One of the first songs we learn as children is the “Alphabet Song,” and even though we don’t really understand what “ellamenopee” means, most of us somehow get the sequence of twenty-six English letters down pat by the time we are ready to read. We know, of course, that our language is always changing. Think of all the new words added to our vocabulary just in the past decade. But when you are working with documents generated by previous generations or those created in countries from which your ancestors arrived in America, you may not realize how much alphabets change, and how those changes can affect your family history research.
