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Tuesday, February 18, 2014

THE DOUBLE "S"

In many of the 19th century and earlier English documents you encounter in your research, you will find a letter that looks like a very odd shaped letter "p".  In this time period a double "s" was written in such a way that it resembles a odd shaped modern "p".  If you find a word that does not look right with a "p" in this location try an "ss" and see if that helps.

Thanks to my daughter Lynne Jones for enlightening me to this oddity in early American documents.  I have run across this many time when indexing records for FamilySearch.



Click on the picture below to see a larger image of some of the examples that are in FamilySearch's Indexing Help.

Happy ancestor hunting.














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