Deciphering Old-fashioned Handwriting
Old-fashioned handwriting often gives historical documents—such as the U.S. census images—a level of charm and personality, but it can also make those documents difficult to read. These difficulties can lead to transcription errors in the indexes of those documents, and frustrate your research attempts. Having a basic familiarity with the penmanship styles found in older, hand-written documents can open doors in your research that you may not have known were closed, allow you to overcome some transcription challenges, and encourage you to look directly at the original images, which are often the best sources of information for your family history research. Below are a few clues that may help you decipher the hand-written records:

• First, read slowly and with care. Make sure that the words make sense, and don't assume anything.
• Watch for the letter "S" in pairs. The first S in a pair was often written to look like a lower case "f," as in this example:
  
  

  "Jessie" or "Jefree" The name listed here is "Jessie," but could easily be mistaken for "Jefree," a modern variation of "Jeffrey."

• Some letters often look like others. Capital letters: I, F, J, L, S, and T are often confused for other letters, as are the lower case vowels, and also l, m, n, and w. For example, see if you can identify the following name:
  
  

  Is this person named "John Smalle" or "John Snow"? Actually, the index to the census of 1810 lists this individual as "John Inoue" of Stokes County, N.C. A comparison of the letters in this name to other entries on the same page, and a successful search of the 1820 census for a "John Snow" in the same county and state, answers the question.

• If you're having trouble deciphering a word, try saying it out loud in several different ways.
• Take your best clues from the document itself, and read the word or name in context. If the indexed version does not seem to fit, or is out of place in an alphabetically ordered list, then you should rethink the spelling.

Learning to decipher old-fashioned handwriting styles is an interesting area of genealogical focus, and offers tangible benefits to your research. To learn more on this topic, read the following articles:

Reading Early American Handwriting by Dick Eastman
Analyzing Your Ancestor's Handwriting by George G. Morgan
Letter to the Editor: Deciphering Handwriting from Ancestry Magazine