[APG Public List] Latin dictionaries

[Stephen Danko]

I have not yet found the ideal dictionary to help with translation of documents 
of genealogical value written in Latin.  Even the very expensive Oxford Latin 
Dictionary has many shortcomings when it comes to translating genealogical 
documents.

You might try C. Russell Jensen's book "Parish Register Latin: An 
Introduction".  It is available for free in several formats online at 
http://www.archive.org/details/parishregisterla00crus

You can read it online or download the B/W PDF.  I have heard that full text 
version is a copy of the book that was scanned and converted to text by optical 
character recognition (OCR).  The full text version is full of errors due to a 
poor job of OCR, so don't use the full text version.  I use the B/W PDF version 
myself, but there are other versions (Kindle and DjVu, among others).  The 
book is actually a textbook of Latin for genealogists, but it includes a great 
Latin-English dictionary for genealogists at the end of the book.  In all, the 
book is 427 pages long, so you may not want to print the whole thing 
out.  Instead, you might just want to print out the dictionary from pages 
362-414.

Kind regards,
Stephen J. Danko
http://www.stephendanko.com/



________________________________
From: Janey Joyce <jejoyce at sbcglobal.net>
To: apgpubliclist at apgen.org
Sent: Mon, October 25, 2010 11:25:31 PM
Subject: [APG Public List] Latin dictionaries

I am beginning to try to translate some Catholic Church records written in Latin 

and wonder if some of you have some advice for me. 


Can you recommend a dictionary that isn't priced in the hundreds of dollars 
range? Have you found a particularly helpful online Latin dictionary?

Some of these documents were written in the 1600s and come from Italian 
churches. Some were written in the late 1800s and come from American churches. 
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