| When I first began researching my Portuguese genealogy (in October 1998), although I had a tremendous amount of outside help (mostly at the patient hands of Rosemarie Cappodici, researcher extraordinaire and denizen of the Seaside, California Family History Center (thanks, Rosemarie!)), I had no real first-hand experience with the Portuguese language. Armed only with a pocket-sized Portuguese-English dictionary and a basic Portuguese grammar book, I set out to translate my Portuguese documents. The process was long and torturous, but I eventually managed to make sense of all the documents I had on hand.
Now, in the interest of "sharing the wealth" and giving non-speakers of Portuguese the benefit of my experience, however limited, I have attempted to share the fruits of my labor. I hope it may make your genealogical journey a little easier.
I know you're anxious to get on your way, but first, a few notes about the pages contained within:
(1) My keyboard is not configured for Portuguese fonts, so I have excluded all diacritical marks and the like. If you have strong feelings about them, just pretend they are still there.
(2) The spelling on these documents remains as faithful as possible to that on the original documents. Some spellings have changed since the documents were originally penned. Thus, apparent spelling mistakes are probably the result of the changes in Portuguese spelling that occurred around the turn of the century. Of course, it is equally possible the original author may have made a mistake. That being said, not all my documents are exactly easy to read. In the event that I've mispelled something, refer to #3 below.
(3) I make no pretentions to perfection. If you suspect you've found any spelling and/or translation mistakes on this page, please e-mail me. I will fix them.
Ok, time for you to go searching. Good luck. Here are your choices:
 The Phrase Dictionary is my attempt to keep you from having to look up word after word in a dictionary, then trying to make a sensible phrase out of them. It lists the phrases that, to my experience, are most commonly used in Portuguese documents.
The Lists Page presents some commonly used information that is too cumbersome for the phrase dictionary to handle. There are just too many names of months, professions, and numbers for the poor thing to deal with. |
