Handwriting suggestion

It occurs to me in reading Steve Arman’s query on page 41 of the April issue, that he may well have already discovered the correct marriage of his 4x great grandmother Mary Davis.

Allowing for errors in transcription and ambiguous writing ‘Mary Pain’ could easily be ‘Mary Davis’. The P could be a D and the ‘vis’ could be read as ‘ in’. Try writing it down. It only takes a curl on the last letter and the dot of the letter ‘ i’ to read one as the other. D Lloyd

Editor replies: That’s a great suggestion and we’ve passed it on to Steve. It’s important to consider potential mistranscriptions during your research and always look at the original document.