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When researching family history you WILL have to read handwritten documents.

Sometimes these will be originals and sometimes copies online.

As is the case today peoples handwriting varied greatly with many people adopting their own style.

This can cause problems in identifying what they wrote.

The important things to remember is that you need patience.

Don't guess the words and move on or you may list a wrong name or place of birth and be thrown when more evidence comes to light.

Read the page as a whole and find words that you are sure about to find out how this writer formed their letters.

Look at the word that you can't recognise and find another word on the page that starts with a similar shaped first letter. If you can identify this second word then you can be reasonably sure of the first letter of your mystery word.

Continue like this until you have identified the word.

On a census return the same enumerator will have written many pages so you can even go onto other pages in search of similar shaped letters.

A common mistake is to regard a flourish at the start or end of a word as a letter.

o,a and e can all look very similar in words as can I and l , f and t , n and m etc.

The major commercial sites like ancestry have made many changes to census listings as people have checked the online census pages against the typed translations showing that even experiences transcribers can be caught out by writing styles.

Take your time and you can work it out.