Transcription Tuesday – Scottish Handwriting
As you pursue your family history research, you will at some point, encounter difficult-to-read handwriting on a document of interest. Therefore, transcriptions should become a regular part of your research projects. Transcription Skills are developed by transcribing; there is no shortcut. Transcribing documents gives opportunity to make a clear and easy-to-read transcription for future reference and analysis. The National Institute for Genealogical Studies offers a variety of course topics for developing these skills through record groups from various countries. To become familiar with the handwriting of a certain time period, and in particular location, take some time to find out what script was being used. It may surprize some new researchers that not only were there different handwriting styles, but also scripts used only in certain settings. Finding these general rules will save a lot of time. Our Basic Level course: Skills: Transcribing, Abstracting & Extracting is a great place to start to develop your Transcribing Skills. As you go deeper and further back in time, you will encounter unfamiliar text and handwriting scripts. Our Advanced Level course: Palaeography: Reading & Understanding Historical Documents will help you to meet these challenges and to eventually master the handwriting you will encounter in historical documents. If you have Scottish Research, you will need to spend time exploring this website: Scottish Hanwriting.com, hosted by the National Records of Scotland (NRS). It is an online resource that provides tutorials for palaeography in the Scottish documents you will need to access. In our Scottish Records Certificate program, we have courses that will examine…