Handwriting: A Case Study

Handwriting can often be difficult to read and is a problem for genealogists. Some of us may be more successful than others in figuring out what we are looking at. Someone (I'll call her Ms. Kowalski) once did a search on 'Hamslans' trying to understand what that was. I immediately realized that what she was looking at was 'Stanislaus'. There was no image included with Hamslans to know conclusively it was Stanislaus but I imagine it was like one I created below.

With the S and t close together and maybe even overlapping, the combination can look like an H. Some letters are often written with 'spikes' such as i, m, n and u. So the three spikes of m in Hamslans is more likely an n followed by an i. I added a dot over the i in my image but maybe the one Ms. Kowalski saw either lacked the dot or it was overlooked. The second spiky n is really a u. This type of error and others are covered in Common Indexing Errors.

Tangentially related to the subject above: This website has two separate components. One component contains posts like this one-- a general topic of interest. The other component is the database section where names and places have been indexed. There is a search box at the top of each page of this site. That search only looks at the posts section of the site which contains very few names. Most people are looking for names and should be looking in the Database section of the website where they are more likely to be successful.

The website creates a log of all the search terms a user might put in the search box at the top of the page. Knowing what people are looking for can help a content creator tailor the content to their audience. So I know that people are looking for names and looking for them in the wrong place-- hence my note in the previous paragraph. 'Hamslans' was a search term someone used that caught my interest and is the justification for this post.