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Reading old handwriting is called palaeography. Old ways of writing, or simply bad handwriting, present a real problem for genealogists. You can learn to read the former, but ghastly scrawls can defeat the most seasoned professional. For old hands, see G.G. Simpson’s Scottish Handwriting 1150-1650 (Tuckwell Press, 1973) and A. Rosie’s Scottish Handwriting 1500-1700: a self-help pack (SRO and SRA, 1994).

www.scottishhandwriting.com offers online tuition on old handwriting, and there are palaeography classes available elsewhere, especially at the ScotlandsPeople Centre.

Older records in Latin can be off-putting, but you can always pay a translator or experienced genealogist. Good guides to Latin include R.A. Latham’s Revised Medieval Latin Word-list from British and Irish Sources (OUP, 1965), and there is a useful list of Latin words used in genealogical documents at www.genuki.org.uk. Here are some basics that appear in legal documents:

•	Annus	year
•	Dies	day
•	Eod. die.	same day
•	Est	is
•	Filia	daughter
•	Filius	son
•	Inter alia	amongst others
•	Mater	mother
•	Matrimonium	married
•	Mensis	month
•	Mortuus	died
•	Natus	born
•	Nuptium	married
•	Obit	died
•	Parochia	parish
•	Pater	father
•	Pro indiviso	undivided
•	Qua	as
•	Sepultat	buried
•	Uxor	wife
•	Vide	see
•	Vidua	widow

This extract from a nineteenth-century sasine or land grant is relatively easy to read: earlier documents can be harder to follow.

Knowing what a document is likely to say can help enormously. Examples of old documents, highlighting where to find the genealogically relevant parts, are in P. Gouldesborough’s Formulary of Old Scots Legal Documents (Edinburgh, 1985).

If you’re stuck over a word you cannot read, look for others in the document that you can. By doing so you can work out how the writer formed each letter, and you can use this technique to decipher otherwise illegible words.