Another week and more translations done. :-)
I finished up the translations of my Lisowski family and have started on my Mizera family. I identified 8 villages/towns to translate the Słownik entries for and attempted 3 of the smaller ones.
The Lisowski village entries were from the Russian partition and if I thought those were a challenge (they were!) they were nothing compared to the Mizera village entries from the Austrian partition. I've not been able to make a complete translation of any of the Mizera villages so far. There are many, many terms that aren't listed on any of the keys/guides I'm using and Google Translate can't deal with them either. Sometimes I can make a guess by the context and content of other words but too often I'm just coming up blank. :-( I'm going to continue to do what I can but I may have to consider asking someone who knows the language to help me out. They're not much good to me if I can only translate every other word, lol!
I made an interesting discovery in the few Mizera village translations I worked on. These villages are each between 1-2 miles apart. The other villages in the area seem to be similar distances apart. That's much closer proximity than I thought. What does that mean in terms of my research? I probably should be looking at villages further out for the individual records I'm missing, because "further out" still isn't all that far away.
I did a quick "drive-by" of some of the villages using Google Street View. What a thrill that was! I love technology. Now if I could just figure out how the old house numbers relate to the current street addresses I could visit some of the old family farms. How cool would that be???!!!
I intend to check out the films available at my local Family History Center to see if there are any on indefinite loan that might include those "further out" villages. I've checked online but no luck there. I think once I finish the Mizera village translations I may take a break and move on to another tedious but necessary project... scanning.
My goal for the next week is to attempt to complete translating the Mizera village entries.
