Here's to Hrvatski! Google Translate now does Croatian

Good news for people like me struggling to read materials in the language of their ancestors:

Google Translate has just added ten new languages to their "repertoire", including Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.

Croatian is the one that I am personally most excited about. I keep finding good resources in Croatian, but translating them word for word is slow going for me at this point. I'm looking forward to seeing how well I can read the Google Translate English versions of some of my selected Hrvatski reading material.

You might also notice that I have added the Google Translate widget to the sidebar of 100 Years in America for those you interested in keeping up with this blog in another language. Happy reading, no matter what language you choose!

Thanks to Ivan Curkovic at Curkovic.ca for spreading the good news about Google Translate's additions.

News about the Croatian Archives online

I was interested to read Ivan Curkovic's May 22 update on the ARHiNET project to digitize and place online records from the Croatian State Archives (with help from the Republic of Croatia Ministry of Culture).

Ivan has very graciously summarized (in English!) the Croatian update on ARHiNET that he read on the Republic of Croatia Ministry of Culture's website. Visit his summary on Curkovic.ca to learn more about this up and coming resource for Croatian genealogists. It looks like Microsoft and Silverlight have been enlisted to assist the project. The scope of the project is huge: it may potentially involve the digitization of 23 kilometers of archival material in the Croatian national archives and an additional 90 kilometers of documents currently located across Croatia, some dating back to the fifth century. At this point, ARHiNET contains about 400,000 sets of records.

Exciting news for those of us interested in our Croatian roots and the history of the people of Croatia!

The Irish of Central Europe?

Andrew Simon in his 1998 publication Made in Hungary: Hungarian Contributions to Universal Culture, provides an interesting descriptive stereotype of the Hungarian people:

"The Hungarian character, if one may allow such generalizations, may be described by such manifestations as acute individualism, pervasive sense of humor, a tendency to showmanship and passionate hospitality....

"The definition of a Hungarian, to quote one of their world renowned savants, is 'the person who gets into the revolving door behind you and gets out ahead of you.' Their history, punctuated by foreign invasions, sharpened their survival skills. Connoisseurs of wine, women and song, they have been called 'the Irish of Central Europe'."

Maybe that explains how the Hungarian and Irish branches of my family became connected. No wonder they were drawn to eachother!

As simplified as these stereotypical descriptions seem, I can certainly see some truth to them. My grandfather in particular certainly had the talent to pull a trick such as the revolving door exit mentioned above and he certainly exhibited a "pervasive sense of humor".

For more on Hungarians and their contribution to the world via invention, musical composition, etc. you might enjoy reading Simon's complete article on the Corvinus Library Hungarian History website.

125 years old and still standing tall

By the time my ancestors arrived in Manhattan in the early 20th-century, it had already been in use for over twenty years. The Brooklyn Bridge had connected the boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan in 1883 and had become a landmark in the process - an American icon. It was dubbed the "eighth wonder of the world" because of its incredible length and stately towers.

I enjoyed the birthday celebration for the Brooklyn Bridge over at The Virtual Dime Museum and thought you might also. Happy reading and Happy Birthday Brooklyn Bridge!

Vintage postcard of the Brooklyn Bridge courtesy of

Penny Postcards from New York.

See the History Channel's This Day in History for more on the story of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Preserving family history in its infancy

As you know if you've been reading 100 Years in America, I have been blessed with family members (one who deserves particular recognition) who have saved photographs of several generations of my family for many years and kindly shared them with myself and others. (A great big thank-you to all of the family photo pack rats out there!)

I've enjoyed viewing these old photos and getting a visual glimpse into the lives of my ancestors. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Throughout the process of viewing and scanning the older family photos that I have, I have been naggingly aware of the boxes of more recent photographs that I have left shoe-boxed and unlabeled (pre-digital photography in my family). Now, thanks to an offer from Scan My Photos International and Apple's experience with it (thanks for sharing, Apple), I've been inspired to delve into more recent photographic family history and pull out those shoeboxes. What fun it has been to go through these photos. Most are only a decade old, but how time has flown!

In order to pull out 1,000 4x6 photos to send for scanning, I've been going through picture after picture and enjoying the process. Unfortunately, I made it to 1,000 with photos representing only less than two years photographically-speaking. Looks like I'll be a regular customer if I like the service that I receive from Scan My Photos...

If you haven't gone through your own family photos recently, I strongly encourage you to do so. As family historians we work so hard to preserve the history of bygone generations. Let's not forget the more recent history of our families. It may be still in its infancy, but as parents know, babies grow up all too quickly!

Anyone else have experience with this company and this process? If you are a Blogger, Flickr, Facebook or MySpace user, you can also take advantage of this free scanning offer (shipping charges do apply). If not, check out the services of Scan My Photos. It's never too early to start preserving family history!

On libraries: "the narrower path"

I've been on a tour lately. Not as a tour guide, or a tourist, but more the driver and traveling companion. My daughter has dedicated much time and effort this school year to a project for National History Day. In a quest for primary and secondary sources to illuminate her topic, she and I have traveled from library to library and archive to archive. It has been a fascinating journey. Watching her project take her from an initial interest in the topic, to a quest for deeper knowledge, to a well-rounded understanding of her chosen period in history has been extremely rewarding.

Some of the best memories that I cherish from this year are moments when I was sitting nearby in a library and she pulled out a dusty old book or an archived letter that had just the information that she was looking for - a treasure!

Having helped guide her to sources using the internet and then visiting so many different libraries and archives with her this year, I have a renewed appreciation for the vast repositories of knowledge cared for by librarians and archivists throughout the world.

After recently being introduced to Bookeye for the first time, it was with interest that I read Anthony Grafton's November 2007 article on The New Yorker website entitled Future Reading: Digitization and its discontents. As Grafton states:

The computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press...

He goes on to give a brief history of the written word, concluding with the relatively recent efforts to microfilm the world's written materials, and current attempts to digitize them and provide access to them via the internet. Grafton discusses the goals and status of Google Book Search and Google Library Project and similar projects by Microsoft and Amazon, including a look at copyright issues. Grafton makes the point that digitization of the world's books is focusing on materials from western nations, leaving the poorest societies to remain poor in more ways than one. As Grafton states:

Poverty, in other words, is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food.

The conclusion of his interesting article on the state of the written (and on-screen) word is that no matter the incredible changes occuring before our eyes with regard to digital access to materials, libraries are here to stay. Grafton makes the point that most researchers begin their information search on the internet, and that "no one should avoid the broad, smooth, and open road that leads through the screen." However, he concludes that "the narrow path still leads...to the knowledge embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books."

I whole-heartedly agree. I have found this to be true in my own research and this year I enjoyed watching my daughter's appreciation for learning unfold further through the discovery of treasures in the libraries and archives that she was privileged to visit. We both know the value of the internet and its many digitized sources, but will always remember those special moments in libraries and archives where written treasures awaited us. And I can assure you, we'll both be returning for future treasure hunts for many years to come.


Image of the vintage New York Public Library postcard courtesy of USGenWeb's Penny Postcards website.

Thanks to Cynthia Chaldekas of the New York Public Library blog for suggesting Anthony Grafton's article.

"Thou art thy mother's glass..."

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.

~William Shakespeare, from Sonnet 3

On this Mother's Day, my thoughts dwell on all the generations of mothers in my family. Some I've known in my lifetime. Yet, there are some whose names I've only recently had the privilege of learning. The inspiration of all of "my mothers" has given me strength and meaning in my own role as a mother.

On this Mother's Day, my eyes fall upon the beautiful children who are the focus of my own motherhood. My prayer is that through the gift of so many loving mothers before them, they would grow into adulthood blooming with the fragrant life that God intended them to have.

Happy Mother's Day!

Remembering Mother Magdalena: 1860-1957

The Bridge
~ Dorothy Hilliard Moffatt

The way I walk I see my mother walking,
The feet secure and firm upon the ground.
The way I talk I hear my daughter talking
And hear my mother's echo in the sound.
The way she thought I find myself now thinking,
The generations linking
In a firm continuum of mind.
The bridge of immortality I'm walking,
The voice before me echoing behind.

When I first saw my great-great-grandmother Magdalena's portrait I felt as if I was looking at a face that was strangely familiar. I had known her name and felt a connection to her as I had wondered about her life and how she had raised her children in the late 19th-century in Legrad (then Hungary). Her daughter Ilona had been very close to her own daughters throughout their adulthood, yet as a tender-aged 24-year-old new mother she had left her home country and Magdalena behind. I often wondered about Magdalena's feelings about her daughter's emigration. Had she ever expected to see her again?

Though Magdalena lived to the age of 97, she never once was able to see Ilona again. Her American grandchildren never had the chance to meet her although they and even their children were well into adulthood by the time of her death.

I remember being told that at one point Ilona (now Helen in America) got impatient with her husband Frank's devotion to card-playing and threatened to "go home to her mother" if he didn't give it up. I wonder how many years had passed until Ilona had realized that she would never see her mother again. At least they were able to keep in touch through letters and pictures sent across the Atlantic.

Magdalena's other children, two daughters and a son, remained in Legrad and lived out their lives there. Her daughter Katarina married Juro Simon, her daughter Louisa married Stjepan (Istvan) Vidaković, and her son Adam married a woman named Katarina. By the beginning of the 21st-century, Magdalena and her husband Stjepan (both born in the mid-19th-century) had more than 150 descendants in Croatia and America.

Magdalena passed away in 1957 in Legrad (then Yugoslavia) at the age of 97. I treasure the photos that I have of her funeral and the family that surrounded her as they said their last goodbyes to their beloved mother, Magdalena.


I can see clear family resemblances to many of the people in this photo, but I have not yet been able to identify all of them for certain. If you recognize anyone in the picture, please leave a comment or send an email.

For more poetry by Dorothy Hilliard Moffatt, see Time for Remembrance: Poems and Too Many Apples.

For more photographs that embody a mother's love, visit footnoteMaven's 1st edition of I Smile for the Camera.