time I looked at all of the boarders listed in the household.  The name Okane caught my eye, and I remembered the story about the portrait.  When I read the rest of the line, I discovered the individual was a boarder, Japanese — and a painter.  My sister's grandmother probably interpreted the name Okane in the context of her Irish background and thought it was Irish, with an O'.  But now I'm pretty sure that I found the right family.

Do you have any interesting or entertaining pronunciation stories from your research?  Or am I the only geek who thinks this way?

IAJGS Conference - Days 4 and 5

Wednesday afternoon at the conference I finally hit the wall.  I was headed to my fifth session of the day and suddenly my brain turned to mush.  (Well, it had been three and a half days of nonstop lectures.)  I had trouble figuring out which talk I wanted to go to, then couldn't find the room, and when I looked at the handout the words were like little black bugs walking around on the page.  I decided maybe it was time for a break, so I spent the rest of the day in the computer resource room, searching in databases I don't normally have access to.  But before I fried my brain I did attend a couple of good presentations.

Avrohom Krauss taught a class on how landsmanshaftn records can add great background information about your family members.  Landsmanshaftn were societies that Jewish immigrants started when they immigrated.  A society was usually built around everyone being from the same town or area (a landsman is a person from the same town as you).  The groups were organized to help newcomers integrate themselves into their new country while at the same time maintaining ties to the old country.  They often offered insurance to members and charitable support.  Krauss discussed the types of records created and the repositories with large collections.  If your ancestor was active in a group, you can perhaps find his (membership was mostly for men) name in the society's records, and maybe even a signature.  I have a photograph of my great-grandfather with a branch of the Workman's Circle, and now I feel inspired to look for him in their records.

Jeff Malka's session on Sephardic research was enjoyable and informative, and it didn't hurt that a lot of the resources he talked about are online, with the Dutch State Archive being particularly useful, so you can research from your chair.  One of the more interesting things he talked about was how a person might have several variations ("aliases") of his name, most of which were based on translating the name from one language to another.  So Aben Melec (Hebrew) is the same as Aben Rey (Spanish) and Aben Meleque (Arabic), and they are all based on the word maleque/meleq, which means "king" and comes from Aramaic.  Keeping track of someone's aliases and proving that they are all for the same person is an important aspect of Sephardic research.  Another tidbit was about the group of Jewish merchants who arrived at New Amsterdam from Recife.  Pieter Stuyvesant, the governor, didn't want to admit them, but he was an employee of the Dutch West India Company, and company officials said they wanted the businessmen to be allowed to settle.

1584 Map of the Azores

Thursday was a banner day -- I had "aha!" moments in three different sessions!  I guess everything started adding up from all that learnin' I've been pouring into my head all week (and taking that break Wednesday afternoon probably didn't hurt).  The first light bulb went off in another presentation on Sephardic research, this one by Schelly Dardashti.  She covered the general travel path used by many Sephardim after they left Spain and eventually worked their way to the New World, and the languages used by the Sephardic diaspora.  The Azores were one of the important stopping points for many people.  When discussing languages (which for Sephardim include Hebrew, Ladino, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Farsi, Judeo-Arabic, and a Roman dialect, among others), Schelly mentioned that names beginning or ending in "al" usually could be traced to Arabic, and these were often Sephardic converso names.  And that's when I thought of a woman I used to work with (at one point I was working on the genealogy of everyone in my office) who has a Portuguese line from the Azores by the name of Amaral.  While working on her family, I had learned that the Amarals were one of the original settling families when Portugal claimed the Azores, and that many Jews were among the settlers also.  So now I'm wondering if maybe the Amarals were originally Jewish.

The next session with a revelation was on Jewish American research before 1880, by David Kleiman.  This again was focused on Sephardic research, because probably about 90% of the Jews in the U.S. for the first 200 years were of Sephardic origin.  This time the aha was for research I had done for another woman I used to work with (yup, in the same office).  She had always been told that her ancestor was Jewish.  I had found him in a book of extracts for a county in Virginia, listed as "Daniel Joseph, Jew" (well, how much clearer can you get than that?), but hit a solid brick wall at that point.  I found someone who looked like it could (should!) be him in Rabbi Malcolm Stern's book First American Jewish Families, which had been digitized and placed online, but I couldn't prove the connection, and it's been bugging me for years.  Kleiman explained that an updated version of Rabbi Stern's family trees, with corrections, additions, and enhancements, is being built at the Americans of Jewish Descent Web site.  Between that and the other resources Kleiman discussed, I think I'm finally going to be able to connect Daniel to Israel Joseph of Charleston, South Carolina.  Then it's on to tracing their family in Europe!

The last aha was actually for my own family.  Maureen Taylor, the Photo Detective, gave a talk called "Immigrant Clues in Photographs."  She covered some of the same points that Ava Cohn had on Sunday, such as thinking about who is in a photo and who kept the photo, and some of the occasions for which people often had photos taken.  Two of the most common times were when people were getting ready to leave to immigrate, and soon after they had arrived in their new country.  And I realized that a photograph I have of my great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother with three other people (a woman and two teenage girls) had to have been taken just before my great-grandmother left Russia to come to the U.S.  Now that I have a context for the photo, I'm almost certain that the second woman in the photo is my great-great-grandmother's sister.  I still have to figure out who the other two girls are, but I'm making progress!  It is amazing how it feels when several things you've learned suddenly click together.

The rest of Taylor's presentation was very entertaining.  She showed several different photographs she has picked up over the years, with hairstyles, clothing, studio props, and other items that help determine when, where, and why a photo was taken.  One photo had two men and a woman standing kind of between and behind them, and a broom on the floor.  Taylor explained it was someone "jumping the broom", a tradition commonly associated with black Americans but which Taylor said was also a Swiss-German custom (though the Wikipedia page I've linked to mentions Gypsies but not Swiss-Germans).  And a man in the audience identified the soldier in one of the photographs she showed, which really surprised her.

The last day of the conference is tomorrow, and only a half day at that.  But I'm assisting at the 8:15 session, so I better get at least a little sleep.

Things My Mother Taught Me

Most parents teach their children; it's part of the job, after all.  But along with the things they consciously set out to teach you -- potty training, how to dress yourself, the manners you need to get along with others, responsibility, respect for others -- there are the things you learn by observing them and what they do.  Some of those lessons can be profound, while others just help make you the unique individual you are.

I learned a lot about tolerance and acceptance of others from both of my parents, but I think especially from my mother.  When I was about 5 years old, my father's ex-wife and my half-sister came to live with our family (my parents, my brother, my sister, and me).  Not exactly what most women would be willing to do!  But we all got along fine.  My mother worked a graveyard shift, so my dad's ex-wife would get us up in the mornings and ready for school, and my mother would get home in time to see us before we left.  My half-sister and I even went to the same elementary school for a while, and the administrators sometimes got the two different Mrs. Sellerses confused.  Even after they moved out to a place of their own, we visited often.

Long before multiculturalism was talked about, our family had a wide range of friends -- black, Hispanic, Indian (from India), and even gay.  We children were taught open-mindedness and acceptance, and that people are just people.  And I grew up knowing that Rock Hudson, Raymond Burr, and Montgomery Clift were gay, though I've never figured out how my mother knew.

My mother always told me I could do anything I wanted to do and be anything I wanted to be, from the time I was little.  She told me I could succeed on my own and didn't need someone to help me.  I believed her and have carved out my own unique corner of the world, first as an editor and now as a genealogist.  (When I did follow my own path as an editor, though, she couldn't understand why I didn't want to work for the CIA or the UN, and why I wasn't rushing to get married and give her a granddaughter.  So not every lesson is perfect!)

My mother loved to watch movies.  She taught me how to listen to the actors' voices and recognize them, which gives me a nice party trick today.  She explained how to watch actors who were portraying musicians and what to look for to see if they were really playing the instruments.  She also explained that it took someone who really knew what he was doing to portray a character who didn't.

My mother loved to play with words.  She taught me to do crossword puzzles, which I still enjoy.  She would flip words around, like spoonerisms, so we had chublip stamps (Blue Chip Stamps) and chotato pips (potato chips).  I still tell people to have a happy "oneth of the month" when a new month rolls around.  And she taught me an appreciation of foreign languages, which definitely influenced my choice of a major in college.

I don't think my mother met a cuisine she didn't like.  We grew up eating Chinese, Mexican, and Indian food; if Thai and Vietnamese had been available at the time, we probably would have had them also.  My mother used to call us kids the vultures -- there was never any food left on the table after a meal.

Unlike the stereotype that is prevalent even today, both of my parents enjoyed watching sports.  As soon as she walked into the house, my mother would turn on the television, often to sports.  So we watched football, baseball, basketball, golf, boxing, car racing ... if it was on television, my mother would watch it.  I find that I still tend to be a minority among most women I know because I enjoy watching sports and have a good working knowledge of most of them.

If my mother were still alive today, I like to think she'd enjoy my working as a genealogist, since she's the one who started me on that path by telling me stories about my family.  Thanks, Mommy.

Introduction

I have been doing family history research since I was 13.  My interest was sparked by what at the time was a fairly standard assignment in junior high school -- do your family tree back four generations.  I still have the purple mimeographed handout.  I even have my original notes from interviewing several family members.  That assignment got me hooked on genealogy.

Since then I've researched all branches of my family, including collateral lines (I definitely believe in whole-family research).  I've taken trips just to meet family members, including one trip to New York and New Jersey when in five days I put 700 miles on my sister's cars and drove through all five boroughs of New York City, plus the two counties on Long Island.  I used to share copies of updated research with all the relatives I was in touch with, until I had three major surgeries in less than four years.  I'm working on getting back up to speed on that.  Not only is it nice to get feedback from people about the work I'm doing, it also ensures that more than one copy is out there.

When I became interested in doing research professionally, I took the advice of several people and volunteered to do research for a few people.  I ended up working on the family history of everyone in my office, my half-sister, my aunt, and several friends.  Oh, yeah, I was hooked!

My professional experience turned out to be a good background for going into this work.  I've worked as an editor for more than 20 years, and I'm also an indexer and translator.  My college degree was in foreign languages (French major, Spanish and Russian minors).  I've done research of various kinds for many years, and I always want to find the answer to a puzzle.

I hung out my shingle in 2005.  My very first ad led to a client, who stayed with me until health problems changed his priorities last year.  Through all of this I now have experience with general American, black American, English, German, Greek, East Indian, Irish, Jewish, Portuguese, Russian, and Scottish ethnic research.  My specialty is Jewish research.

I do a fair amount of volunteer work.  I've been on the staff of the Oakland Regional Family History Center for more than ten years.  I'm the publicity director, programming person, and newsletter editor for the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society and the editor of The Galitzianer, a quarterly journal for Jewish genealogical research in the former Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia.  I have been the treasurer of the California State Genealogical Alliance and the representative of the Northern California chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists.  I've worked on several transcription projects, several of which were posted on RootsWeb.

In my blog I plan to talk about projects I'm working on, information I find that I think other people will find useful, and different directions research can take you.  I hope you enjoy my take on things!