A few weeks ago I received my copy of the first issue of Discovering Family History, the new magazine from Moorshead publishing. While the aim of this new magazine is directed to the beginning genealogist it is always good to review the basics and possibly learn some new ways to research. No matter how much we know when we start researching in a new area we are beginners also.

        One very interesting article was on deciphering old handwriting. When I first started I knew next to nothing of my grandfather Hansen, I did know he had came to the USA from Denmark, and when I asked my dad or my uncle they both said Ma knew all about my grandfathers (and her) families, but like most genealogists I was 30 years too late to ask Ma as she had been dead that long. My uncle did find my grandfather's address book and when I was at Salt Lake City in the wonderful library there I found a lot of information on my grandfather's family, but it was mostly all handwritten in old Danish script. The later script was pretty easy to read, but as I got back further and further the handwriting became worse and worse, and finally very shaky and even some was in Latin..

        At first, I could hardly read any of the handwriting, Danish script before about 1875 was a lot different than the English script I knew from school days. I bought a book on Danish script, and another on common Danish words for genealogists and slowly I learned how to read the Danish script. After I came home from Salt Lake City I ordered many more films with Danish records for my family and got pretty good at reading the old records. I even wandered by the Danish bulletin board on the old Prodigy classic to practice my Danish. A few years later at a conference I was at had a course on reading the old German script, and since I had found my first German ancestor by then I took that class. I had always heard how difficult the German script was to read, but I found out it was almost the same as the Danish script I had taught myself, I still can not read a word in German, but I can spell out all of the letters in the words. I also found out a lot of very early American records have some Danish-German script letters, that look strange in the American records, but very familiar in German or Danish records. .

        The other article I really liked was called Genealogy Etiquette and Netiquette. There were twelve items on Genealogy Etiquette and five on Netiquette. Most are common sense items such as turning off your cell phone in libraries, citing your sources when you get information from someone else, not marking or highlighting research books and materials in the library or archives. Send a SASE to help the researchers from other areas, offer to pay copy costs, etc.. Be patient, I know you are in a hurry to get the information on your family, but the librarian may have gotten ten requests on the same day. One suggestion is in both etiquette and netiquette is to share your work. On the netiquette set is one to be sure to tell where you found the message they are replying to, and one that I get a lot. I get a query from a message I posted years ago, and do not even remember the original query nor the reply I wrote, so identify the query and date is my suggestion..

        I think Moorshead publishing has another great magazine, so check it out and become a beginner again..