Reading old documents

Post the link and I'll take a look (I have a worldwide Ancestry subscription, so should be able to access it).

ETA: as long as the image itself is clear, you shouldn't have to go as far as a university for help reading an old document. There are a lot of genealogy groups on Facebook where people would be happy to help--or you could try the message boards on Ancestry.

Take your time with it and keep coming back to it. My first two books were nonfiction and I used a lot of handwritten 19th century documents as source material. Sometimes if you keep returning to something, suddenly, on one of those views, their writing will suddenly become much clearer to you. Or you slowly start identifying patters. If you can find more documents written by the same person, that will help.

With real difficult to read documents, I'll transcribe it and leave blanks for everything that's not absolutely clear. Then you can start using context while filling in the blanks. And again, just walk away when you're stuck. I recently had two words ending a sentence that I just could not read. Then one of the times I picked it up, I saw it as clear as if I had written it myself.