Advanced Primary Source Search Strategies

"Palaeography is the study of old handwriting. This web tutorial will help you learn to read the handwriting found in documents written in English between 1500 and 1800. At first glance, many documents written at this time look illegible to the modern reader. By reading the practical tips and working through the documents in the Tutorial in order of difficulty, you will find that it becomes much easier to read old handwriting."

"This website offers guidance in the deciphering of documents written in handwriting styles or alphabets no longer in general use. The tutorials and materials gathered here are meant to help a variety of people – students, researchers, historians, genealogists, and indexers – learn more about old scripts and how to make use of that knowledge to analyze and interpret the past. The concentration is on western European scripts, particularly those in use between 1500 and 1800. There is general introductory material about the history of writing and the development of different scripts (or hands) as well as extensive, and interactive, language-specific materials."

If you're interested in reading documents from the late middle ages and early modern era in Britain, this course will help you learn what to watch for.

Some of the transcription projects included here in the guide are also on this list provided by the AHA, but not all of them. It's worth checking out to see if there are any other projects of interest to you.

Current transcription, tagging, and review projects include the Susan B. Anthony papers, the papers of Mary Church Terrell who was an advocate for African Americans and women, and the Walt Whitman papers.