Welcome to B & J Mulqueen who have joined this week, and welcome back to Christine Mladen. If you haven't already contributed, we hope to hear from you soon. ****** ****** ****** Thanks to Bill for the 1841 update - must make time to get on-line and check things out properly now Kilmory is up! The issue of interpretation of 'weird' entries is one that often appears on lists south of the border. I could fill this page with examples from my wife's side (all Sassenach). The primary rule I have used in interpretation of ambiguous lower case entries is to count the number of vertical strokes, ignoring the horizontal bits and see if they fit the name in question [e.g. Lonlett for Scarlett - once the 'S' is interpreted incorrectly as 'L' (a common error and equally so vice versa), the 'c' has to become 'o' as 'Lc' just doesn't compute - the rest follows suit.] When the household was literate the enumerator had to translate their writing in the same way that we/indexers now interpret the Enumerator's writing - we know the indexers get it wrong on occasion - the enumerators ditto. Where the enumerator only writes the surname once and uses ditto's we have less chance than when it is written on every line. I have a classic case when the ditto was used, but the family spread over two pages - the enumerator took an each way bet and spelt the surname one way on one page and the other on the next - the indexer faithfully recorded the two variants - I wasn't able to confirm the extra family members until I viewed the film. ****** ****** ****** Feel free to join in and present your own items. Peter Cook cookfmly@bigpond.com List maintainer and Co-host with Barbara < babrown12@optonline.net > of the ButeshireGenWeb mailing list.