When a stack of creased envelopes arrives from a cousin in Adelaide or surfaces in a Tupperware box in the laundry cupboard, who among us is not tempted to set the letters aside with a sigh? The ink looks faded, the loops look strange, the spelling looks wrong. That is exactly where paleography — the reading of old handwriting — earns its keep, and this guide walks through the method I have followed while working through the Hackworth, Tidwell, South, Brighton, Telford, and McCarthy papers.
Paleography is rarely about decoding a single difficult word. It is about building a slow familiarity with a particular hand, the paper it sat on, and the conventions of the writer's time. The page relaxes, the strangeness fades, and a voice from the past begins to speak again.
In Australia, family letters are unusually rich because so many families arrived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and immediately began writing back. A letter from Sydney to relatives in Cornwall in 1883, or a note from a Queensland property to a sister in Hobart, carries the kind of detail that no official record will, and a careful reading turns a private archive into a shared family voice.
This guide is for amateur archivists with limited time and a kitchen table for a desk. The aim is a clean, verified text you can keep beside the original and, if you wish, share through your own website or a family blog.
Australian homes catch a great deal of sun, and direct afternoon light bleaches iron-gall ink and warms brittle paper beyond what is safe. Choose a north-facing window for soft, indirect daylight, or use a daylight-temperature LED lamp angled from the side. Side-lighting throws the loops and tails of old quill writing into relief, which is half the work of paleography.
A clean sheet of white paper behind the page lifts the contrast without bleaching it. A loupe helps with the tighter loops of mid-Victorian hands, and a soft pencil and a small notebook for unresolved guesses round out the kit. In humid weather — much of coastal Australia from Brisbane around to Perth through the long summer — let the letters rest in a dry room for an hour before opening, so damp paper does not cockle under your hand.
Most family letters from Australia's colonial and Federation periods were written in the round, looped English hands taught in British and colonial schools. Before about 1830, copperplate ruled; after about 1860, a rounder "English round hand" took over. By Federation in 1901, a more upright, business-like hand had become common, and you will see it in many a McCarthy or Telford letter from the early 1900s. Each style has its quirks: long-tailed f, crossed or uncrossed t, r that looks like v, s that looks like f.
Do not begin a letter by reading words. Begin by tracing a single letter — say, the letter "e" — through every line on the page, noting how the writer joins it, whether the eye of the e is closed, and how high the loop rises. Then do the same with "r," "s," "t," and "f." Once you have mapped the writer's alphabet, the words begin to fall into line, and this is the single trick that has saved me the most time, and the one I wish someone had told me before my first envelope from the Tidwell line.
A paleography reference need not be a wall of books. The British National Archives and the National Archives of Australia both publish free online tutorials on reading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hands, and the differences between British and Australian colonial letters are small enough that one set of notes covers both. Jean Bennett's How to Read Local Archives and Ewan Clayton's The Golden Thread are two useful printed works to keep at hand.
For Australian material, the State Library of Victoria and the State Library of New South Wales both publish paleography guides aimed at family historians, and Trove, run by the National Library of Australia, often carries digitised handwriting samples alongside its newspapers. The Society of Australian Genealogists in Sydney holds workshops and printed handbooks that are unusually practical, and many of these resources are reachable from a public library in Adelaide or Perth through inter-library loan. Keep a small notebook of hands you have read, and within a year your notebook will be worth more than any published guide, because it will be a record of your own family's hands.
The simplest method is the one I keep returning to. Lay the letter flat, read it through once without writing anything down, then read it aloud the second time, even if you mumble. Read it a third time, marking every guess with a soft bracket and a question mark in pencil on a slip of paper laid beside the letter, and only then begin typing or writing out a clean draft.
Keep a strict two-line transcription: the original on the upper line, word for word with its old spellings and abbreviations, and a modern reading on the line beneath. When a name or place leaves you unsure, search Trove for the locality and the rough date, because a press mention from the day a letter was written often confirms the spelling of a street in Ballarat or a name on a property near Bendigo.
Australian archives are unusually well organised for family history, and Trove, run by the National Library of Australia, is the entry point most researchers use first. It carries digitised newspapers, gazettes, and government records from every state, and lets you search by name, place, and date. A name that survives nowhere else often survives in a Trove newspaper column.
For government records — wills, land grants, immigration, war service — the National Archives of Australia in Canberra is the central resource, and its reading rooms across the states hold original colonial and Federation records. The State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, the State Library of South Australia in Adelaide, and the Tasmanian Archives in Hobart each hold material that complements it. The Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988 protects personal information about people who are still alive, so seek consent from living relatives before publishing transcripts online.
Nineteenth-century Australian letters are dense with abbreviation because paper, ink, and time were dear. "ye" stands for "the," "wch" for "which," "&c." for "et cetera," "inst." for "instant" (meaning the current month), and "ult." for "ultimo" (meaning last month). Numbers are often spelled as figures, with the year sometimes written as a sum: "18_38/9/22" for September 22, 1838.
Many an Australian writer used British postal conventions well into the twentieth century, so "P. Office" or "P.O." stands for post office, "Recd." for received, and "ansd." for answered. A date at the top of a letter may follow the old "day-month-year" form, and a year written at the close of a line is sometimes the date of writing, not the date of the subject. Keep a glossary in the back of your transcription notebook, because the same writer uses the same abbreviation in the same way for years.
Transcription is the easier half of the work. The harder half is keeping both the original and your typescript alive for the next reader. Store letters flat in acid-free folders, away from direct sun, in a room where the relative humidity stays between forty-five and fifty-five percent — a difficult target in much of northern Australia, where a small dehumidifier is a wise purchase. Keep each letter in its own clear polyester sleeve.
When you must send a letter to a relative or a researcher, use Australia Post's registered or express services so the parcel is trackable and insured. If a letter is too fragile to post, photograph or scan it at 600 dpi and send the digital copy. Before publishing transcripts online, remember Australia's Privacy Act 1988 protects living people; get consent from living relatives whose personal details are mentioned, or keep such details to a private family archive.
| Resource | Format | Best for | Australian access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trove (National Library of Australia) | Free website | Cross-checking names, places, dates | Open from anywhere in Australia |
| National Archives of Australia (Canberra) | Reading rooms + online | Government, migration, war records | Free entry; reading rooms across states |
| State Library of Victoria (Melbourne) | Reading rooms + guides | Victorian-era hands, goldfields records | Open to all; inter-library loan available |
| Society of Australian Genealogists (Sydney) | Workshops + handbooks | Practical transcription methods | Membership for some workshops |
| British National Archives tutorials | Free website | English round hand, copperplate | Open from anywhere |
The letters you sit with this year will outlive you. Read them with care, write them down faithfully, store them in a dry steady room, and the next reader — a grandchild, a cousin in Perth, a stranger from a genealogy forum — will hear the same voice you heard, and the family will stay in conversation across the years.