Ste. Anne de Detroit

I spent this afternoon adding some details to my work in Family Tree Maker.

Most of my time was spent hunting down information related to my Paternal Grandmother's baptism record. I sure learned a lot about Ste. Anne's Parish in Detroit, Michigan where she was baptized. It is a beautiful Church. One day I hope to visit it and the surrounding buildings which have been placed on the National Registry of Historic Places. I have probably driven past that church a few dozen times having grown up in Michigan, but now that I know my Grandmother was baptized there, I feel like I'm seeing it again for the first time. It has a new layer of meaning for me. (Besides the fact that another one of my loves is historic buildings. In fact, what draws me to them are the stories I know they would tell if the walls could talk.)

My "you learn something new every day" moment for today was discovering what I assumed was French in the baptism record was instead Latin. It was also an "ah-ha" moments of sort. I figured the record was in French because I knew the church and Detroit was founded by the French as a fur trade post on the river. What I should have remembered however is that before Vatican II in the 1960's, the main language of the Catholic church was Latin. I knew masses were conducted in Latin, but somehow it never occurred to me that the records would also be in Latin until a friend recognized the phrases when I posted them on Facebook looking for help translating.

Most of the phrases were easy to guess, but based on the names, I wasn't sure if Nomina Patrionrum was Names of the Godparents or Names of the Grandparents. In the case of my Grandmother, it could have been either. With the help of my Facebook friends, I was able to determine it indeed means "Names of the Godparents" (or Sponsors).