Genealogy research involves looking at very old records, documents, and letters. Some of these important pieces of paper will include words or phrases that you have never heard of before. What on earth could that possibly mean? Deciphering it can reveal pieces of information that you will need in order to continue your genealogy research. Fortunately, there are several genealogy related dictionaries that can help you discover what those confusing terms and perplexing words actually mean.
It is not unusual for your genealogy research to bring you some unexpected mysteries to solve. You may be looking forward to filling in some missing branches of your family tree. It can be interesting to find the grave of an ancestor, and see who he or she was buried next to. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you can find personal stories of an ancestor’s life from old letters or perhaps a journal. All of these types of mysteries are exciting to solve, and may be the exact thing that inspired you to start researching your family in the first place.
On the other hand, it can be frustrating to come across an archaic term on a document that you must find a way to decipher before you can continue your research. When this happens, you are going to need to make use of a good dictionary, or perhaps, several of them. Fortunately, many can be found online, and used for free.
One good place to start is with Olive Tree Genealogy. Their genealogy dictionary includes terms for specific areas of interest: Huguenots and Walloons, Loyalist, Mennonite, Mohawk, New Netherland, Palatine, and “Miscellaneous”. What’s in the miscellaneous section? It has the word Moravian, which I did not recognize. A Moravian is a Protestant group formed in Bohemia in 1415, which spread to England, Germany, Poland, and Prussia.
Genealogy.com also has a genealogy dictionary. Each word in their dictionary is linked to a new page that contains the definition of the word you are looking up. From here, I learned that a quitclaim deed is a legal document someone uses to give up their rights to a particular piece of land, without guaranteeing the title of the land. It has an excellent explanation of what the word “Soundex” means. You may have come across that word when using other genealogy search engines. In short, it is a way of grouping together surnames that sound phonetically similar. I learned that holographic wills exist. They are also called olographic wills, and are handwritten and signed by the person whom the will belongs to.
Rootsweb has a Dictionary of Genealogy and Archaic Terms. It has not been updated since 2007, but the information you can find there should still be valid. I learned that sororate means “the marriage of one man to two or more sisters, usually successively, and after the first wife has been found to be barren or after her death”.
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