Will the colonial spelling be modernised?

Not unless you ask for it. The default keeps what the scribe wrote, including b for v, y for i and the cedilla, and marks any letters supplied when a contraction is expanded. A modernised version can be produced alongside the diplomatic text if you need one for reading.

How are Nahuatl, Quechua or Tagalog words handled?

They are transcribed as they stand and flagged as belonging to another language, not corrected towards Spanish. If you say which language to expect, the transcription keeps its spelling variants intact, which matters when the same village is spelled three ways in one file.

Can it work from a nineteenth-century facsimile of a lost document?

Yes, and lithographic plates are often easier than the original because the strokes are clean. The caption should always say that the image is a facsimile, since the plate has already made editorial decisions about faint or damaged passages.

Are caste and status terms transcribed as written?

They are. Words like español, mestizo, indio, mulato or esclavo are part of the record and are kept exactly as the scribe wrote them, in the position where they stand. Changing or omitting them would falsify the register.

What about the address and the docket on a folded letter?

They are transcribed as separate blocks with their position noted — the sobrescrito on the outer fold, the Council’s note of the day the letter was seen, and any later archival marks. Together they show how long the letter took to cross the Atlantic.

Spanish · c. 1550–1800

Read the paperwork of the Spanish Indies

A viceroy writes byrrey and serbyr, a parish priest fits a caste term and three baptisms into six lines, and an accountant runs pesos, reales and tomines into the same abbreviation. Evidano transcribes letters, cabildo books, registers and mission papers from the Spanish Indies without modernising the spelling, keeps the address and the docket separate from the text, and marks the words it is unsure of instead of turning an indigenous place name into the nearest Castilian one.

Upload a page See the samples

Sample pages

Real pages from public collections, shown beside their transcriptions. Pages whose transcription is still being checked are marked.

A lithographed facsimile of thirteen lines in a compact, upright sixteenth-century hand. — Sample 1. The opening of the letter that Luis de Velasco, viceroy of New Spain, sent from Mexico City to the Emperor Charles V on 12 July 1552, reproduced photolithographically in the Cartas de Indias of 1877. The interest is in the viceroy’s own spelling: bynyese for viniese, serbyr for servir, byrrey for virrey, resydençya for residencia, with y for i and b for v almost everywhere.

A lithographed facsimile of ten long lines in a large, sweeping late sixteenth-century hand. — Sample 2. The first page of the letter in which Martín Enríquez, viceroy of New Spain, asked Philip II once more to relieve him of the office, written at Mexico City in October 1576 and reproduced in the same 1877 collection. Nothing here is a clerk’s work: ten sweeping lines to the page, merçed cut down to md under a stroke, and V. M. standing in for Vuestra Magestad.

Large drawn capitals reading LIBRO PRIMERO above five lines of a rounded calligraphic hand. — Sample 3. The title page of the first minute book of the cabildo of Zacatecas, in the state archive there, which covers the years 1557 to 1586. The drawn capitals and the five lines beneath them were added when the volume was rebound in the eighteenth century and are attributed to José de Rivera-Bernárdez, count of Santiago de la Laguna; they record the government of this muy noble y leal ciudad de Nuestra Señora de los Zacatecas and count the book at ciento y dos foxas.

The right-hand leaf of a paper wrapper inscribed with five lines of an eighteenth-century hand ending in a large flourish. — Sample 4. The wrapper of a cantada with transverse flutes for the feast of St Peter, composed by Juan Matías de los Reyes and dated 1768 at Antequera de Oaxaca. Five lines of a practised eighteenth-century hand give the scoring, the dedication to el Príncipe de los Apóstoles, the incipit and the composer’s name, written in the shorthand of a cathedral music archive: Sr, Sn, Pº and the ampersand of &a for etcétera, closed by a rúbrica.

What colonial writing looks like, and why it varies so much

From the middle of the sixteenth century the offices of Mexico City, Lima, Santa Fe, Guatemala and Manila reproduced peninsular practice at a distance of months. The same escribano training, the same formularies and the same abbreviations crossed the Atlantic, so a will drawn in Zacatecas looks like a will drawn in Valladolid — but the hands drift. Humanistic round and italic writing, taught in the colegios and used for anything meant to be read by a superior, sits beside the looped cortesana and the tangled procesal that clerks had learned at home, and a single file may pass from one to another as it travels from a village alcalde to a viceroy’s secretary. Because ships were lost, important letters were sent again as duplicado and triplicado, so many texts survive as several scribal copies, in different hands, of one original.

The spelling is not modern Spanish and should not be made to look like it. b and v change places (byrrey, serbyr, boluntad), y stands where a modern text has i (dyas, myll, resydençya), ç survives before a, o and u, x holds the old palatal sound in dixo and México, and h comes and goes. Contractions are those of the peninsula plus a colonial layer: V. M. and V. Md. for Vuestra Magestad, S. C. R. M. at the head of a letter to the king, dho and dha, mrs for maravedís, ps and rs for pesos and reales, tos for testigos, and superscript endings on names and ordinals. Titles, religious formulae and the flourished rúbrica after a signature are as fixed as the vocabulary.

The genres are administrative before they are anything else. A viceregal letter carries the address on the outer fold and, on its arrival in Spain, a docket noting when the Council of the Indies read it; cabildo books are foliated and headed in the margin; parish and mission registers set an entry against a name and a status or caste term; tribute lists, mining accounts and freight receipts run in columns of pesos and reales; bilingual doctrinas and vocabularies place an indigenous language beside its Spanish equivalent. Nineteenth-century collections photolithographed some of these documents, which is occasionally the only surviving witness to a hand.

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

Spelling that a spellchecker will destroy

An engine tuned on modern Spanish quietly repairs byrrey to virrey and myll to mil. That is not a small tidying: the spelling of a colonial document is evidence of who wrote it and where they learned to write, and once normalised it cannot be recovered from the transcription.

Names no dictionary contains

Nahuatl, Quechua, Maya, Aymara, Tagalog and Visayan personal and place names run through these documents, often written differently on successive lines by the same scribe. Language models pull them towards Castilian words that look similar, which corrupts exactly the terms researchers search for.

The sheet holds more than the letter

The outer fold carries the address, the arrival docket adds a summary and a date in another hand, and archivists have since numbered the leaves. Merged into one block of prose they make the document look confused; kept apart they date its journey from the Indies to the Council.

Ink, damp and second-hand witnesses

Iron-gall ink eats through paper, tropical damp stains it, and text from the reverse shows through. Where the original has been lost, what survives is a nineteenth-century lithographic facsimile whose clean black strokes hide exactly the kind of ambiguity a transcriber has to record.

Who works with this material

Archives and libraries of the Americas

Colonial series are consulted from every continent, and most requests begin with a name or a place rather than a shelfmark. Searchable text of the first folios of each file lets an archivist answer a question without shipping images across the world.

Family historians in registers of baptism and marriage

Parish and mission books record parents, godparents, origins and status in a few crowded lines. Transcribing them exactly, including the caste terms that a modern reader may find uncomfortable, is what makes the entries usable as evidence rather than as summary.

Historians of language and evangelisation

Doctrinas, confesionarios and vocabularies set Nahuatl, Quechua, Maya or Tagalog beside Spanish. Both columns have to survive the transcription, with the indigenous words unaltered, or the manuscript loses the thing that makes it a linguistic source.

Editors of documentary collections

Anyone continuing the work of the nineteenth-century collections needs a first transcription that keeps the original spelling, marks expansions and records the dockets and endorsements, so their edition can be checked line by line against the file.

Getting the best transcription

Step 1

State the region, the decade and the languages

A file from Manila in 1750 and one from Michoacán in 1580 differ in vocabulary before they differ in letterforms. Naming the audiencia and the period, and any indigenous language you expect on the page, does more for accuracy than any other instruction.

Step 2

Forbid modernisation explicitly

Ask for the spelling to stand as written — b for v, y for i, ç, x — with expansions of contractions marked, and say that no word is to be corrected towards modern Spanish. Then check one paragraph closely before trusting the batch.

Step 3

Ask for the fold, the docket and the margins

Request the address on the outer fold, the arrival note of the Council, the marginal summaries and the archival numbering as separate labelled blocks. In a register, ask for one block per entry so that names and dates stay attached to the right baptism or burial.

Step 4

Give it the names you already know

Supply the parish, the encomienda, the mine or the ship, and the surnames you expect to meet. Recurring names steady everything around them, and a list of known forms is the quickest way to stop one person appearing under three spellings in an index.

Frequently asked questions

Will the colonial spelling be modernised?: Not unless you ask for it. The default keeps what the scribe wrote, including b for v, y for i and the cedilla, and marks any letters supplied when a contraction is expanded. A modernised version can be produced alongside the diplomatic text if you need one for reading.
How are Nahuatl, Quechua or Tagalog words handled?: They are transcribed as they stand and flagged as belonging to another language, not corrected towards Spanish. If you say which language to expect, the transcription keeps its spelling variants intact, which matters when the same village is spelled three ways in one file.
Can it work from a nineteenth-century facsimile of a lost document?: Yes, and lithographic plates are often easier than the original because the strokes are clean. The caption should always say that the image is a facsimile, since the plate has already made editorial decisions about faint or damaged passages.
Are caste and status terms transcribed as written?: They are. Words like español, mestizo, indio, mulato or esclavo are part of the record and are kept exactly as the scribe wrote them, in the position where they stand. Changing or omitting them would falsify the register.
What about the address and the docket on a folded letter?: They are transcribed as separate blocks with their position noted — the sobrescrito on the outer fold, the Council’s note of the day the letter was seen, and any later archival marks. Together they show how long the letter took to cross the Atlantic.

Related scripts and pages

Procesal and Procesal Encadenada Records, c. 1500–1650The peninsular notarial writing that colonial clerks brought with them.Cortesana Court and Chancery Documents, c. 1400–1550The chancery hand of the offices that first governed the Indies.Portuguese Colonial Italic and Mixed Hands, c. 1550–1900The parallel case in the Portuguese empire, from Brazil to Goa.All Spanish hands and document typesEvery Spanish domain from Visigothic script to colonial mixed hands.Image to TextSearch all supported languages, scripts and document types.

Transcribe your colonial Spanish documents

Upload a viceregal letter, a cabildo book or a parish register, choose Spanish Colonial Humanistic and Mixed Hands, and check the names and spellings on one folio first.

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