Excerpt from The Latter-Day Saints' Millennial Star, Vol. 66: August 25, 1904The majority of church registers used, to about the year 1800, were books of parchment, made from prepared sheepskins. The writing varies from the neatest efforts of a scholarly hand to the coarsest, all but unreadable scrawl.Most registers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are written in old English text, with Latin abbreviations and Latinized given names, the sur names being unchanged. This writing is quite easily understood by anyone of ordinary education after a little careful study and comparison.The spelling of surnames is varied in the extreme, but can be accounted for by our foreparents being, as a rule, uneducated and speaking various dialects therefore, when the name was spoken the one who recorded would, if not con versant with it, spell it as pronounced. The writer has frequently found one individual's name Spelled in three or four different ways, at the registering of the marriage, and that of subsequent baptisms.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.