Thanks so much for the links, your comment and for visiting my blog. I will most certainly look at those tutorial links. I’ve heard of Picasa and know a lot of people use it, but from your description it seems more versatile than I thought. I’m going to have to check that out and play around with it!!

I think you and Patrice have come up with some very helpful ideas for which I thank you both and hopefully at the end of the week when I post about the Challenge, I might even be able to show a transcription for this particular Will!!

Kind regards,

Christine (rootsresearcher)

(The FamilySearch Research Wiki has a few additional links: https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Handwriting:_Online_helps_for_reading_Old_English_Handwriting)

I haven’t actually worked through these tutorials (yet), but they came highly recommended, so I saved the links.

Your will looks like quite a challenge. One thing I’d do (after working through the tutorials) would be to look for examples of wills from this period which have already been transcribed. This gives you a sense of how such documents were organized and what wording was typically used. Ideally you’d like both the transcription and a digital image of the original, but even a few will transcriptions w/o images will help you know what to expect to find in your ancestor’s will.

Also, I always make a color scan of hard-to-read documents using the highest resolution possible (maybe 600 dpi). Then I use Google’s free Picasa software to view the scanned image on my computer. I find Picasa very easy to use, especially when you want to blow up an image and then move around to examine different parts of it. All you do is move the scroll wheel up and it enlarges the image. If the enlarged image becomes too large to all fit on your computer screen at once, then hold the left mouse button down and you can drag the image so the part you’re interested in is visible on the screen. I’ve set my computer so that Picasa is the default program used to view images, so all I have to do is double click on the file name and it opens in Picasa. (Note: Picasa can also be used to keep track of all of the images on your hard drive, and even to do some very basic image editing, but you don’t need to deal with all of that. All you need to do is use it as your default image viewer.)

Kind regards,
Christine (rootsresearcher)