Genealogy Translation & Paleography

Most pre-1900 records weren't in modern English (or modern anything). German Sütterlin, English secretary hand, Polish parish-Latin, Russian Cyrillic, Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic — every European archive is a paleography puzzle. The 2024–2026 AI wave (vision LLMs + Transkribus) made this dramatically more accessible. Pair with Genealogy Document Scanning & HTR for the OCR step, Genealogy AI Tools for the LLM step, and Genealogy Calendar Conversion for date reading.

Free paleography tutorials

• ★ ★ BYU Script Tutorial — free; Brigham Young University's interactive tutorials for English secretary hand, German Kurrent / Sütterlin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Latin scripts. Practice exercises with answer keys. The single most-recommended free paleography resource in genealogy.
  • https://script.byu.edu/
• ★ FamilySearch Wiki Paleography pages — free; per-language guides.
• The National Archives (UK) Palaeography Tutorial — free; English secretary hand 1500–1800.
• Scottish Handwriting (NRS) — free; Scottish handwriting tutorials.
• English Handwriting 1500–1700 (Cambridge) — free.
• Suetterlinschrift (German tutorials) — free; multiple academic + community sites.
• Polish Genealogy Society translation guides — free.
• Russian / Cyrillic paleography (Slavic Reference Library) — free.
• Genealogy Translation Free Genealogy community / WikiGenealogy — free; volunteer guides.

Hand-specific reference

• English secretary hand — 1500–1700 court / parish records; cursive, looped letters, non-modern letterforms. BYU tutorial.
• English court hand — pre-1500 legal documents; specialist skill.
• German Kurrent — 19th-c. handwriting until ~1941. Hard for English readers.
• Sütterlin — 1911–1941 simplified Kurrent variant; taught in German schools that period.
• Latin parish records — Catholic, in Latin until Vatican II (1962). Stock vocabulary: baptizatus, sponsi, parentes, defunctus.
• Polish parish-Latin / parish-Polish — pre-1868 mostly Latin; 1868–1918 Russian-mandated Cyrillic in Russian-Poland; back to Polish post-WWI.
• Russian Cyrillic — 19th-c. Russian Empire records; pre-1918 orthography (with hard signs / yat letter).
• Hebrew + Aramaic — Jewish religious records, ketubahs, gravestones.
• Yiddish — Hebrew script with German-origin language; common in Eastern European Jewish records.
• Arabic + Ottoman Turkish — Middle East / Balkan / North Africa records.

Hosted machine translation

• ★ ★ DeepL — paid + generous free tier (500K chars/mo). Best machine translation for European languages; better than Google Translate for German / French / Polish / Russian / Italian. Browser extension + API.
• ★ Google Translate — free; the universal coverage; weaker on idiomatic + old-language than DeepL.
• Microsoft Translator — free + paid; competitive.
• Yandex Translate — free; strong on Russian / Eastern European.
• Naver Papago — free; strong on Korean / Japanese.
• Baidu Translate — free; Chinese-focused.

LLM translation (the 2024–2026 game-changer)

• ★ Claude / GPT-4o/5 / Gemini 2.5 — paid + free tiers. Better than DeepL on: old-script handwriting, archaic vocabulary, abbreviated genealogy idioms, code-switching (Polish-Latin in same record). Worse on: consistent professional translation of long literary text. Use vision modes for direct image-to-translation.
• Local LLMs — see Self-Hosted AI / LLM; Qwen / Llama for offline translation. Quality below frontier.

Specialty / paid translation services

• Translate Live (Czech / Slovak) — paid; specialist.
• Vital Records Translation — paid; commercial genealogy translators by language.
• APG (Association of Professional Genealogists) translator directory — paid hourly; vetted professionals.
• JewishGen ViewMate — free; volunteer translation help; post your image, hope a community member translates. Excellent for Eastern European Jewish records.
• r/translator on Reddit — free; volunteer; surprisingly good for short documents.
• Academic Slavic / Germanic / Iberian / Sinology departments — sometimes accept genealogy-translation requests as student exercises.

Reference resources

• Latin Genealogical Word List (FamilySearch) — free; common parish-Latin vocabulary.
• German Genealogical Word List — free.
• Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish word lists — all free at FamilySearch Wiki.
• JewishGen InfoFiles — free; word lists for Yiddish / Hebrew + Eastern European languages.
• Latin Place Names Dictionary — locating "Posen / Posnaniensis / Poznań."
• The German Letter Dictionary (German abbreviations + given-name Latin equivalents) — Joannes = Johann, Gulielmus = Wilhelm.
• ScriptSource — free; reference for non-Latin scripts globally.

Workflow patterns

1. Scan well + crop — see Genealogy Document Scanning & HTR.
2. HTR pass — Transkribus (best) or eScriptorium for hard hands.
3. LLM cleanup + translation — paste HTR output to Claude / GPT-4o; ask for translation + identification of names + places.
4. Verify against word lists — confirm key names, dates, relationships.
5. Cite the original — always cite the manuscript source, not the AI translation.
6. Volunteer translation for impossible cases — JewishGen ViewMate, r/translator, professional service.

Calendar + date subtleties

• See Genealogy Calendar Conversion. Old records use feast-day + Latin date formats: die septima mensis Junii Anno Domini millesimo octingentesimo trigesimo = 7 June 1830.

What's changing in 2024–2026

• Vision LLMs reading old scripts — Claude / GPT-4o / Gemini surprisingly good on legible 18th–19th c. hands; weaker on Sütterlin + secretary hand. Used as first pass + Transkribus for hard cases.
• Transkribus public models for major European archive scripts.
• DeepL model upgrades continue lifting quality.
• Local LLM viability — Qwen2.5-VL handles many old scripts on a single GPU.
• AI-paleography workflows are the biggest 2024–2026 shift in genealogy after FamilySearch Full-Text Search.

Pick this if…

• Learning paleography from scratch: BYU Script Tutorial.
• Best machine translation, Europe: DeepL.
• Reading an old handwritten record: Transkribus + Claude / GPT-4o follow-up.
• Word lookup in old Latin / German / Polish: FamilySearch Wiki word lists.
• Free volunteer help on a tough document (Jewish records): JewishGen ViewMate.
• Free volunteer help on a short clip (any language): r/translator on Reddit.
• Professional service for irreplaceable document: APG translator directory.
• Fully offline / private: local Qwen2.5-VL via Ollama.