Reading the Old Handwriting

 

I want to share a methodology for reading a document. This is helpful when transcribing documents in a foreign language.  A step by step procedure like this helps even those who are familiar with transcribing records. 

 1.  Identify all the names in the document. This will be the easiest thing to do.  I like to look for proper nouns that are capitalized, and names often look much the same in different languages.  

2.  Identify dates, beginning with the month followed by the day and year. (I didn’t realize that sometimes the day and year are written out and sometimes they aren’t.) This can be used as an answer key for how the letters were written in other words in the document.

3.  Identify action verbs and relationship words such as married, born, and died.

4. Identify places.  This is the most difficult because of all the variation. Use gazetteers, online maps, and Wikipedia articles to help with this.