Old Documents
What are the most common problems when reading old documents?
Where can I go for help if the documents are in Latin?
Well, there are transcripts of Latin documents that you can have a look at, and then see the formulae that was used in many of the legal documents, so you can predict where names, dates and places should appear. Also use a Latin dictionary and work your way through.
Are the dates and words important?
Dates in documents actually fix the people who are mentioned in them, in time and hopefully in place as well and they will tell you something about the activities in which they were involved. But the dating system in England, Wales and Ireland and the English dominion before 1752, the calendar year actually started on the 25th of March and so from 1752 onwards when the calendar changed to our present day calendar and the new year begins on the 1st of January, you have to be particularly careful interpreting documents and leave the dates as they appear in a document and then interpret the dates later by modernizing them to our modern calendar.
How can I correctly interpret my findings?
When you're looking at documents, write down the information exactly as it appears in that document. Don't read into it what isn't there, because you might misinterpret certain things which perhaps aren't clear at the time. Sometimes you may find that documents conflict with each other, so the contradictions will have to be sorted out. You need to bear in mind the purpose of the person compiling the document. Was it a legal document or was it a personal recollection that was being recorded? This is because that might be important in the way that you interpret the content.
How do I trace old documents?
When you go beyond the records that are centrally kept, you're going to need to approach local sources. Anything that was created by central government or filed by central government will be kept, usually, in the National Archives down at Kew, or in Scotland or Ireland in the national repositories there, and the same for Wales. But with locally created documents like parish registers and wills, you're more likely to find them in county record offices or in the cases of towns, cities in borough or civic record offices. There is the National Register of Archives, which will enable you to find out where particular sources are kept and you can have a look at this and find out where they are.
What are your tips for handling old documents?
Old documents are unique and irreplaceable, so you must always handle them with care. Don't touch them more than you have to. Certainly don't lean on them, and always use a pencil. That's mandatory in a record office. Never write notes over them or mark them up in any way.
Where can I go for help?
Is there a manual that can help me decipher these words?
There are some online glossaries that you can tap into as well, but certainly there are lots of guides around for translating online documents. Also, dialect glossaries, so you can work out what the words were in particular documents, like wills, for example.
What about regional dialects, how do I decipher them?
Each part of the country, particularly the further back you go in time, will have its own dialect forms of words, which quite often were written down the way that they were pronounced, so they would seem very unfamiliar today. And also you'll have obsolete terminology, particularly for things like farm implements, which are no longer current. There are compilations of dialect words that you can tap into and find out what the meanings of these words were.
How are numbers written in old documents?
Particularly in taxation documents, you're going to find that the amounts of money that people were expected to pay or how much they were assessed on will be written in Roman numbers as opposed to the Arabic numerals that we know today. You have to be wary when looking at those and similarly with dates, as they may be written in Roman numbers as well.
How should I file and store my findings?
A lot of people when they're taking notes will do it on file paper, or they might use worksheets which you can download from the internet. Or you may choose to use a software package, or you could feed it all into a laptop computer. You might choose then to arrange the information that you've discovered into family group sheets, which basically are one set of parents and their children. And then file all the information together family by family, with the latest generation at the top and then going back in time. Also file negative results because it's important to remember exactly what searches you've done. And results that perhaps don't seem immediately relevant - always keep them - because in the light of further research you might find that they turn out to be relevant after all.
How start a local search?
When you've discovered birth, marriage and death certificates and your family census returns as early as you possibly can, feed in the results of your research into your family tree, which you drew up in the beginning. It included information you had gathered from your family members, and then draw up a checklist of the sorts of sources you might consult in order to find the answer to questions like; where was that person born? If you know approximately when and where from the census returns, well, the parish registries would be the next stage. What you need to do is prioritize the sort of sources you want to consult, read up about them, find out where they are and whether you can search in the index as the finding aids to these, but parish registries will definitely be your first results after the census returns. So it's those that you need to concentrate on in your checklist. Don't be too ambitious. Don't list more than 10 items on your checklist at a time, because if you are too ambitious you will very quickly get frustrated, and what you really need to do is to stay focused on the person and the event that you are after, and take each step at a time.
