How to Read Historical Handwriting

As history recedes into the distant past, we've actually conserved a lot of historical records. If you're wanting to go looking through an old record for some great insights into historical situations, beware, hand-written archives can be downright hard to read. Because of style changes and other big differences between our world and the world of the long-passed writers, you'll have to pay attention to details to decipher the often cryptic pages.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Learn to decipher cursive hand. This kind of linear writing has largely gone out of style these days, but in most of the "old times" of America, it was very much in vogue. You'll have to get good at seeing how letters stand out while connected to each other, and with some of the scrawling hands that wrote old records and genealogies, it might not be easy.

2. School yourself in language evolution and old English. If your historical handwriting is old enough, it may incorporate some of the characteristics that our modern English inherited from Gothic/Germanic language. Knowing a bit about the silent e or other phonetic changes may help you.

3. Figure out other changes in handwriting that have occurred over the years. One of the main ones is the changing of the "s" from an "f" style letter to the current "s" shape. Being adept at picking out these changes will definitely help you.

4. Learn about old abbreviations. For lots of items from names to occupations to inventories, record keepers used different kinds of shorthand to conserve ink. These may be cryptic at first, but with some practice, you may be able to become an expert on fleshing out words with missing syllables.

5. Read historical handwriting with an eye for simplified phonetics. Some writers of antiquity tended to write words as they were pronounced, making it hard to read by today's standards.