My husband works with computers, not old documents, so one night when he glanced over as I sat transcribing a census page, he cried, "How can you read that?" Used to the uniformity and predictability of fonts on a computer screen, he was baffled by the curlicues and chicken scratches on the old census document. He couldn't read it at all.

You may have felt the same way when you've struggled to decipher handwritten pages about your ancestors, from census pages to deeds to personal family letters and diaries. The answers you're after may be there, but they might as well be written in Martian.