Geography: Say it and repeat!

Genealogists are faced with strange place names as we conduct our ancestral search.

Not only are they hard to find on the map, but vowels and consonants are often arranged in unusual combinations and letters have curious squiggles, making localities nearly impossible to pronounce for the descendants of immigrant families.

Steve Lasky's new Museum of Family History Blog offers a peek at a section of his virtual museum. The Education and Resource Center offers four pronunciation guides to Eastern European towns.

Here, at the Museum's ERC (Education and Research Center), an effort has been made to aid those interested in learning the correct pronunciation of various town and city names, as spoken by those native to that particular country. Currently, pronunciation guides are available for Polish, Magyar (Hungarian), Lithuanian and Romanian. Perhaps a Russian language guide will be available at some time in the future.

Listen to each audio clip, and depending on your computer's media player, you may be able to pause, forward, reverse or repeat the clip. Listeners may repeat the town name after the speaker says the name.

Here are links to the four guides:

Lithuanian
Magyar (Hungarian)
Polish
Romanian

Thanks, Steve, for such a useful feature!