Teach Yourself Palaeography

A Guide for Genealogists and Local Historians

Claire Jarvis

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780750998772
• eBook ISBN: 9781803991276

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. Using a series of graded exercises in transcription, Teach Yourself Palaeography works backwards in time in easy stages from the modern handwriting of the nineteenth century to the court hands of the medieval period, focusing on records that are of particular interest to family and local historians. The book 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Nineteenth and Eighteenth Centuries
• 2 The Later Seventeenth Century
• 3 The Sixteenth Century: Records in English
• 4 The Sixteenth Century: Records in Latin
• 5 Court Hands
• And Finally
• Answers to Exercises
• Appendix A: Glossary
• Appendix B: Transcription Conventions
• Appendix C: Typical Letter Forms
• Appendix D: Marks of Abbreviation, Punctuation and Correction
• Appendix E: Numbers: Numerals, Money and Dates
• Sources