{"id":6936,"date":"2014-04-23T16:02:52","date_gmt":"2014-04-23T16:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.genealogybank.com\/?p=6936"},"modified":"2025-04-23T09:57:51","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T13:57:51","slug":"a-genealogists-guide-to-old-latin-terms-abbreviations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/a-genealogists-guide-to-old-latin-terms-abbreviations.html","title":{"rendered":"A Genealogist\u2019s Guide to Old Latin Terms & Abbreviations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/em><\/strong>: In this article, Mary Harrell-Sesniak explains some of the old terms\u2014many of them derived from Latin\u2014that genealogists encounter during their family history research. Mary is a genealogist, author and editor with a strong technology background.
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Throughout history, terms come and terms go\u2014and thankfully for most people, archaic expressions disappear. That is, thankfully for everyone except family historians. We encounter a plethora of long forgotten archaic terms while doing our genealogy research, mostly in what some consider a dead language: Latin!<\/p>\n

To be honest, I was never fond of Latin.<\/p>\n

I remember a particularly tense parent-teacher conference when I was a girl, during which the teacher implied that I wasn\u2019t well-suited for the subject. My mother, who was then at the height of her passion for genealogy, disagreed\u2014and so I continued studying Latin, under extreme duress.<\/p>\n

In later years, I discovered that I shared my mom\u2019s passion for genealogy\u2014and when I started seeing old documents with Latin phrases such Caesar\u2019s \u201cVeni, Vidi, Vici\u201d (\u201cWe came, We saw, We conquered\u201d), my early education studying the Latin language started paying off.<\/p>\n

So now, I\u2019d like to share some tips for understanding old Latin terms you may encounter in your own genealogy research.<\/p>\n

Dates: \u201cInstant,\u201d \u201cUltimo\u201d and \u201cProximo\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The three most common old Latin terms for dates are: instant, ultimo, and proximo, which refer to the present month, last month and next month respectively.<\/p>\n