Terminology has changed significantly since the days of our ancestors, and you are likely to run into words and phrases you don’t understand while performing your genealogical research. In time, as you read through various documents, you may begin to make some sense out of this antique jargon.
Sometimes you can locate old terms in a regular dictionary, such as The Oxford English Dictionary. Genealogical dictionaries, such as Abbreviations & Acronyms: A Guide for Family Historians or What Did They Mean By That? A Dictionary of Historical and Genealogical Terms, can also be a great help for making sense of old terminology. A good book for old legal terms, which were often written in Latin, is Black’s Law Dictionary.
You may also notice inconsistency with capital letters as you read through records. Sentences and proper names may begin with a lower case letter, while capital letters may appear in the middle of sentences. Capital letters used in the middle of sentences were often meant to emphasize an important word, such as Born, Married, or Died.
Another old quirk is found in punctuation-or rather a lack thereof. Punctuation was not important in older times, and therefore it was infrequently used. Equal signs were often used to carry a word to the next line or page (today we use a hyphen). Other times, words may be written twice when they are carried to the next line or page.
Concrete spelling rules did not appear until the 1800s, when Noah Webster published the first American dictionary. Therefore, it is common to find words spelled in a variety of ways in old documents. Like punctuation, proper spelling was simply not important to our early ancestors.
Deciphering old terminology takes a bit of practice, and a lot of patience, but in time many of the old word, phrases, and grammar usage will become familiar and easier to read.
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