Tips
for Reading Old Handwriting
By Bob Robb
January 10, 2012
Do you have any tips for
reading old handwriting?
There are a number of tricks
for reading old handwriting, enough that you could take an entire college
course on the topic. This article is intended to be a crash course in some of
the unusual things you're likely to encounter reading historical documents
before you jump in and start indexing.
If you're having trouble determining which letter it
is you're looking at, try to find a similar character in another context on the
document. Often, just seeing it somewhere else is enough to figure out what
that character is. With that in mind, there are a number of letters that tend
to look very similar.
Compare the v in Novak with the r in Parry. The
examples below will give you a good idea of some of the characters that may get
confused for one another.
In some cases what appears to be fs is actually ss.
The following example illustrates this case:
Another issue to watch out for is a record-keeper who
wrote a string of letters that make up a bunch of humps in the word. For an
example of this, take a look at the name Williams.
From the a to the end of the name, you can see how the
person writing the record scribbled until they got to the end of the name. In a
majority of these cases, you can count the humps and use context to figure out
which letters they make up. Be careful, sometimes the person writing the record
lost track of how many humps they'd written.
Be on the lookout for ts that show up uncrossed or is
that are apparently undotted. For an example of both of these hobgoblins, look
at the name Mattie.
The cross for the t is above the i, and the dot for
the i can be found over the e at the end. You'll notice that many of the ts
above are "crossed" somewhere other than through the upright portion
of the letter. Again, context and page patterns will help you figure out which
of these letters should be ts and which are something else.
The examples below were all taken from previous
indexing projects and are typical of the writing you are likely to encounter.
