yumpin' Yaysus

I've had time, at the office, to work on that French translation on behalf of a family friend, and I just fucking finished. I'm not really finished, though: there's still more to do. I need to go page by page through the document and make sure that (1) I translated everything correctly, without skipping lines, making typos, or transposing text; and (2) I need to be sure the translation actually makes sense. This is a harder task because it's a genealogical document, and it's sometimes hard to know what a pronoun is referring to. If I have, for example, three generations of Jean Le Grand in front of me, and the pronoun he suddenly appears...well, which Jean Le Grand are we talking about? The grandfather? The father? The son? It doesn't help that whoever put this text together in 1921 did a piss-poor job with typography: the term "Reformed religion" appears three ways, for example— Reformed Religion, Reformed religion, and reformed religion. And italicization of surnames is all over the place: sometimes, they're italicized; at other times, no. If there's a rhyme or reason to this, I don't see it.

I also think I did a poor job translating the language of heraldry: there's a ton of coats of arms in this document—descriptions, not pictures—and as I was fumblingly translating these descriptions, I began to realize that there's a very specific, standardized way to describe coats of arms in French, so I need to comb through those very carefully and make sure I either got the descriptions right or can repair them if needed. I think I got a lot of them very wrong.

Good luck to D, the family friend, and to her sister JA, who is really the one who needs this document rendered into English. If JA is following a lead on a family line, this Le Grand family seems to go back to the 1600s. I admit I began to take a bit of a nerdy interest in the document, much of which focuses on northern French cities like Caen and provinces like Normandy. Two cities in particular caught my interest, and I've been having a devil of a time trying to track them down on both modern and older maps: Anguerny and Anerville—Anerville in particular. Anguerny was easy enough to find, but Anerville has, thus far, not shown up on any maps. ChatGPT was useless in trying to find it, too. I did, however, stumble upon a huge and detailed online map of 18th-century France; I plan to pore over the Normandy region to see whether I can find Anerville. It's where so many of the Le Grand family lived, after all.

Just another couple of days, and I'll hand over my translation and my research to D and JA.