One of the blogs I write is the Daily Genealogy Transcriber. On it, I try and post daily a signature or other piece of writing for readers to try and interpret.
The idea behind the Daily Genealogy Transcriber is to see how easy it can be to transcribe the same word or name in a variety of ways. Only a small part of the handwriting is posted. In the case of signatures, that may be all the writing the person did on that document as the clerk, notary, or lawyer wrote out the rest of the document. For this reason signatures can be especially challenging for genealogists to transcribe and why we tend to focus on those items.
The Daily Genealogy Transcriber also includes pieces of handwriting that is not someone's signature. In these cases, I try and post something that can easily be misinterpreted or viewed in several ways.
The purpose behind Daily Genealogy Transcriber is to get people to see how names and other items can be "wrong" in indexes in other finding aids.
And that never hurts.
