How to Read the Unreadable

by Wanda Tucker ~

In the course of genealogical research, I have come across documents which would seem to be completely unreadable. They are in the public domain, many others have seen them, and no one has ever translated them. This can be because of damage, but many times it is simply a matter of what I call “doctor’s handwriting.” We’ve all seen that prescription from the doc which we can’t believe a pharmacist is expected to decipher. But they have a frame of reference; they know the generally prescribed medications and dosages, so they manage. But we don’t always have a working knowledge of what “might” be on the page. So what do we do?

A few years ago, as a fairly new genealogist, I came across an entry in the 1840 United States Federal Census. This particular ancestor of mine was controversial in the family, since it was widely thought, but not yet proved, that he was a Revolutionary War patriot. Some members of the family had paid quite a bit to the pros, who came up with nothing. But this illegible entry on the 1840 Census really piqued my interest.

In 1840, the US government was interested in finding out just how many Revolutionary War pensioners they were still paying. One column of the Census read “pensioners for Revolutionary or military services, included in the foregoing.” And there was an illegible entry in that column for my ancestor. Part of it was readable; it said his name, Edward Williams, then some words and then his age, a whopping 102. But many family members and professional genealogists had searched high and low, and there was no pension for Edward Williams that could be our ancestor. And no one had ever been able to figure out the words between his name and his age.

That is where thinking outside the box and using unusual techniques comes in. In looking at the Census, it turned out that the enumerator of it was a member of a collateral family, who would presumably have known my ancestor quite well. That made me think there had to be something relevant in those illegible words, else why write anything at all? I wondered if there might be other Revolutionary War soldiers in the same area, and if so, did the same man enumerate them? I went looking, and eureka! There was one.

John Dillard was a well-known Revolutionary War pensioner from the same county where Williams lived. He had an entry in the pensioner column. It clearly read “under pay.”

Here is where the tricky bit comes in. I copied the entry in Edward Williams’ pensioner column into a PhotoShop document. I then copied in the entry from John Dillard. And just like that, I could read at least two of the words in Williams’ column. Those words were “under pay!” But there was more there I still could not read. Without the word before under pay, the mystery remained.

In cases like this, one way to decipher a word in a document is to look for it in other places on the document where it is legible. The word I still couldn’t read didn’t appear anywhere on the pages I had, though. So I did the only thing I could think of; I started looking for individual letters. As you might imagine, this was a tedious process!

When I had first looked at the entry, wishful thinking had led me to believe it read “Revolutionary,” because I thought I could see a ‘t’ and a ‘y.’ But I now knew the ‘y’ was the end of ‘pay.’ So I looked around and found a letter ‘t,’ and copied it into my PhotoShop doc. It was a match! There only appeared to be two more letters, and further searching led me to an ‘n,’ and finally an ‘o.’ And with that, the mystery was solved!

Edward Williams’ pensioner listing in the 1840 Census read “Edward Williams not under pay 102.”

Of course this meant to me that he did serve; his enumerator, a close neighbor and collateral family member knew about his service, and for some reason he was not receiving a pension. Maybe he never applied. We will likely never know. But thanks to some unusual thinking and PhotoShop technology, we do know what an entry on a 175+ year old document means.

And there you have it. If you have an entry on a document that seems impossible to decipher, take some time to compare it to whatever else you have. That might mean words on a different page by the same writer, it may mean finding one letter at a time, but you never know. You might just read the (seemingly) unreadable!

Edward Williams Pension Experiment 2