Visiting the National Archives yesterday gave rise to a couple of questions…
I find the cursive writing very hard to read. Were they more practiced at reading it in the day or maybe just had more time to concentrate on each letter/word (life didn’t mve as fast in those days). Still you’d think that they might take more time to write more legibally.
Whats with the “s” that looks like an “f”? Does it have a name? What are the rules for using it? I notice that a normal “s” was often used at the end of a word or when two were back to back. When did they stop using it?
We are often involved in transferring public records from original documents to digital formats to enable searches - these electronic versions are used extensively by geneologists.
I personally do not do this work, but I often see it when walking past those who do.
I find that it is largely a matter of practice, but the thing that does make it hard is irregular fading. You might find it easier to read if you tilt the page obliquely away from you, this has the effect of ofreshortening the characters, and you can also compensate to a degree for the lean angle of the writing.
Once you do get used to this type of writing, you begin to appreciate it. The stuff we deal with is written with practised hands, and is artful in itself - as an aside, it makes reading grave markers easier too, useful if you want to trace your ancestors, and if you start going into parish registers and the like, its essential to have a good grasp of this style of cursive.
Eighteenth and nineteenth century handwriting is not inherently more difficult to read than most other forms of handwriting. Any unfamilar style just takes time and experience before you can read it easily. And, for children learning to read, that is no less true for modern handwriting. Read enough old documents and you eventually forget that reading them was ever difficult at all.
(Although it is true that there were certain types of older hands that were deliberately designed to be difficult to read.)
The clerks in certain government offices, most famously in Chancery, developed their own special in-house styles of handwriting, not so much because they wanted their documents to be difficult to read but more to prevent anyone else being employed to write them. It was a form of restrictive practice.
I find Chinese very hard to read but it is only because I have little practice. The few signs I do recognise are easy. Anyone can read well written cursive with practice. But I have to say I have spent many many hours decyphering the will and other documents of my ancestor who died in 1812. The whole thing is incredibly complex and subject to a lot of guessing and was facilitated by the fact that I have the same document translated in English and in Spanish so when one language is not clear you can try the other one. And it still was a bitch.
Cursive was developed for ease of writing, not for ease of reading. Imagine having to write with a quill dipped in ink.
APB, I’ve got this idea in the back of my head that members of the gentry took a certain pride in writing horribly, so as not to seem like some damned clerk. Is there anything to this?
I’ve never heard that one, although it is true that writers of private correspondence had less reason to write neatly than those employed to write formal documents.
There are also always cases that are merely bad handwriting. Historians find those documents difficult to read just as much as most people at the time would have done.
Bad handwriting indeed but you’d think that the writers of certain documents that have survived would take extra care to make sure their intent was understood. For example, the dif between a 19th century grocery list and a military order to bring up the artillery pronto.
Another thing … I can’t remember seeing anything very old that wasn’t cursive (printing?) or in block capital letters. It wasn’t “shouting” back then was it?
Unrelated, but one of the things I hold most dear about my mother is the letter she wrote to my Dad’s parents about her beloved “Billy” and how much she was looking forward to coming to the US with my Dad and me.
My Mom and Dad met after WWII, fell in love and had me.
My mother was German and was very young when they both fell in love and stuff.
But before we left Germany for the US, she wrote a letter with such superior penmanship and I only came in possesson of it after she dies in '92.
Y’all, it wasn’t just what she wrote, it was the style of writing she used! It must have taken her 2 hours to write those 3 pages.
It depends upon the writer – just like today. I did some historical research, reading deeds from the late 17th through the mis 18th century, and some were perfectly legible and understandable, while others were so hard to interpret that my transcriptions were filled with lacunae. It’s pretty much like today – anyone forced to try and read my handwriting is going to be very frystrated (which is why I type). But I know lots of folks with beautiful handwriting.
What gets me isn’t the medial S’s – it’s the ampersands. It took me a while to realize that the weird figures I saw were really supposed to be ampersands (&). They were rotated 90 degrees from the way I expected, because they were apparently made by doing a strong downward stroke, then going back up, looping around to the left, and making a horizontal stoke – all as if you were making a “Plus” sign (+) without lifting your pen from the paper.
Really? I thought that was pretty common. In fact, I often write them that way, a habit I picked up from my mom (I’m 26, she’s 64). I had, in fact, always thought of it as a quick way of writing a plus sign. Although, since the & is really just a stylized version of the word “et” (meaning “and” in Latin), that style of ampersand is just another way of combining the e and the t.
Michael Sull is considered the master of Spencerian penmanship. He did our Certificate of Marriage and it is just beautiful!. He teaches it through books and DVDs, I think. He is developing a new course which will include training for youngsters.
If you look at the heading on that page, you will see examples of a terminal t and a terminal p that may look a little unusual to you. The t is not crossed and the stem on the p is high. When I was learning cursive in about 1951 or 1952, we were given the option of making a terminal t and terminal p that way or the more familiar way.
FTR, I found the handwriting of those about 35 or 40 years older than I to be a little difficult to read. I’ve also noticed a change in the handwriting of those who are about that much younger than I. Does the handwriting of a 65 year old look strange to you if you are 25?
I don’t know how common it is, but I didn’t make the connection to ampersands until I started studying the manuscripts – I’[d always laboriously made the ampersand as a soret of backwards G-Clef before that.
I, too, picked it up from my mother, and also thought of it as a quick way of making a “plus” sign, but I’ve nbever tread or heard it articulated that way before. I’ve seen many sites that sa that the ampersand is derived from “et” (and the very name “ampersand” shows this), but the similarity to the “Plus” sign makes me suspect that the ampersand and the plus sign are related, and more deeply than having the “t” of “et” involved.
