TRANSCRIPTIONS and ORIGINALS

I am writing this post as a follow on from one that I put up on my own blog earlier this month. 

This is also about my experience over the weekend whilst working on the Family Search Family Tree and I suspect I am not alone in having this experience.

I had looked at a new record set on Find My Past and was relating it back to an ancestor on the Family Search Family Tree which led to further research on this individual and his family.

Richard Carrot the son was attached to his parents but his siblings have been added today. 

There are others using the name Richard Carrot in this area so at the moment much of the family is speculative with sources attached but not proven relationships. I have accessed the parish registers to confirm christenings, marriages and burials. However Richard and Elizabeth are common first names and useful census records are rare before 1841. How do I know I have the right family?

So here is a map of the area courtesy of Google maps.

Richard Carrot and Elizabeth Hall married in Pickworth in 1777. Elizabeth was christened in Walcot 1778 and Richard in Folkingham 1783 but what about Matthew in Swaton 1785.

Another marriage can be found for a Richard and Elizabeth Aldridge in Horbling in 1761. 
Horbling is closer to Swaton so could they be the parents of Matthew?
First I need to look for likely children of Richard and Elizabeth nee Aldridge in Horbling or nearby. The only one I have found is for a Thomas in 1765. I have not found a burial for Elizabeth in Horbling but a Richard was buried in 1776.  These records do not record ages and relationships the only distinguishing information recorded was that the occupation of Richard prior to his death was Tollbar keeper.
A search of newspapers at this time did not reveal any useful information as family announcements cannot yet be found in the local newspaper.
So I stick by my current conclusion in the absence of anything to refute this or providing more information.

Matthew was used as a first name by Richard the son for one of his son's. Matthew senior married Mary Dewey in Edenham but the couple do not appear to have had any children. I can find no christenings and by 1841, the first census showing relationships, they are too old to have any living with them.
Looking at the parents, grandparents and siblings of Mary's father on the Family Search Family Tree I discovered several different transcriptions of the surname. The dates and place are the same and a look at the digital images at Find My Past will confirm they refer to the same individuals.

If we are to correctly identify individuals and attach all the relevant sources we need to be aware of these alternative transcriptions and identify them for what they are when reconstructing families.

Our ancestors did like to use the same first names from generation to generation and we must always consider that each record may refer to a different individual. When John died as a baby or young child it was often the case that the next boy would be called John. It can also be seen that the sons may both want to use the first name of their parent for their own children. In my own family I have found William Roberts used 3 times by the parents in the register of christenings but only one burial. Was the second child christened twice. The second christening was private which may have possibly been due to the child being sickly. There were only 2 births registered, consistent with the first two christenings, and only one death registration and burial.

I have added explanations to the tree in the discussion and merge fields so that it is clear what I have concluded here. Even with birth and death certificates I would be unable to be certain that I have made the correct conclusion.

In conclusion whatever we use we need to make a considered analysis of the information available. Even when we have access to original records we may only make assumptions regarding those who have proceeded us. However showing the source of the information upon which we base our conclusion will add weight to a well thought out proof.  

Philippine War Letter Home a Treasure Discovered

I was going through my mother's writing files, and was floored when I found a portion of a letter my grandfather Harry Ozro Whitson wrote home to his mother, sister, brother, and friends in Oklahoma from the Philippines during the war. There is only the first page and a fourth page, but the first has a drawing he made of his surroundings at the top.  It is priceless.  I asked my mother about it and if she had the other pages or knew who did. She (she suffers from dementia) said I didn't have it, you must have.  I knew it wasn't me, as I would never have laminated it.
This find was exciting.  I have already had one journey in finding my grandfather's experience during the Philippines War and wrote it here on my blog.

Harry O Whitson 

Company B picture location was not written on the back, just Spanish American War

This letter gave me first hand experience from him where he was and some of what he did, albeit it is only part of the story. These are the two pages of the letter.  I believe that he wrote on the back of the paper, but it is hard to tell since it is laminated together.

Letter from Harry O Whitson to his family in Oklahoma from the Philippines 1900 in possession of Fran Ellsworth 

Page 4 or flip side of above of Harry O Whitson's letter in possession of Fran Ellsworth

The hand drawn illustration on the first page.

I had downloaded GenScriber before for transcribing some wills and documents, so I dusted it off and began my hand at transcribing what my grandfather had written.  It was not easy and obviously as I worked I saw he didn't know how to spell many of the place names, I was able to figure it out, but I did not change anything as I was transcribing.  NOW, I have another reason for posting, hoping some of my eagle-eyed genfriends will see what I have missed and let me know. Crowd sourcing. (smiling) Those of you just starting, this is an awesome FamilySearch Wiki page that helps tremendously Transcribing Historical Documents (National Institute)

This is my attempt at transcribing the above letter.

Marinduquie, Santa Cruz, Oct the 28^th  9100

The 38^th, , U. S. V. Inf. Co. B

Dear friends Mother Sister Brother and friends one and all I will Try and let you know what we are dewing and have been for the last 30 days, We left the Luzon the 25^th of last month for this place for the purpose of recapturing the 29^th the 58 men and th?ec (their?) captors it was T. Co. who were captured they were about 12 miles from there quarters and they were very for st?f ok they would of never ben captured   We went through the country a cupel of times and they thought they had better turn them in so they turned them over to us they looked very hard for they they  had no shoes and but very little clothing of any kind

[page 2 and 3 are missing]

Page (4)And the seconday on water there were some sick boys  I enjoyed the trip very well myself the 27^th of Dec ? disembarked at Minalea and this 1th day of January 1900 We left Minalea and landed at [Supor… Brxny] there […one word…]first on the firing line  The 1^st of Jan  We started in the advance to the south line with 20,000 trops in the skurmish line through the rice fields We landed at Balangas Jan the 16^th  and stayed there until Sept the 25^th and then We left for Marinduque Island Santa cruz and there we are know but I do not think We shall stay here long  I will have to get ready for drill so long I will write some more to night good by

Using his letter, I searched on some of the old newspapers and found the press coverage of the same events and online I found, a wonderful webpage about the Philippine War from their perspective (always good to have). 

My grandfather's company was under Captain Anderson who was the first to go search for the captured men. From the accounts of the press it appears that it was not an easy task. This war was captioned later as the first Viet Nam.  

One of several newspaper articles I found.

The Inter Ocean
(Chicago, Illinois)17 Oct 1900, Wed • Page 3

  When searching the Newspapers on GenealogyBank.com, Newspapers.com, and ChroniclingAmerica.com, I first put  Marinduque insurgents and the date 1900.  The articles came right up.  My grandfather's account was as accurate as he accounted it. My quest for information was satisfied.
On a side note I discovered a short article about their clothing on GenealogyBank which really made sense. This is just a snippet.  Those guys must have been miserable when they first arrived.

This War was not covered greatly in my American History class. It was lumped in the Spanish American war that featured Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, so this has been a learning experience for me as well as a journey that has helped me know my grandfather a little better, probably better than my mother who was only 2 months old when he died.  See you all next month ~FranE

Reading Irish parish registers

Have you got Irish people in your family tree?

If you have, and they were Catholics, you may have been spending the last few days the same way as I have, scrolling through the newly-released images of parish registers from the National Library of Ireland.

And going cross-eyed deciphering the handwriting, the abbreviated first names and the just plain odd-looking ones.

National Library of Ireland, CC by YvonneM

These records are pure gold dust for those of us with Irish ancestors. And they’re free to view, print and download. I’m very grateful to the NLI for putting them online for those of us who can’t visit their (wonderful) building in Dublin to look through the microfiches there. It would be petty to grumble about the fact that they’re not indexed. But just to make the job of scrolling through all those pages easier, I thought I’d pass on some tips I’ve found useful during my search for my ancestors, the Delanys or Delaneys in the parish of Tomacork (also called Carnew), on the border of counties Wicklow and Wexford.

I’m going to use these Tomacork documents to illustrate my points, because I’ve become familiar with many of their quirks. I hope this will be a helpful starting point for your reading of similar resources.

The first tip is – keep going. I found that, as my eyes got used to the handwriting of the various priests and the names which came up again and again, reading the records grew easier. So don’t give up. Like so many worthwhile things, reading these records can get easier when you practise.

Patt (Patrick) Rossiter, with a long s

If you’re new to reading old documents, you might be confused by the unusual shapes of many letters. The records I’ve been looking at date from 1785 onwards, so they’re not from too long ago, but they’re still old enough to take some deciphering if you don’t know how to mentally transcribe them. Long or ‘leading’ s, for example – the one that looks like an f without a cross-bar.

Or the very curly capital letters that don’t look at all like print ones. Here are a few:

Two examples of Anne (top L, bottom R)

A curly H in Hugh

Two examples of capital K in Kelly

A capital B that looks like an M in Brislawn

The capital A in Anne, with no cross-bar, takes a bit of getting used to, and capital H and K look similar. In fact the second Kelly takes some deciphering.

There are a few websites with old handwriting alphabets which can help with reading records. This one is a good place to start, and I've listed more at the end of this post.

Luckily, when we read old records we’re not just reading a sequence of letters. Though that is often the best way of deciphering words. It takes me back to school... C, A, T, cat...

You may need to just write down the letters you’re sure of and go back later once you’re more used to the writer’s hand or have identified the letter somewhere else in the document. That's how I was sure of the examples above.

Repeated words or phrases can be helpful here, because we know what the letters are and can work out quirky variations from them. And you can often work out what a letter is by its context.

What's Judy's surname here? Byron? I happen to know, and reading these parish registers confirms, that Byrne was a very widespread name in Tomacork. In fact it's in the old clan territory of the O'Byrnes. So I can work out that she's most likely a Byrne by comparing this word with many others on the same pages, written by the same person.

But beware of doing what we all do – reading what we think, or hope,

we see, and not what’s actually there. It’s important to check against other examples of the (supposed) letter written by the same person.

Is this crossed out sponsor a new relative, James Delany? I'd love to think so. But there's a Darcy on the same page.

And the descender from Lucy on the line above in the first image may or may not have merged with the l of Delany. In addition, the registers are full of people called Demsey (a variation on Dempsey), another local name. Though this priest usually writes it Dempsey.

 I can't just assume the name here is what I'd like it to be.

What do you think? Delany, Darcy, Demsey or... impossible to decide?

And then there’s image quality.The NLI registers are images from microfiche, so some pen strokes are hard to read or invisible. These entries look like a bad photocopy.

You can find some good tips on reading photocopied records here.

Sometimes you’ll have all the letters worked out, but they don’t look like any name you’ve heard of. There are two possible solutions: the name could be an abbreviation, or it could be written as it sounded to the scribe.

Abbreviations first. In these Catholic parish registers they’re only used for first names and a few stock phrases. There are lists of name abbreviations on the web and I’ve put links at the bottom, but here are a few of the most common found in genealogy records. A good rule of thumb is that the last letter of the abbreviation is the last letter of the name. Except for Jno.

Edwd = Edward

Elizth = Elizabeth

Jno = John (not Jonathan)

Margt = Margaret 

Thos - Thomas

Wm = William

And some from the Tomacork records which may be helpful to Irish research:

Anty = Anthony

Batt = Bartholomew

Catt = Catherine

Lau - Laurence

Mattw = Matthew

Michl = Michael

Patt - Patrick

I've used a smaller font to show letters which are usually written superscript (above the base line).

There are some other abbreviations in these registers, like SS for Sponsors (godparents), and Latin ones like Ills or Illa for Illegitimus/a (illegitimate), usually followed by (ut dixit), or 'it is said', referring to the father.

Plenty of names in these registers are written as they sounded to the priest. That can be confusing. Some are easier to read, like Onor for Hono[u]r, Annistice for Anastasia, Kavinaugh for Kavanagh.

Then there are ones which ask more from us. One of my Delanys, Daniel, was married to Mary Costolough.

That’s a fun one, with a long s and no cross to the t. I only found two other Costoloughs after a lot of genea-searching, and it seemed to be a variant of Costello. Then the light bulb came on. Reading it out loud, remembering that Irish names tend to be stressed on the first syllable, and knowing that the priest used a silent gh in several names, it became clear that, yes, /’kɒstələʊ/ (using the IPA transcription) worked for Costolough and Costello.

I'll be posting about my Delaney/Delany finds over on A Rebel Hand soon. In the meantime, good luck with your old records! And finally – the genealogist’s mantra – don’t assume. But you know that already...

Further online resources

Useful sites for reading old handwriting:

Family Search

The National Archives palaeography online course

Cyndi's List

Alphabets:

University of Cambridge

Early Modern Palaeography

Reading bad scans/photocopies:

FreeBMD 

Name abbreviations:

Boyd's

FreeREG

Genealogy in Time

Roots Ireland - Irish abbreviations

Irish surnames:

Irish Identity

A Transcription Toolbox

In the early 1980s my grandmother taught me to crochet.  We worked together on a set of lacey mats for my dressing table.  Gran did the larger central mat while I worked on a smaller mat with matching pattern.  To facilitate the creative endeavor she wrote out the pattern for me to follow.

Crochet pattern transcribed by my gran (Mabel Adams, nee Coulson 1910-1991), the crocheted mat I made from the pattern, and the crochet hook used

For clarity, legibility and accuracy, Gran wrote in upper case, but the abbreviations and terminology would not be meaningful to someone who does not know crochet.  Gran's normal cursive (joined up) handwriting was a different style to mine and I remember thinking that some of her letters looked slightly odd.

Learning to read old handwriting, understanding why a document was created and knowing about its subject are key to genealogical source analysis. 

Why transcribe?

Handwriting recognition is a rapidly developing technology, but it may tempt us to be too lazy to learn about old handwriting.  Optical character recognition (OCR) was hailed as the solution for printed text, but the results are often not very accurate, particularly with poor quality print and older fonts.  These technologies are useful, but I think the "no more indexing" claim by the runners-up in the RootsTech 2015 Innovator Showdown , ArgusSearch, is misguided.

Apart from making a digital copy, transcribing documents fully makes you examine the details closely, which helps you better understand the contents.

Palaeography Lessons

Palaeography (also spelled paleography) is the study of old handwriting.  Fortunately there is a range of online tutorials that can help us learn to read scripts used in previous centuries.

The UK National Archives tutorials are an excellent practical introduction, with exercises for you to try.  Have some fun with the ducking stool game.  Scottish Handwriting.com from the National Records of Scotland offers practical exercises and a weekly poser.  English Handwriting 1500-1700 provides a good background information and transcription conventions.

These resources cover the period from 1500 to 1800.  For genealogists, learning to read secretary hand, a script widely used for administrative and legal purposes is important.

As handwriting developed from earlier scripts, an understanding of those scripts is helpful.  Nottingham University's Medieval Handwriting provides interactive exercises and information on understanding medieval documents.  Further early modern and medieval material is available at Palindex. DigiPal is a fabulous resource for very early scripts from Anglo-Saxon and Norman times (1000-1100).

Latin was both an international and legal language.  In England it was used in legal documents up to 1733.  Legal Latin is often heavily abbreviated which makes deciphering it a challenge.  A knowledge of the law at the time the document was written is greatly helpful.  Fortunately, legal documents tend to follow a pattern, which helps us predict what it might contain.  Once again the UK National Archives has good introduction to Latin, and Latin Palaeography.  Whittaker's Words is an online Latin dictionary.

Decoding the script and abbreviations, and knowing what to expect are all pre-requisites for a quality transcript, just like the crochet pattern needed knowledge and skill to produce a finished article.

Many of the resources listed here include interactive practice.  Practice really does make perfect transcriptions.

Transcription Tools

Armed with knowledge gained from the resources above, you are ready to start transcribing.  For access reasons, it is common for genealogists to work from a digital image or a photocopy of the original manuscript.  Enlargement and zooming in on detail is an advantage of a good quality digital image.  A large screen or two screens can help make the image and transcript easier to see and read.  Before you rush to buy a second screen, check the ports on your computer and TV.  I connect to my TV using a HDMI cable.  You can use image program like Irfanview or Photoshop to manipulate images and a word processor, such as Word.  Some people find manipulating two programs in different windows clumsy.

Transcript 2.5 puts the image and transcript in a single window and provides basic image manipulation and text formatting tools.  Some people find it suits them very well, but I did not find it much easier to use.  Try both approaches and find what suits you.  For me, the deal breaker is that the formatting is not completely compatible with Word.

A plain or formatted text transcript is a good start, but I want a more sophisticated transcription tool:

• Annotations note layout, corrections, obscured text and non-text parts of the manuscript.
• Semantic mark-up, tags that tell the computer what the text means, enable further analysis.
• Support for non-standard characters, such as the thorn and yogh that appear in 1700s manuscripts.

A more detailed explanation of why I want these features is explained in the worked example of a property document.

T-PEN transcription interface

T-PEN, Transcription for Palaeographical and Editorial Notation is an academic project intended for digital humanities scholars.  The web based tool includes image analysis functions that highlight lines of text.  The user-friendly interface presents each line of text for transcription.  Annotations, special characters and XML encoding are supported.  XML encoding is an exciting feature because it offers the potential of semantic mark-up.  This is the kind of transcription tool I would like to see developed and adapted for genealogy.