[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Importance of diacritic letters

[Nelson Itterman]

Hello Jerry:
I understand that in thr Russian Language that there is something following
the last "n" in my name leaving it Itterman in stead Ittermann.
Have you heard about it?
Nelson

-----Original Message-----
From: ger-poland-volhynia-bounces at eclipse.sggee.org
[mailto:ger-poland-volhynia-bounces at eclipse.sggee.org] On Behalf Of Jerry
Frank
Sent: October-17-11 11:00 AM
To: ger-poland-volhynia at eclipse.sggee.org
Subject: [Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Importance of diacritic letters

Even seasoned researchers learn new things from time to time.  This issue
came up for me this weekend.

Diacritic letters are those with a symbol attached to them.  In German this
would typically be the umlaut.  In Polish there are several including the L
with a slash through it, some vowels with hooks underneath or a dash above,
etc.  Here follows what I have learned using the L with a slash as an
example.

Some websites are smart enough to interpret L with a slash (I will show it
further as L~) as a plain L.  So if you search for Lodz (which in Polish is
actually L~odz) in either the LDS Family Search site or the Pradziad Polish
Archives site, you will get numerous results.  However, this is not
consistently true.

This weekend I was searching for available records for Bl~onie, a town a
short distance west of Warsaw.  As I had always done, I entered "Blonie" in
the search box and got few to no results on both sites.  Several of those
hits were for other locations which I was not interested in.  But, when I
entered "Bl~onie" as the search term, I got hits from both sites.  I now
know which microfilms to order.

It is possible to use special keystrokes to achieve diacritic letters but we
often forget the code for them.  If you use GOOGLE Translator, you will find
that each language comes up with a little keyboard that holds the special
characters you need.  Just copy and paste them into the applicable search
box.  OR, just open any Polish language website and copy and paste your
special character from there.

Jerry

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