*** A Cemetery is a Cemetery is a Cemetery

*** Genealogy Bank: Did you realize?

*** Roslyn’s 26 Ethnic Cemeteries: Ever been there?

*** Google Translate & Other Ethnic Alphabets

We were recently in Maui and on a beach-lava-rock hike, I spotted this cemetery of sorts. This sort of beach-memorial-cemetery is not a bit unusual in Hawaii. You perhaps cannot see but the crosses are festooned with shell and flower garlands and piled with rock and white coral. Sometimes they have a name/date inscribed but often not. Just a memorial. I found these most touching.

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I never missed an episode of the TV show in the 1970s, Northern Exposure, filmed mostly in Roslyn, Washington. Of course, I had to visit the town and have lunch in the Roslyn Cafe. And we had to visit the cemeteries! There are some 5000 graves spread across nineteen acres on the hillsides on the back side of town. These burial grounds are divided by heritage…Croatian, Serbian, Polish, Lithuanian, Slavonian…as well as several lodges. Back in Roslyn’s coal mining heyday when coal was king, immigrants came from all over Europe for work. And then died here. Wandering across these ethnically divided areas was so very interesting. Some of the markers were clearly handmade and some were quite expensive looking (keep in mind that Roslyn back 100 years ago was a long way from anywhere). Roslyn is just on the east side of Snoqualmie Pass and when your travel plans next call for you to cross our state, do take a break and visit Roslyn…… and the gulch and hillsides of those ethnic burials.

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I taught a class the other day and one of the questions asked was “how do I do research in countries where I don’t read the language?” Good question. Lisa Alzo answered that question in a class I attended in December 2016:

     1. www.babelfish.com  —  free online translator enables users to translate phrases and sentences into any language…in a text block of up to 150 words.

     2.  www.digitaldialects.com  —  a site for free interactive games for learning languages (you need Adobe Flash Player (free) for this).

     3.  www.familysearch.com  —  FamilySearch offers free word lists to help you translate common words found in church or other records; FS also offers letter writing guides in many languages.

     4. www.translate.google.com  —  popular online free tool for translating words, paragraphs or sentences in 71 different languages. If you use Google Chrome and visit a foreign website, Google will ask if you would like to have the page translated authomatically. Yah, Google!

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TFT:  What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.