Familiar Record Practices: Irrelevant Capitals, Punctuation, Look-Alike Letters

Irrelevant Capitals

There was a tendency to capitalize words for no apparent reason, and

capitalized words might be found anywhere within a sentence. There seems

to have been a tendency to capitalize nouns, but it was not consistent. Some

writers simply capitalized certain letters whenever they began a word with them,

 and there is some variation from scribe to scribe.

Punctuation

There are two main types of exceptions to this kind of punctuation in early records: 

1.  In some writing you will find an occasional comma,
2.  In other writing you will find no punctuation at all.

One practice followed by some scribes was to use dots (•) to indicate pauses.

1. A dot  on the line indicated a brief pause. 
2. A dot above the level of the writing indicated a full stop,  
3. A dot between the words indicated a phrase separation.

These dots, when used, took the place of all other punctuation.

Look-Alike Letters

Another problem, only partially observable in the sample documents shown

capital letters / and / are very difficult to distinguish, as are also U and V.

(In the original Roman alphabet there was only one letter for each of these

pairs.) L and S and even T and F are also easily confused.

However, much depends on the scribe, and there are frequently other capital letters

which are confusing. Study the handwriting very carefully in order to make a distinction

whenever there is a problem.

Initials in names are the chief villains and are especially troublesome in census returns

(and these are in the nineteenth century) and other lists of names.

Small, or lower case, letters also cause many misunderstandings. Curlicues

on the letter d above the line and on y and g below the line can be

troublesome as they often run into other letters, even on other lines of

writing. But they are not much trouble when you recognize them for what

they are.

Another troublesome character is the long 5' (^). To the inexperienced observer this

may appear as either an / or a p or even as a double or double p depending on how

it was used. It was seldom used at the beginnings or endings of words but was almost

always used as the first letter of the double J and frequently in other instances. This

usage persisted into the middle 1800s.