Tips and Tricks

Tips, tricks, and ideas to help with your genealogy research. Explore these posts to find new ways of researching for those elusive ancestors and breaking through brick walls.

Share

“Secretary Hand”

Member Frances Heales mentioned “Secretary Hand.”

This led me to the following info:

It was a style of European handwriting from the 1500s and 1600s and longer for English, German, Welsh, and Gaelic.

This led me to a BYU Script Tutorial on line. There are four main hands or scripts in English documents; Round, Italic, Secretary and Court.

If you have a hard time deciphering old handwriting this should be of help.

It has abbreviations, Latin, numbers and examples of different types of records and the transcriptions. It will also lead you to other sites such as the UK National Archives.

There are tutorials for English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin and Italian documents.