Abbreviations Clerks Used and What They Stood For

A working glossary of the Latin and English shorthand you will meet in old records



Clerks who filled out deeds, wills, court minutes, and vital records were trained to write fast, using a standard set of contractions rather than inventing their own shorthand. Paper cost money, court sessions moved quickly, and legal training itself was built around a fixed vocabulary of Latin terms of art inherited from English common law. Once you learn the standard forms, most abbreviations decode the same way across thousands of unrelated documents, which is why they are worth learning rather than guessing at.


Latin Terms That Carry Genealogical Weight


  • et al. (et alii, "and others"): signals unnamed additional parties in a deed, lawsuit, or list, so a single name on an index card does not mean the record names only that person.
  • et ux. (et uxor, "and wife"): the wife joined the conveyance without being named, so you sometimes have to trace her separately through a later deed, a dower release, or a probate file.
  • ux.: wife, used as a plain label rather than a joining phrase, the way vid. (vidua) labels a widow.
  • s.p. and d.s.p. (sine prole, decessit sine prole, "died without issue"): tells a compiler to stop looking for children, since none existed at the time the record was made.
  • ss. (scilicet, "namely" or "to wit"): appears in the caption of an affidavit or deposition just before the county name, marking venue, not a person.
  • decd.: deceased.


Contracted Given Names


Clerks also shortened first names to a standard set of contractions, not personal nicknames.


  • Wm.: William
  • Jno.: John, from the Latin Johannes, and easy to misread as a form of Jane if you do not know the convention
  • Thos.: Thomas
  • Chas.: Charles
  • Danl., Saml., Benj., Robt., Geo., Jas., Jos.: Daniel, Samuel, Benjamin, Robert, George, James, Joseph


A superscript letter usually rode above the contraction, Wᵐ or Thoˢ, and that raised letter is exactly the detail most transcriptions and name indexes drop. That is one reason an indexed spelling sometimes looks wrong even when the clerk wrote it correctly; the FamilySearch Research Wiki keeps a fuller list of these name forms and Latin terms, though it is a general reference rather than a citation you can use in place of the original record.


Everyday Shorthand in Ledgers and Newspapers


  • do. (ditto): repeats the entry directly above it; a column of do. under a surname on a census page or in a store ledger means every person in that column was recorded under that same surname, not that they were necessarily related to each other.
  • inst., ult., prox. (instant, ultimo, proximo): this month, last month, next month, used in 18th- and 19th-century newspaper death notices, so "died the 4th inst." only gives you a usable date once you know the date the newspaper itself was printed.
  • abt.: about, flagging an approximate rather than a recorded date.
  • int.: intestate, meaning the person died without a will, which tells you to look for a letters-of-administration file (admon.) instead of a will.


Where the Meaning Still Trips Up Researchers


The same two letters do not always mean the same thing. Do. usually means ditto, but in an account book it sometimes stands for Doctor, and only the surrounding entry tells you which. Sr. and Jr. before about 1800 usually distinguished any two men of the same name living in the same town, often an uncle and nephew or two unrelated neighbors, not necessarily a father and son, so do not assume a direct parent-child link from the label alone. Keep in mind that an index built from a clerk's contraction is only as good as the person who expanded it: a name entered as Wm in the original but keyed into a database as William, or left as Wm without the period, can send your search past the very record you are trying to find. When an abbreviation changes the meaning of a record, check the original document image rather than trust the transcription.



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