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Jun. 18th, 2020 04:03 pmStill fat, but feeling less useless because I found something to do when I can't be useful work-wise. The Boston Public Library has a very large amount of scanned handwritten documents from the Civil War era, and they need them transcribed so they're searchable. So I've been transcribing documents for most of the day. Lots of it is reading other people's transcriptions and filling in blanks, but some of it is transcribing for the first time.
Most of it is the letters of William Lloyd Garrison, and he gets a bit tiresome after a while. Some of it is letters to Z. B. Oakes, who seems to have been a slave broker in Charleston (he was; I just looked him up), and most of the people who wrote to him had bad handwriting or bad spelling or both, so it requires some brain. Besides which, those are hard letters because of the subject matter; "I'm selling this woman because she won't behave and I won't take her back, so get what you can for her." Ugh.
Fortunately I'm pretty good at handwriting (I read doctors' handwriting for seven years at HMS and only gave up in despair twice), and at least WLG could spell. He couldn't write a letter under four pages, though.
Most of it is the letters of William Lloyd Garrison, and he gets a bit tiresome after a while. Some of it is letters to Z. B. Oakes, who seems to have been a slave broker in Charleston (he was; I just looked him up), and most of the people who wrote to him had bad handwriting or bad spelling or both, so it requires some brain. Besides which, those are hard letters because of the subject matter; "I'm selling this woman because she won't behave and I won't take her back, so get what you can for her." Ugh.
Fortunately I'm pretty good at handwriting (I read doctors' handwriting for seven years at HMS and only gave up in despair twice), and at least WLG could spell. He couldn't write a letter under four pages, though.
