When I first started digging into old records and research it was… overwhelming. There were so many names, so many dates, and so many different ways to handwrite the letter “a”. But one of the challenges that threw me off the most was trying to decipher genealogy abbreviations.
THERE ARE SO MANY GENEALOGY ABBREVIATIONS!
At the time, I was stubborn (ok, I’m still stubborn). I tried to use context clues to figure out what the abbreviations meant. Bad idea. While this worked just fine for some words, it also sent me down crazy wrong turns and discouraging dead ends.
For example, I spent a few years feeling very confident that I had a great-great-great-grandmother named Sophia Unk. (…Unk=Unknown)
Anyway, to save other amateur family researchers the trouble of deciphering everything, I put together a handy cheat sheet of some of the most common abbreviations.
The Cheat Sheet
Due to the sheer volume of abbreviations that you might come across in genealogy, this cheat sheet isn’t the be-all and end-all. There are a lot of terms I couldn’t include and a lot of different variations of abbreviations that wouldn’t fit. I also want to point out that these abbreviations are found in English language records. Other languages – well, that requires more cheat sheets.
However, I hope this cheat sheet is at least a helpful starting point! To make it even easier to digest, I broke the cheat sheet down into two small infographics, one for abbreviations starting with A to J and the other with those starting with K to Z. Feel free to print them out, save them to your computer, or bookmark this page so you’ll have them ready when you need them. Download the PDF here!
Using Abbreviations As Clues
So much of family research is piecing together tiny puzzle pieces and hoping none of them have been stolen by puzzle gremlins. Sometimes abbreviations can be that missing piece! But, if you don’t know what you’re looking for they’re very easy to miss.
For example, “a.” is an abbreviation for “about”. Now we’re ready to go, right? Not so fast. If you get caught up on the word about, you might not realize that “a.” can also mean age, acres, ante, aunt, and probably lots of other words that start with a. Since it’s hard to remember all of those possibilities, the most important thing is to keep an open mind and your resources close by.
My mom is an expert at finding clues in strange places, including in stories from family members. Check out her article on that subject here.
Sources:
“Glossary of Genealogical Terms,” Ancestry.com Support,
https://support.ancestry.com/s/article/Glossary-of-genealogical-terms
“Genealogy Abbreviations,” Sam Behling, RootsWeb.org,
https://homepages.rootsweb.com/~sam/abbr.html
