Read the Document

Read the Document.

Welcome to Stuck in the Branches. By now you can find records. This guide is about getting everything out of one once you have it, because the index gives you a name and a year, and the document itself gives you the family.

The Index Is Not the Record.

A search result is somebody's typed summary of a document. The document has a dozen things the index never captured: the neighbours, the handwriting, the crossing out, the column somebody left blank. Always open the image. Always.

Look at the Whole Page First.

Before you hunt for your ancestor's line, look at the page itself. What form is this, what year, what place, who filled it in, and what questions does it ask. A page you understand gives up far more than a page you skim for one surname.

Read Every Column, Including the Empty Ones.

People read the name and the age and stop. The remaining columns are where the research is: occupation, can read and write, year of immigration, whether naturalised, how many years married, how many children born and how many still living. An empty column is also information.

Relationships Are to the Head of Household.

In a census, each relationship is to the head of the household, not to the person above. So son, then daughter, then mother in law, then boarder. The mother in law is the head's wife's mother, which means her surname is often your missing maiden name.

Treat Every Age as Approximate.

Ages in a census are what somebody said on the doorstep, sometimes about a person who was not home. They drift, they round, they get flattered. Use an age to estimate a birth year within a few years, then go and find a birth or baptism record to pin it down.

Read the Neighbours.

Look at the households on either side, and on the page before and after. In the nineteenth century your relatives lived next door to each other, married the family across the street, and witnessed each other's documents. Half of the brick walls in this series are broken on the neighbouring page.

Learn the Clerk Before You Read Your Name.

Do not start by staring at the word you cannot read. Read ten entries you already know around it, and learn how this particular clerk forms a capital L, an S, a double s and a final y. Once you know the hand, the impossible word usually reads itself.

The Letters That Trick Everybody.

The usual suspects: a double s written as what looks like a p or an f, a capital L that looks like an S, a capital T that looks like a J, a u and an n that are identical, and a final s that curls away to nothing. None of these are rare. All of them are learnable in an afternoon.

Numbers Lie More Than Letters.

A one with a serif looks like a seven, a five looks like a three, a four looks like a nine, and a zero can look like a six. When a number matters, check it against another record rather than trusting your reading of one hand on one bad day.

Expect Abbreviations and Latin.

Older registers abbreviate hard, and church records are frequently in Latin or Italian regardless of where the family lived. Learn a short list for the records you work in: the words for son, daughter, widow, baptised, buried, witness, and the month names. A one page cheat sheet solves most of it.

FamilySearch Research Wiki, handwriting and language help

Spelling Was Phonetic.

There was no correct spelling of your surname. The clerk wrote what he heard, in his own accent, often from somebody who could not read and could not correct him. Esposito, Espozito, Sposito, Esposita. Search by sound, not by the spelling your family uses today.

The Clerk Wrote What He Heard.

This is why a family can appear under a name they would not recognise. An immigrant says a name in his own language to a clerk who writes it in English, and both of them did their best. Treat your surname as a range of possibilities rather than a fixed string of letters.

Nicknames and Initials.

Giovanni becomes John becomes Jack. Margaret becomes Maggie, Peggy or Daisy. Many records carry only initials, and the middle name you rely on may never appear. Keep a list of every form of a name your family used and search them all, including the ones that look unrelated.

Dates Were Written the Other Way Around.

A date written as three slash twelve can be either March or December depending on who wrote it and where. Note what the document actually shows, and note that it is ambiguous, rather than silently converting it. The same caution applies to a date you read in somebody else's online tree.

The Place Has Probably Moved.

County lines were redrawn, towns were renamed, villages were absorbed, and countries changed entirely. Your ancestor did not move, the border did. Before deciding a record does not exist, find out which jurisdiction held that place in that year, which is exactly what the research wiki is for.

Check the Calendar Change.

In records before the mid seventeen hundreds in English language countries you may meet a year that appears to be two years, written as sixteen ninety one and sixteen ninety two together. The new year used to start in March. The record is not wrong and neither are you.

A Record Proves What Somebody Said.

This is the most important sentence in the guide. A document is not the truth, it is a record of what a particular person told a particular clerk on a particular day. Ask who gave the information. A death certificate's parents are supplied by a grieving relative who may be guessing.

Who Was the Informant.

Weigh every fact by who said it and when. A baptism register written days after a birth by the priest who performed it is strong. An age on a marriage licence given by a bride who wanted to look older is weak. Same family, same tree, two very different pieces of evidence.

Open the image, every time.

Take one record you already have in your tree and read it properly: every column, the neighbours, the informant, the handwriting. Most people find something they missed the first time. We are here when you get stuck.