For some time I have had a box here that was sent to me by “P” from New Zealand. It arrived while the family-tree project was already expanding in several directions, and there always seemed to be something more immediate demanding attention: another archive to search, another document to process, another email to answer, another branch of the family suddenly producing new information. Today I finally had enough time to sit down, open the box properly and begin looking through what was inside.
I was expecting family material, of course, but I was not quite prepared for what I found. Among the contents is a set of old handwritten sheets containing names, relationships and dates from the family tree. As I carefully worked my way through what I could decipher, the chronology kept moving backwards: through the nineteenth century, then the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, until eventually I found information apparently reaching all the way back to 1546.
That is an extraordinary date for me to see in material connected with this project. Only recently I was excited about managing to extend some branches of the family into the early 1800s through archival research. Now I am sitting with handwritten papers that appear to contain several additional centuries of accumulated family knowledge. Whether every relationship and date on those pages can ultimately be supported by surviving historical evidence is a separate question, and an important one, but as a research lead this material is potentially invaluable.
The small problem of actually reading it
There is, unfortunately, one fairly substantial obstacle between finding these papers and actually using them: I can barely read them. The handwriting is difficult, some of the names are unfamiliar, and a word that looks obvious at first can become considerably less obvious once I try to place it within the surrounding family relationships. With genealogical material, guessing is particularly dangerous. Misreading a surname or a single digit in a year can send the research towards the wrong person and, once that mistake enters the database, it can quietly contaminate everything built on top of it.
This is therefore not something I want to solve by staring at a poor photograph until I convince myself that I recognise the writing. I need good digital reproductions of the original sheets, ideally at a resolution that preserves the finest details of the handwriting, ink and paper. I am now looking for a very good digitisation service that can scan the pages carefully and at high resolution without damaging the originals. Once that has been done, the resulting images should be far more useful both for manual transcription and for modern image-analysis tools.
The images I am attaching to this post today are consequently only low-resolution working images. They are good enough to show what I found and perhaps allow somebody familiar with the names or handwriting to recognise something useful, but they should not be regarded as the definitive digital copies. As the work progresses, I intend to replace or supplement them with substantially better scans.
Full size 1200dpi image available here.
Full size 1200dpi image available here.
Full size 1200dpi image available here.
Full size 1200dpi image available here.
Full size 1200dpi image available here.
Full size 1200dpi image available here.
This is where other people may be able to help
One reason for putting the material on the blog before the entire transcription is complete is that somebody else may recognise what I cannot. A difficult surname might be perfectly obvious to a person who knows the family or the geographical area. A place name that looks meaningless to me may immediately be familiar to somebody who grew up nearby. Even handwriting itself becomes easier to interpret when several people independently arrive at the same reading.
Once I have the proper scans, I will therefore begin attaching the higher-resolution images here as well. I would very much welcome help from anyone who can identify names, dates, places or relationships on the pages, particularly where the handwriting is ambiguous. I am not looking for confident guesses presented as facts; what is useful is a suggested reading together with an indication of how certain the reader is. Several independent interpretations can then be compared with one another and, more importantly, with historical records.
This collaborative aspect is becoming one of the most enjoyable parts of restarting the family-tree project. Information has been arriving from relatives, researchers, archives, municipalities and people who have no particular reason to spend their time helping me other than an interest in the history. A piece of information supplied by one person can make an archive search possible; that archive can identify another generation; a document from that generation can reveal another town or surname; and suddenly an apparently isolated note begins to connect with the rest of the tree.
From 1546 to a modern family-tree database
The next stage will take time. Before anything from these pages becomes part of the established family tree, I need to understand exactly what the handwritten material says and how the people on the different sheets relate to one another. I then need to distinguish between information that can be corroborated from original or reliable archival sources and information that survives only in these family notes. Both have value, but they are not the same kind of evidence and should not be presented as though they were.
If the earlier generations can be substantiated, however, the implications are rather remarkable. A person recorded in 1546 belongs to a world nearly five centuries removed from ours. At that distance, even apparently simple questions about names, places and relationships become historical questions in their own right. Administrative boundaries changed, languages and spelling changed, churches and states kept records differently, and the availability of surviving documentation becomes progressively less predictable as the research moves backwards.
There is also something rather satisfying about the physical continuity represented by these papers. Somebody, at some point, sat down and wrote these names by hand because the information mattered enough to preserve. The pages eventually travelled to New Zealand and have now travelled back across the world to me in Europe, where I am trying to convert that accumulated family knowledge into a structured digital record that can survive for another generation. The technology has changed completely, but the basic purpose has not.
For now, the task is much more practical. I need to get these sheets properly scanned, preserve the best possible digital copies, transcribe the handwriting without guessing at what I cannot read, and gradually compare the names and dates with whatever historical evidence can still be found. As better scans become available, I will add them to this post so that other people can examine the originals for themselves.
I opened a box from New Zealand today expecting another collection of material to process. Instead, I may have found a roadmap taking part of the family back to 1546. There is a great deal of work between finding that date on a handwritten sheet and being able to say confidently that the family tree really reaches that far, but that is precisely what makes the discovery interesting. I now have several more centuries to investigate.
I remain personally and actively involved in the research. The selection of evidence, interpretation of the material, decisions about what to investigate, and conclusions presented here remain my own. The handwritten material described above has not yet been fully transcribed or independently verified, and information contained in it should therefore be regarded as research material until it can be checked against appropriate historical sources.
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