Transcription Tuesdays: The Burial Record of Albrecht Kruszynski (Kurrentschrift)

This was one of the more difficult transcription pieces I have done. It is written in the old Kurrentschrift, a nightmare script that was eventually outlawed by Hitler. It is no longer used and is a bit of a pain to learn to read, especially if you don't know German (like me- I only know English and can get by in Spanish). I might make a post later about how I learned to read it. It was not a very fast process and I still have difficulty depending on who wrote the document.

Tip: Finding how many times an ancestor married with census notes

When an ancestor marries multiple times there can often be a lot of confusion if you are unaware of more than one marriage. When tracing the lineage of a female ancestor it can mean the difference between finding her real maiden name and running into a brick wall. Census Notes were small notations census takers made to make counting various statistics later easier. Most of these are pretty useless, but occasionally there are notes that provide valuable information. I have been noticing on several different censuses that sometimes the census taker would note down the number of marriages the person has had. This isn't true for all censuses of course but it's certainly something to look out for.

The way the number of marriages is notated is a number after the "M" (standing for 'married') in the census sections about whether a person is single, married, widowed, or divorced. Here are some examples: