Atlas Obscura – A transcriber on the Isle of Man can decipher almost anything. “…Linda Watson’s company, Transcription Services, has a rare specialty—transcribing historical documents that stump average readers. Once, while talking to a client, she found the perfect way to sum up her skills. “We are good at reading the unreadable,” she said. That’s now the company’s slogan. For hundreds of years, history was handwritten. The problem is not only that our ancestors’ handwriting was sometimes very bad, but also that they used abbreviations, old conventions, and styles of lettering that have fallen out of use. Understanding them takes both patience and skill. “I see the job as a cross between a crossword puzzle and a jigsaw puzzle,” says Watson…Most of the documents that people need to understand, though, are wills and legal papers, which have their own pleasures. “The inventories I love,” she says. “It’s like someone comes to the front door and says, come on in to my house and have a look around.”