Trying to decipher and transcribe old letters is something I’ve been doing for a couple of decades. I wish I could say it gets easier. For me, it hasn’t much. Partly because I was transcribing in spurts. Heavy into transcription for a month, and then not touching for three to six months. The transcription skill is similar to learning and using a foreign language; consistent use is better.
I was initially working only with letters from the Civil war era and the script wasn’t quite as removed from the cursive I was taught. Then I started working with older letters from the early 19th, or late 18th century and deciphering got harder. The S that looked like an f was more in use and spelling was less standard.
In the process of working with old letters, I did learn about name abbreviations like Saml for Samuel and Jno for John. Other abbreviations I ran into related to dates. Ult. for the Latin ultimo meaning the month preceding the current month. Inst.for the Latin phrase instante mense, meaning in this month.
For this week’s class exercise in transcription using the early papers of the American War Department, I picked a letter that related to procurement from the Springfield Armory in 1800. I picked that letter because I have a background in Army acquisition and I wanted to if there were similarities between 1800 and the last 20 years. There were. The letter refers to quarter end for fiscal measurement, and the author signs the letter “most respectfully”. In the Army today we report money quarterly, and every other time period, and we sign off with “very respectfully” or “respectfully”. Interesting to see the 200 years of continuity come through the difficulty in deciphering writing style.
Nonetheless, early 18th and 19th-century cursive is difficult to read. What has helped me are guides like Kip Sperry’s “Reading Early American Handwriting”, or the guide Cheek Genealogy left here: http://www.moonzstuff.com/articles/oldhandwriting.html
For some scribbles, however, I am unable to decipher them. If it just looks like a wavy line unless there is some clear flow in the sentence there is not much to be done. Luckily, the 1800 Springfield letter didn’t have too many of those. But where it’s better than a scrawl but still somewhat garbled then multiple interpretations can come into play.
I interpret the xxxxxx Ely in the Springfield letter as Hudson Ely. I could see where someone else could interpret it as Thomas Ely. I am not sure if my read of the name Hudson is correct. If a transcription is crowdsourced as many are today to save money, then the crowdsourced transcription needs review.
On another note, we got a tour and an interactive discussion with the archivists at the George Mason University Special Collections Research Center (SCRC). One of the archivist’s was scanning C-SPAN administrative records. It was instructive to see the lighting used to eliminate shadows and hear why the different digital file formats are used. It caused me to relook TIFF and JPEG definitions, and re-think whether for some of my historical mapping projects downloading the TIFF file would be better despite the much large file size.
