The vast majority of the records that we use to research our family history are handwritten. Many of them, particularly from the mid-18th century onwards, include manuscript entries, completing pre-printed forms or pre-printed pages in a register, but many more are entirely handwritten: wills, for instance and pre-19th century parish registers were normally written on plain sheets of paper or in plain notebooks.
It is therefore crucial that, as family historians, we should learn to read the various styles of handwriting that we’re likely to confront in the course of our research – and that we should learn to read them well!
The problem is that handwriting, by its very nature, is prone to a huge degree of variance, not just from one era to the next but also from one individual to another. In many documents, it was vital that the handwriting was highly legible (or at least that it was to those who needed to use them at the time they were created) and in those cases, a degree of uniformity across a collection of records can be expected. But a lot of the records we use were working documents, constantly being updated by clerks as they went about their daily business, adding and amending entries and making notes, the meaning of many of which is sometimes unclear to us today.
Zooming in on a document can help you decipher what it says. Equally, putting it to one side and coming back to it with fresh eyes can help too.
The quality of the census enumerators’
