I have had the pleasure over the last several months of transcribing Bills of Mortality for the Death by Numbers team, and what initially most surprised me is the amount of interpretation my role requires. Just because the bills are what historians would describe as “primary sources,” transcribing them is more complicated than just copying them word-for-word. While it helps that the original bills are in English, I still routinely run into textual issues that require me to pause and think carefully and critically about how to approach the text.