I've wracked my brains about this particular prompt for the better part of a week and have come to the conclusion that this will just be a post written for the sake of maintaining my blogging streak. 😂
I have both Swedish and Italian ancestry, and I will say this concerning translation. The internet is a Godsend. There are so many tools now available to help you translate that pesky marriage document or will. If you have no other refuge, Google Translate will at least give you a passable idea of what you are reading (provided you can properly transcribe the writing - that's a whole other issue). If you regularly use Facebook, there are some fantastic genealogy groups out there that are eager to assist you with your genealogical woes. My current favorite is the Swedish American Genealogy group. I firmly believe that if you give them enough information, they can find anything you happen to be looking for (in Swedish, of course), and then they will happily translate the information for you.
Transcription - translation's kissing cousin, if you will - is often a tougher nut to crack. Even records that are in English can be unintelligible if the person recording them writes in any teacher's least favorite style - chicken scratch. One family record, in particular, comes to mind...
You might remember Nettie Pearson of the thousand-and-one marriages. Her last (I think) marriage was to a man by the last name of Johnson. What his first name was is anyone's guess. Here are Nettie and Mr. Johnson as recorded in the 1940 census.
The name has been transcribed as Nera Johnson, but there is no Johnson by that name anywhere in the area in the years preceding this census, nor are there any after. The only thing I am certain of is that his name is not Nera...but I have no idea what it is. If anyone reading this has any suggestions/interpretations/transcriptions, I would be happy to entertain them. In the meantime, Mr. Johnson of the Berrien County, Michigan, 1940 census will be...lost in translation. 😉
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