Birth records provide a wealth of information, depending on the writer and the time period of course. The records from the Napoleonic Era in Italy, online from 1806-1815, start out with a shout out to Emperor Frances II of Austria. We are definitely Northern Italians.
The records vary depending on who is writing them. A standardized 'fill in the blank' form was not utilized until 1875. With those later records you were sure to get the parents names, ages and their fathers - at least the father's father. And the address. With most families staying in the same house after marriage, it makes it easy to figure out close relatives.
In the early 1800's it is a crapshoot. Sometimes the father of the father is mentioned, more often not. Never do you see the name of the mother's father. Maybe a street number, maybe not.
What is interesting is that if the baby was delivered by a midwife, you get her name, her husband's name her age and the address. I mean, who cares where the parents live. And then there are the witnesses. You get their name, age, profession and address. Somehow they become more important than the information on the parents.
One of the more interesting things I have found is the number of illegitimate births. Many of these are recorded with just the father's name. Then later, if the parents marry, the birth is recorded with a mention of the marriage and the legitimization of the birth.
One of my cousins living in London, England has yet to discover who his great-grandfather is. He knows the mother (that's how we are related) who left the baby in a nunnery to be raised, but we do not have any idea who the father was. Obviously not the man she eventually married.
Then there are records that make you shake your head. A couple of fathers got a little confused - too many cigars and vino?- and when asked to give the name of the mother they gave their own mother's name. And one child got recorded as a female birth, then fourteen years later, there is a record indicating that the sex was wrong on the original document. I kept wondering if it actually took that long to figure it out.
The actual Polish records do not exist online. For the former Russian area, the Polish Genealogical Society is slowing putting info online. I have been able to find some records there, but it is very haphazard. For the Austrian ruled area, a woman from Texas has photocopied all the documents from the churches and put them in spreadsheets. They are on a website called semanchuk.com It was while searching for ancestors on this site that I discovered that the 'different sect', i.e. Greek Catholics, it what my mother used to refer to.
And I must give a thank you to Google translate. If it wasn't for them, I could not decipher these records.
Record from 1812:
Impressed by the resources you have discovered. I wonder what is available for my father's family, as my grandfather came from Lithuania when it was part of Russia about 1913. My mother's family came from Austria in the 1890s.
ReplyDeleteJason,
DeleteGo to FamilySearch.org. It is free to set up an account. Then you can search to see what records are available online. I was lucky in that the Italian records I needed were there for 1871-1910. I got a lot of info on Ancestry once I started my tree. Good luck searching.
Excellent, Denise. I’ve got paper records from my husband’s aunt in Austria. Fortunately, he was able to translate!
ReplyDeleteKnowing another language comes in handy. I've forgotten nearly all of my Latin and French. On the prior post someone from Argentina left me a message and I was right there in Google translate. I know zero Spanish other than peso.
DeleteEarly birth records seemingly provided very limited information back then, and what there was was sometimes incorrect. The nearest to that in my experience is my Father's birth Certificate on which his name was mispelt - Denis instead of Dennis. It was passed on to me - Denis is my middle name!
ReplyDeleteSpelling of names will be my letter 'S'.
DeleteI loved the stories you have uncovered (particularly the people who mistakenly thought they were being asked for their own mothers' names instead of the baby's mother's name.... Recently I came across an amended certificate in 1962 in Dallas County, Tx. for a 1903 birth of a a baby boy. The person who in '62 sought the amending was the man's sister, so it can be presumed that the man had died, possibly just before then. It was an in-home birth, with all info typed from hand written notes by the doctor on scene. Naturally, there were transcription errors made back in 1903, which is why the amending was sought. A few spellings were corrected, and one more little detail. The baby was listed as a female, and this had not been discovered for 59 years. So the state of Texas granted this man -- I guess you could say -- gender confirmation, though on paper, rather than surgically.
ReplyDeleteMy sister and I are still wondering what happened that made them go back and correct the certificate I found. At the age of fourteen, he would not be marrying, or entering an army, so why? And we are pretty sure that in the late 1800's it wasn't surgery.
DeleteVery cool to read about the names or lack of names and the screw ups. I found that quite funny to be honest.
ReplyDelete