This month’s membership meeting tackled a challenge many of our members hit sooner or later: church records written in Latin. Kasia Dane, a longtime genealogical researcher who has contributed roughly half a million record entries to sites like Geneteka and FamilySearch, presented “Digging Into Church Records: What Latin Do You Really Need to Know?”
Rather than a traditional grammar lesson, Kasia’s session focused on pattern recognition — training the eye to spot recurring words, abbreviations, and phrasing rather than memorizing vocabulary from scratch. Drawing on real baptismal, marriage, and death entries from Catholic and Greek Catholic parishes, primarily in Poland, she walked through examples spanning from the late 1500s through the early 1900s, showing how record-keeping conventions shifted over time — from handwritten narrative entries to pre-printed columnar forms.
If you missed the meeting, the recording and handouts are now available exclusively for members on our Meeting Recordings & Handouts page.
Not a member yet? Join the Polish Genealogical Society of New York State to access this recording and our full library of past presentations.