Over the last few months there has been a gradual increase in the number of people who have not been following the guidance in the Hints and Help for Beginners page which can be found at http://freebmd.rootsweb.com/beginhelp.html about what to transcribe when you cannot read all of an entry. The most common areas of misunderstanding that we have been seeing increasingly during District Aliasing over the last few months are as follows. 1. Usage of the hyphen character - instead of the underscore character _ to represent a single character that cannot be read. e.g. ---bridge is wrong and should be written as ___bridge instead 2. When the number of characters that cannot be read is uncertain, a few people are using a collection of underscore characters when the correct thing to do is to use a * character instead. This shows up when we do a few independent lookups of the spellings that we have been unable to alias in any other way, and can be misleading to anyone reading the transcription. When we try to create aliases it is often possible where the appropriate number of _ characters have been used, but where an inappropriate number have been used this can often make it impossible to alias such entries. 3. When the character seems to be one of a couple of possibilities, a few transcribers are using normal brackets / parentheses when they should be using square brackets / parentheses e.g. B_(ce)ulford should be written as B_[ce]ulford e.g. Ba(*) should be written as Ba* 4. Some people are leaving spaces (and in earlier months using commas) between underscore characters e.g. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ which should be written ________ if you are certain that there are 8 characters that you cannot read, or if the entry is handwritten, more probably as * since you probably cannot be sure how many characters you cannot read 5. If there is clearly nothing in a column a ? character should be used, and where both the distric tname and volume name are absent ?,? should be used in WinBMD and ?;? used by anyone who is still using SpeedBMD. The following style of transcriptions are wrong. e.g. Missed when scanned e.g. Possibly lines missed when scanned The majority of transcribers are following the guidance correctly, but if you recognize any of these types of examples as being how you would deal with entries you cannot read fully, then please re-read the guidance again. And keep on transcribing. We're almost at the 100 million unique entries mark now, which is a huge achievement. Well done to all current and previous transcribers. Mary Trevan (FreeBMD District Aliasing Team Co-ordinator)