Latin Language and Script:

Reading Old Script or Bad Handwriting.

The Basic Principles.

There are only a few basic ideas for reading difficult handwriting. They are easy to learn, and they work! The same principles apply, whether you are working with ancient Latin manuscripts, or messy handwriting from the 20th Century. In the 21st Century, nobody writes anymore!

1. Work with the largest sample you can find of the script written by the same person. A whole page is better than a few lines, several pages are even better. You need a large enough sample to get an idea of the various ways that the scribe formed each letter, how he linked letters together, how he used abbreviations, etc. Attempting to decipher a short baptismal record without having a large enough sample of the script is a major cause for genealogical mistakes!
2. Using whatever words or parts of words that you can read clearly, build an "alphabet table". You can cut and paste from images, or you can copy individual letters by hand (paying attention to exactly how each letter was drawn). Look for variations in the way each letter of the alphabet is formed, and add those variants to your alphabet table. Try to find several samples of each letter of the alphabet! Include capital letters too, when you can find them.
3. Also copy any "unknown" letters. Eventually, when your alphabet is almost complete, you will figure out where the unrecognizable letters belong! For Latin documents before about the 17th Century, and sometimes even later, some of the "unknown" letters may turn out to be abbreviation symbols. However, there are some odd forms of the letters c, e, r, s, and x that often confuse the beginner.
4. Use your "alphabet table" as a guide to decipher more of the text. Every time you decipher one more word, that's progress!
5. Try to make a complete, exact transcript of the original text. The better the transcript, the easier it will be when it comes time to prepare a translation. Attempting to translate a baptismal record before you have completed the transcript often leads to errors.
6. Pay special attention to personal names and place names, which may be easier to recognize than the rest of the text.
7. If you can't be sure about family names and place names, try to find other documents from the same region, in which you will probably be able to find the same names, but in a different hand. Whether from the same period, or from a later period where the handwriting is easier to read, you should be able to match up some of the names with those in your problem documents, and thus decipher more of the text. This will give you confirmation that you are reading the names correctly, and it will also give you a bigger sample of identifiable letters for your "alphabet table".
8. All the rest is practice! The more different hands you study from a given period and region, and the more time you devote to this study, the easier it will be!
9. Take advantage of resources for paleography, local history, place names, etc. on the internet! Also take advantage of the Latin message board at Rootsweb.com, by posting a query with an image of the document attached.