Send a Letter, Make Cousin Connections
When was the last time you sent a letter or email to someone you didn’t know? Gail did, and you will be touched and inspired by her sweet story of finding a long lost cousin in Italy. Sometimes, all it takes is sending a letter to make a monumental cousin...PERSI for Genealogy and More Updated Genealogical Records for a New Year!
With an update to PERSI for genealogy, Pennsylvania birth and death records, and a tidbit or two from the United Kingdom and Scotland, you will start this year off right! It’s a new year and we are ringing in some great new and updated genealogical record collections.
PERSI for Genealogy
A monthly PERSI update has been added at Findmypast. With over 67,000 new articles and five new titles, the Periodical Source Index is the go-to source for those looking for stories of their ancestors. The new titles cover the American Historical Society, Chicago, Maryland, and British family histories & heraldry and will allow you to discover articles, photos, and other material you might not find using traditional search methods.
To fully appreciate PERSI as a genealogical tool, read our previous blog post “PERSI for Genealogy: the Periodical Source Index.” And you’ll find more related articles at the bottom of this article.
Pennsylvania – Birth and Death Records
This week, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania released the 1911 births (105 years old) and 1966 death records (50 years old) to the public. This makes birth records publicly accessible from 1906 through 1911, and deaths 1906 through 1966. This collection index is free through the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission portal.
Ancestry.com offers these records in digital form as well, but there is a subscription cost to use Ancestry. However, Pennsylvania residents can access these records free of charge through Ancestry.com Pennsylvania.
To access the index only, start with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission page on Vital Statistics for links to the indexes. You need to know the year of the event and the surname. If you do not know the year, you can search several years, one by one. These indexes are not digitized but are PDF files of the ones the State uses. If you locate a state file number for a certificate, you can order it from the State Archives.
However, if you are a Pennsylvania resident, you will be able to access the certificates digitally using the link to Ancestry.com Pennsylvania as mentioned above.
United Kingdom – Huntingdonshire – Marriages
New at Findmypast this week, the Huntingdonshire Marriages 1754-1837 collection contains over 1,000 names taken from 26 volumes of marriage records from the Huntingdonshire district of Cambridgeshire. These records will allow you to discover when and where your ancestor was married.
Scotland – Roxburghshire – Patient Registers
Also at Findmypast, explore the Roxburghshire, Kelso Dispensary Patient Registers 1777-1781. These registers contain over 1,700 names that list the date and outcome of patients’ treatment (such as cured, relieved of symptoms, or died). This may be particularly helpful for those unable to find a death date.
It should be noted that these are transcriptions only and you will not be able to see a digital image of the original.
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Language Translation Tool for Genealogy: MyHeritage’s New Global Name Translation
At some point in the past, many of our relatives–overseas or in the same land–spoke a different language. They used different versions of names we know. Records about their lives were created in a language we don’t know, whether their home tongue or the language of an institution, like church records in Latin.
Well, MyHeritage has just launched a groundbreaking new technology today that aims to remove language barriers in family history research. “Global Name Translation™ helps overcome the Tower of Babel syndrome,” says Gilad Japhet, Founder and CEO of MyHeritage. “The world is getting smaller and more connected, yet information from other countries is still mostly hidden from those who don’t speak the language.
Now you can now search for historical records at MyHeritage “in one language and receive relevant results from other languages, automatically translated for you into the language of your search,” explains Japhet. 
For example? “A search for Alessandro (Alexander in Italian) will also find ‘Саша’ (which is the Russian form of Sasha, a popular nickname of Alexander in Russia) with its corresponding transliteration into the language of your search.”
This technology is also integrated into MyHeritage matching technologies, so subscribers will begin receiving transliterated matches from other languages.
According to a press release, Global Name Translation™ works with “very high accuracy, generating all the plausible translations, to facilitate matches between names in different languages. In addition, a manual search in one language will also provide results in other languages, translated back to the user’s language for convenience. This is a unique innovation not offered elsewhere, useful for anyone interested in discovering their global roots.”
The first version works with several languages: English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Greek, Hebrew, Polish, Czech, Russian and Ukrainian. “The next version currently in development will add Chinese and Japanese, and additional languages will follow.”
Click here to learn more reasons we love MyHeritage, which is a sponsor of the free Genealogy Gems podcast, or click here to explore MyHeritage yourself. If you are looking for a language translation tool for genealogy outside of MyHeritage, check out the chapter on Google Translate in the fully-revised and updated second edition of The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox by Lisa Louise Cooke.