Overview

If you want to learn to read and know about old handwriting, this is the only book you will need. This is the very first 'teach yourself' book on palaeography, covering all the skills that the genealogist needs to read any document that might be found at any date in English archives. Taking the form of a series of graded exercises in transcription, it works backwards in time from the modern handwriting of the nineteenth century in easy stages to the 'court hands' of the medieval period, focusing on records that are of particular interest to family and local historians. It also provides a unique, self-contained reference guide to palaeography, and to all the different letter forms, symbols and abbreviations that have ever been used in English records. 175 b/w illustrations

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9780750998772

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Reviews

The text is eminently practical throughout, focusing on the types of records that genealogists and local historians use, and want to obtain. * Who Do You Think You Are? magazine * This educational guide will help you master the reading of old handwriting from the 19th Century back to the court hands of the 16th. It covers the terminology used when transcribing, but the main emphasis is on practical learning in order to decipher old documents, on the importance of 'having a go' and persisting. * Family Tree magazine *

The text is eminently practical throughout, focusing on the types of records that genealogists and local historians use, and want to obtain. * Who Do You Think You Are? magazine *

Author Information

Claire Jarvis is a qualified archivist with a PhD in History from Cambridge University. She was a research fellow and data analyst at London University in the 1990s, and co-authored three books and several research papers. She has lectured in family history at Birkbeck College and Morley College. She now runs the successful business Jarvis Transcriptions which provides archive services and transcriptions and translations from Latin of historical documents to genealogists, local historians and academics. She also runs palaeography workshops and online tutorials for local historians in the UK and abroad.

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