Sunday, January 17, 2016

Translating, Research, and Webinar

Sometimes you just have to throw the plans out the window and punt. That's what I had to do this past week. I'd scheduled myself a good amount of time for genealogy, time I'd planned to use translating 5 Słownik Geograficzny entries for my Lisowski family villages. But, I was feeling under the weather most of the week and wasn't able to put in as much time as I would have liked. I did manage to get 3 of the 5 translations done, including one large one, so all was not lost. I'm content with that.

I was also able to put in about an hour of time at a local library using their Ancestry access to do some research on my mother's best girlfriend's family (Wojciechowski/Lezczynski). Her family doesn't connect to my family in any way I'm aware of but I'm curious about her Polish roots just the same.

And I attended (online) Lisa Alzo's webinar, Clutter Buster Bootcamp, yesterday. Like a lot of folks, I have lots of un-filed, un-organized, un-inventoried genealogy "stuff" that needs to be dealt with. Some of it is digital on hard drives, some of it is paper and heirlooms. It's a lot of stuff and I've been procrastinating about getting started with it because of the enormity of the project. Thanks to the webinar I was reminded about the benefits of breaking big projects down into smaller "mini" and even "micro" projects. Maybe with a little planning I can make some real progress this year. I was hoping to hear about some new software or app that would help me with any aspects of the project but I didn't hear about anything I wasn't already aware of. Oh well. It was still a worthwhile presentation. 

My goal this week is to finish the last 2 SG entries, one of which is very large, multiple pages. We'll see how far I get with that. The challenge is that the SG uses lots of abbreviations that Google Translate won't translate, and because I don't speak/read Polish I don't know what words they are abbreviations for. There are multiple guides on the net that you can use to translate the most commonly used abbreviations. That's not what trips me up. It's the uncommon abbreviations that stump me. Onward!