Hi Mary, Guy et al, I'm afraid I must disagree with Guy and agree with Polly. If you look at http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~oel/handwriting.html you will see that the capital F which just happens to look like ff is there amongst other capital F representations. It should be transcribed as F as this too is a representation of a capital F, but in a modern font. Just as the long s which just happens to look a bit like an f without the cross bar should be transcribed as s, as that is what was written. Cheers, Liz in Melbourne On Friday, February 27, 2004 5:03 AM, Guy Etchells [SMTP:guy.etchells@virgin.net] wrote: > You are transcribing it correctly put both "f"s in. > It is not the transcribers place to adapt the text to modern usage. > Cheers > Guy > > Mary Seal wrote: > > > I would like some advise please. For quite some time now I have been involved with transcribing parish registers and bishop's transcripts. The advise I was given in the beginning was to trascribe everything as is. (not the "s" which looks like "f" though. Consequently I have been writing Frances and February as they were originally written - ffrances and ffebruary. Now I am being told that I am putting in too many "f"s. > > > > So what do I do? Transcribe as it is written or leave off one of the "f"s? > > > > Regards..............Mary from Ottawa, Canada > >

Greetings! It seems to me that if you are to use 'fancy' fonts, what you are producing is a facsimile, rather than a transcription. Presumably you would include an accent on a vowel if the scribe had splashed a drop of ink above it - a graue mistake! As someone pointed out, the aim is to produce a *readable* version of the original document in the alphabet of our time. To use computer fonts that mimic the original (and will not stand the tests of time and of being transferred between computers) does not fit my idea of a transcription. Regards, Jerry