Fun with Words in Genealogy

Did your Scottish ancestors have a pair of cod-heads? Perhaps your American ancestors helped lay a corduroy road or worked as a whitewing? German ancestors? Did they wear osnaburg or ticklenburg?

Language changes over time and our ancestors would be equally befuddled if they heard someone say "My bad" or "Catch you later" or any of the countless words and phrases we use today. Making sense of today's vocabulary is easy enough, but what do you do when confronted with words and phrases that are no longer in popular usage?

Consult a book—there are some wonderful book references that a generation of genealogists have come to rely on:

• A to Zax: A Comprehensive Dictionary for Genealogists and Historians, written by Barbara Jean Evans, is a much-beloved classic and deserves to be in every researcher's library. Published by Hearthside Press, the third edition came out in 1995 and is still available in paperback.
• What Did They Mean by That?, written by Paul Drake, is "a dictionary of historical and genealogical terms old and new." Published by Heritage Books in 2003, it, too, can still be found for purchase.
• More What Did They Mean by That?, also by Paul Drake, is a companion book to the previously mentioned volume and appeared in 2006 as a hardback and in a paperback edition in 2009. (StLGS members: Log into our store to get your member code and then go to http://store.stlgs.org/more-what-did-they-mean-by-that for your discount on the hardback, which we sell.)

Check the internet—lists of archaic words and phrases abound online. Here are just a few to get you started.

• "Archaic Words That Used to be Common," Lexico (Oxford Dictionary) https://www.lexico.com/en/explore/archaic-words
• "List of Archaic English Words and Their Modern Equivalents, Academic Kids Encyclopedia. (Don't be put off by the name of the website. This is a short but helpful list.) https://academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php/List_of_archaic_English_words_and_their_modern_equivalents
• "Old English Core Vocabulary." (Created and maintained by the University of St. Andrews, Scotland)  https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~cr30/vocabulary/
• "Glossary of Archaic Words and Phrases," (British site with emphasis on legal terms) https://parlipapers.proquest.com/help/parlipapers/Glossary%20of%20Archaic%20Terms%20and%20Phrases.html 

(By the way, if your ancestor had cod-heads, he/she was likely from the Glasgow area of Scotland and had some shoes that wore out at the toes. A corduroy road was made from tree trunks laid side by side over a swampy or muddy area, and a whitewing was a street sweeper in a white uniform (see the illustration above). Osnaburg and ticklenburg were kinds of cloth made in Germany. Both were made of linen but the latter was more coarsely made and twice as strong.)