Jewish Genealogy sources: Court history documentation at Zhitomir, Volyn gubernia
So, all the day today was dedicated to the translation (but mostly transliteration) from Russian language to English all our current clients’ projects. It was not so simply. All the week before we did a hard work at Zhitomir archive and today it was an opportunity to collect all the materials together and consist the reports. Hard work, but we like it. Specially because it connected to Jews and Genealogy)
In general, there are some general problems during the consisting of the reports. But taday I’ll try to tell about the most important one: Transliteration. Mostly it connected to the correct transliteration of the names. I mean Personal Names, Patronymic names and Family Names (Surnames). During the work we need to provide to our clients not only the correct spelling of the names of their ancestors, but we also want to understand that they can read it correctly and not to miss the sounds.
That is why, during the transliteration process, I try to find the best way of replacing Russian sounds to the English alphabet. The fact is that there are lots of the system. Some of them are good. Some of them are good, but some of ther really frustrate me)) But it is important. Specially at Genealogy.
So, in my work I use my own, but close to British system of transliteration (capital letter is Cyrillic and small letter is Latinic:
A = ?, ? = b, ? = v, ?= g, ? = d, ? = e, ? = yo, ? = zh, ? = z, ? = i, ? = y, ? = k, ? = l, ? = m, ? = n, ? = o, ? = p, ? = r, ?= s, ? = t, ? = u, ? = f, ? = ch, ? = ts, ? = ch (or tch), ? = sh, ? =,shch ? = no sign, ? = y, ? = no sign, ? = e, ? = yu, ? = ya
In that way, the simple (and common in our work ) phrase in Russian, which coud be found in some archive documentations related to Jewish Genealogy could be spelled like this:
Original: Мещанин города Овруча Берко Хаимович Зак
Transliteration: Meshchanin goroda Ovrucha, Berko Chaimovich Zak
Translation: The bourgeois (townsman) of Ovruch city, Berko Chaimovich Zak
About the author
Professional Jewish Genealogy researcher at Ukraine. Works together with his wife Nadia Lipes. More than 5 years of experience. Executive director, SEO and founder of www.jewua.info
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