Reading Old Handwriting (A McLaughlin Guide)

READING OLD HANDWRITING includes in the table of contents:How to start, 'Victorian Vicars' and 'Shy Young Curates' ,Numbers up ,The eighteenth century ,All swags and flounces ,Capital letters ,Small letters ,Elizabethan scribes and scribblers ,Abbreviations ,Numbers, andPractice makes perfect: Bibliography How to start From the introduction: "Probably the first time you will come face to face with older styles of handwriting is in parish registers - in fact, they are a good way of cutting your teeth, since what the entries say is partly predict- able. It is much more difficult to start cold on whole slabs of prose where you are not sure even of what kind of document it is, and certainly not what phrases to expect. When you are given a set of registers or a microfilm, the natural reaction is to begin at the beginning. This is one of those rules which should be overturned in family history - always begin at the end. There are three good reasons for this: in the first place, what you know already is likely to involve the end of the registers, since we work back from what we know to what we don't know. In the second place, as you work back, you acquire more knowledge, in particular of which other families your ancestors married into - making them hence- forth 'yours' to be collected; in the third place, the writing of those early registers is strange and unless you ease yourself into it by getting familiar with the surnames occurring in the parish, you could fail to identify the relevant names among so many new ones and have to work back over them again. A seventeenth century register can look totally unreadable, at first sight, but if you have trained on the later years you will find names emerging from the general scribble which are the ones you want. "