colons used as a name truncation

[neko]

looking at a 1680 Quaker marriage record, I found several shortened given names, but only two had colons after the names.

Joana: other than adding an h, I cannot fathom what more could this name have to it? she is my 7x great grandmother. she is listed variously as Jane, Jean, Jone, Joan, Johana, etc. in her childrens birth records. if only I could find her marriage record, either to her first or second husband!

Tho: one would assume this is Thomas, but that's not a certainty.

this record is a copy of the marriage record as all names are written in one hand, originals are written in the hand of everyone involved in the wedding.

anyone have thoughts on these colons being used to truncate a name?

[arthurk]

In modern English a convention used by some people (and no doubt ignored by others) is that if an abbreviation doesn't include the final letter of the name or word then it is followed by a full stop; otherwise it has no punctuation other than what the context requires. In earlier times a colon was generally used where we now use a full stop, and if the final letter was given it was sometimes as a superscript with a full stop underneath.

A lot of handwriting from the 17th century and thereabouts (give or take 150 years or so) has the added excitement of abbreviated words and special symbols and/or superscripts to indicate combinations of letters. There are too many for me to go in to here, but if you see something like a tilde '~' over a letter it normally indicates some kind of omission.

Does this help? If you'd like to know more, there are a number of online guides to old writing, one of them here at The National Archives.

Arthur

PS - I wouldn't read "Tho:" as anything but Thomas.

[neko]

I hae to agree, though these were new to me for Quaker records I have seen them in much later records. knowing meanings have changed over the generations I wasn't sure whether these meant something different back then. I do often find either the last letter dropped or an extra e added, depending, often in the same record.

I should drop into the handwriting assistance forum on this site, I've been transcribing early records for years-but that doesn't make me an expert, I'm still learning new things. last night I found a surname I could not make out. it did not help that it was lower case. but they'd written it like most of the fancy H that looks like a scrolly Y...only the other H's were modern H's. I found it in a transcribed record later, it was a V. it's when the handwriting isn't standard that I get new lessons in old handwriting.