Hi Mary >>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.<< That is exactly right and should govern all you do. But like your "long s" which only *looks* like a modern "f" and in fact on close inspection can usually be seen to be missing a cross piece, the "ff" is the way that the capital "F" was written at that time and in that hand and so should therefore be transcribed as "F" and not "ff". HTH Polly (who has taught palaegraphy classes for Oxford University