Put simply, palaeography is the study of old hand writing, seen in manuscripts: hand-written books, rolls, scrolls and, most importantly for the family historian, on records. Deciphering this writing can be incredibly useful when researching your family history, but it can be a challenge! Discover how to crack those handwriting conundrums with our paleography guide.
Reading old handwriting (palaeography) is an acquired skill, but a little knowledge and perseverance can pay dividends as your research advances and you need to study an increasing number of older manuscript sources.
Paleography quick links: how to read old handwriting
The evolution of handwriting
Handwriting has evolved over the centuries and you will find different styles according to the date of the document, writes Celia Heritage.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, you will commonly find a style known as ‘secretary hand’ used in wills, correspondence and parish registers. This is fairly easy to read.
By contrast the use of ‘court hand’, for court records, was prohibited by an Act of Parliament in 1731 because it was so difficult to read!
Although it’s useful to know which styles of writing were prominent at certain periods, the handwriting of an older person might reflect the style of an earlier generation, despite the date on the document and many documents were written using a mixture of styles.
Whatever the era, some clerks were better at their jobs than others and some documents will be easier to read and the letters more consistently formed than others.
As literacy spread and was no longer the remit of trained clerks or the clergy, you may well find yourself reading your ancestors’ business or personal correspondence. However, with the spread of literacy came a lowering of standards, meaning the handwriting of later centuries can sometimes prove more of a challenge for the researcher.
Getting familiar with routine words and phrases
Half the battle with paleography is the ability to identify the type of document you are looking at and familiarity with the language used in a particular type of document.
Many genealogical sources, such as probate records, title deeds or court records routinely include standard phrases and vocabulary, and once you know what sort of document you are reading, then your reading speed will soon improve.
Most archival documents have a description of the type of document written on the outside and with time you will soon learn to recognise each document by its language too.
If you are reading a will, then many begin with the phrase ‘In the Name of God Amen’, while if your ancestor was leaving land/property to his heirs then you can expect to find words such as:
- ‘messuage’ (dwelling house and the plot in which it stood)
- ‘appurtenances’ (rights and agreements attached to a piece of land)
- ‘tenements’ (originally land held of the lord of the manor)
Christopher Corèdon and Ann Williams’s book, A Dictionary of Medieval Terms and Phrases (Boydell and Brewer, various editions), will help further with other definitions.
If you are studying title deeds then you may well come across phrases such as ‘remised, released quitclaimed and confirmed’ (denoting the transfer of a lease) and you will soon realise that much of this formulaic legalese can largely be ignored by the genealogist.
The vocabulary in parish registers changes little from century to century. You will usually be using later, more legible registers first, so by the time you uncover your first Latin entries you should be able to understand what you are reading with a little help from one of the aids mentioned in this article.
It pays to dedicate regular bite-sized practice time to your palaeography.
The National Archives (TNA) website has a series of excellent online tutorial exercises that fit this mould, as well as more advanced practice documents accessible for free at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/palaeography – here you will also find alphabet guides and further tips on how to accurately read and transcribe the old words, numbers and dates.
Six transcription tips and tricks
- To help you identify unfamiliar letters, use one of the specimen alphabet charts in the book Reading Old Handwriting by Eve McLaughlin or on The National Archive’s website.
Remember these are only a guide and you may find different variations of each letter.
- Some words are easy to mistake for others.
Observe all the letters in a word and note any squiggles or lines above the word. These indicate where a letter has been omitted.
Clerks routinely omitted letters to save time and, in some cases, parchment. Some words such as ‘with’ and ‘which’ were frequently reduced – in these examples to wt and wch. – while common Christian names might also be shortened, such as Thomas to Thos:.
A letter of the alphabet known as the ‘thorn’ was a remnant from Old English which often confuses readers. This stood for ‘the’ but was written as ye.
- The context of the word in the sentence is important too.
Bad handwriting is not a modern-day phenomenon and the context will give the clue as to what the word must mean when all else fails.
Similarly a word may be spelled in an unfamiliar manner. Reading it out loud may provide the clue. For example ‘daughter ‘might be written as ‘dawter’ and ‘four’ as ‘fower’.
- Note trained clerks were not consistent in the way they formed their letters; even forming them differently in the same document.
- A word may have fallen out of use and, even if you can read it, you may not understand it.
This is frequently the case when reading inventories attached to wills.
Stuart A Raymond’s book, Words from Wills and other probate records 1500-1800 (SA and MJ Raymond, 2004) is excellent in these circumstances. Thus we learn that a ‘keive’ was a barrel used for brewing or washing clothes, for instance.
- Where record office policy allows, get a copy of the document to work on at home. If it is a paper copy then scan this into your computer. The ability to magnify and zoom in on words makes transcription easier. Many record offices (including TNA) allow the use of digital cameras for the copying of documents for personal use.
Transcribing a document on the computer screen has benefits in other ways too, as you can improve the light levels and, using a program such as Transcript – freely available from www. jacobboerema.nl/en/Freeware.htm – transcribe the document as you go along by way of a split screen.
Identifying names
Whereas it’s often possible to identify a word based on the context of the sentence in which it lies, surnames can prove much more difficult to decipher, especially where we don’t have any expectation of what the name should read.
If you are searching parish registers, then browse other entries to see if the surname reoccurs elsewhere in a more legible form. If the name occurs in a single manuscript document you may find it has been included in the catalogue entry.
Different versions of place names, with which you are totally unfamiliar, may catch you out. For example, Pembury in Kent was frequently referred to as 'Peppingbury' in the 16th century.
How to read census returns
Census returns vary in legibility.
Apart from the 1911 English, Welsh and Irish Census, the census images you view are of census enumerators’ summary books. These were copies of the original census schedules completed by each householder, or by the enumerator where the householder was illiterate.
It can be difficult to decipher a census enumerator’s writing, thanks to the later annotations written over the top by governmental clerks extracting statistical information.
Typically you may see lines or crosses as they ticked off the entries they had assessed. These may obliterate the vital information you want to know, such as your ancestor’s age.
The clerks might also overwrite the original occupation with one of a number of set occupational categories into which they were instructed to classify each person’s occupation.
Another complication can be the clarity of the census image; some appear very faint.
Magnifying the image on your computer screen may help decipher what lies beneath a clerical mark.
Alternatively, try viewing the image using a different website. The way in which the census images are filmed varies between genealogy companies and what may appear as a faded image on one website may be a lot clearer on another.
Being familiar with abbreviations used in census returns will also help you. The 1841 Census in particular used a high proportion of abbreviations that are not all obvious. These include:
- ‘Fwk’ (framework knitter)
- The use of a small ‘m’ after the type of trade, such as shoem. = shoemaker
Quick link: Read more about UK census records with our in-depth guide
How to read Latin in documents
Many genealogists find that they can easily access birth, marriage, death, parish and census records, but lots of family trees get stuck around the end of the 18th century, writes Bruce Durie.
Fortunately, a rich seam of records – covering inheritance, land, tax and legal matters – is out there, and holds valuable clues to take your research back further.
Some of the records are in Latin – the formal language of legal documents in England and Wales until Lady Day (25 March), 1733, and it persisted in Scottish documents too, much later.
But with perseverance, practice and some guidance, this needn’t be a barrier to filleting the genealogical information they contain.
School Latin v legal Latin
Those who took Latin at school may remember enough to make sense of documents. But the classical Latin of Cicero and Caesar is 1,500 years and more adrift from the late medieval/early modern Latin of Church and legal documents.
The main difference to bear in mind is new words created for specific purposes.
Some words, such as haeres (heir) patris (father) or in terris de (in the lands of) would make perfect sense to a Roman.
But Scottish landholding terms, for instance, such as in baronia (barony), dominio (lands) and feudi rmae (feu ferme = a legal land duty) would be meaningless.
Have a dictionary to hand
There are various glossaries and formularies of old documents available. Formularies often contain translated examples of typical document types. Do get yourself a good Latin dictionary as well.
How do you pronounce Latin?
There are 24 letters in the postclassical Latin alphabet, mainly pronounced the same as today.
However, note:
- There are no w and y
- a u was written as a v (vxor = uxor, wife)
- a v was pronounced as w, except before a consonant – vita (life) was pronounced ‘weeta’.
- Also, i and j are interchangeable (cuius or cujus, and in numbers such as iij = 3)
- c may be used for qu in manuscripts (condam for quondam)
- Diphthongs – two vowels combined (ae; oe; au; ui) may be fully rounded (aurum [ow-room, ‘gold’) or they may be collapsed (celum instead of coelum, ‘heaven’)
Why endings matter in Latin
In English, ‘Harry loves Sally’ is not the same as ‘Sally loves Harry’ and ‘Harry gave Sally a dog’ is not the same as ‘Harry gave a dog Sally’. We make the distinction either by word order – Harry (subject) loves (verb) Sally (object) – or by inserting prepositions – ‘Harry gave a dog to Sally’.
Latin doesn’t worry about word order so much, but the usual order is subject-object-verb. So, in the phrase ‘John-Janet-loves’, Latin sorts it out by ‘inflecting’ the subject and object – Johannis Janetam amat (John loves Janet) is not the same as Janeta Johannem amat (Janet loves John).
Numbers and dates in Latin
For most family history research, it’s enough to have this table of the basic numbers:
- I = 1 V = 5 X = 10 L = 50 C = 100 D = 500 M = 1000 These can be combined:
- VII = 5+2 = 7
- IX = 1 before 10 = 10-1 = 9
- XL = 50-10 = 40
- LXX = 50 +10 +10 = 70
- MDCCII = 1000+500+200+2 = 1702
- MCMLXXIV = 1000+ (1000-100) +50+(10+10) + (5-1) = 1974
- MMIII = 2003 Because i and j are interchangeable, and a final i is usually written as j, Julii, Julij and Iulii all mean ‘July’.
Fortunately, you will need to know a fairly restricted set of words to make sense of (but not to translate completely) most documents. These tend to be words for land and property, family relationships and so on.
The best thing about legal documents is that they tend to stay in an almost unchanged form, sometimes from the end of the 12th to the early 19th centuries.
Nouns and adjectives in Latin
Nouns and adjectives have gender, number and case, indicated by the word endings, and have to ‘agree’.
To give an example or gender and number:
- because villa (country house) is feminine gender
- annus (year) is masculine and testamentum (covenant, will) is neuter
- ‘one house’ is una villa
- 'one year’ is unus annus
- ‘one will’ is unum testamentum
Words also change to indicate singular or plural, eg villa (house), villae (houses).
The case of the word matters, too.
In Latin, ‘year’ is annus but ‘in the year’ is anno as with anno domini
‘Lord James’ is Dominus Jacobus but ‘of our Lord’ is …domini
and where something is given ‘to John’ (Johannis) this would be ad Johannem
Verbs in Latin
In Latin, verbs are inflected according to person, number and tense. We also do this in English to a degree, particularly with ‘irregular’ verbs.
A ‘regular’ verb in English, such as ‘to walk’, hardly changes (I walk, you walk, he/she walks etc).
But what about an ‘irregular’ English verb, such as ‘to be’?
The verb ‘to be’ changes considerably: I am, you are, he/she is etc. Latin does the same. A regular verb like amare (to love) and an irregular verb esse (to be) go like this in the present tense:
amare…
- amo I love
- amas you love
- amat he loves
- amamus we love
- amatis you love
- amant they love
esse…
- sum I am
- es you are
- est he is
- sumus we are
- estis you are
- sunt they are
Five basic rules to translate Latin
Translating from Latin can be tricky, especially since it doesn’t ‘read’ like English, thanks to the word order, putting adjectives after nouns and the verb at the end etc. But there are some basic rules:
-
Find the verb (usually at the end of a sentence but not always). This tells you what is being done, who is doing it and to whom
- Find the subject – a noun or nouns in the nominative case
- Find the object – a noun or nouns in the accusative case
- Don’t translate the object before the verb
- Analyse the sentence by writing V over a verb, S over the subject, O over the object and if the subject is ‘in the verb’, write V+S over the verb. The endings, not the word order, tell you whether a noun is the subject or the object
Paleography article written by Celia Heritage | Latin guide written by Bruce Durie
Get more family history advice with the Family Tree newsletter
Sign up to receive the Family Tree newsletter and we'll send you a friendly, informative weekly email packed with expert tips, advice and special offers. As a welcome gift we'll also send you a resource kit featuring interview sheets, family tree charts and more!
