“You can decipher most squiggles”

At the Washington Papers, research editor Kathryn Gehred recently wrote about the questions and challenges involved in transcribing people’s handwritten letters.

After all, our scribbles are often inconsistent and sometimes ambiguous, but we know what we mean to write.

Gehred’s first main example came from young George Washington’s notes on his voyage to Barbados.

In the center paragraph of the notebook, Washington wrote that the crew had “catched a Dolphin.” I wouldn’t want to correct his grammar here, as it shows the way Washington wrote, and likely spoke, when he was 19 years old.

Let’s look as well at the two times he spelled the word “dolphin.” The first time, Washington clearly wrote “Dolphin”; but in the second instance, it looks like he wrote “Dalpin.” There’s not a lot of difference between a script “o” and “a,” and Washington clearly spelled the word correctly once. Should I correct the spelling in the second instance?

I believe on this point editors would disagree on what to do. If this were the only time Washington used an “a” in place of an “o” for the word dolphin, I would correct it, figuring that the “o” looked like an “a” due to sloppy penmanship. However, since he repeatedly wrote “Dalpin” or “Dalphin” elsewhere in the journal, we chose to keep the letter as “a.” I believe showing that young Washington misspelled words, even words he had spelled correctly earlier in the paragraph, carries historical meaning.

I write the above to give readers who do not have a background in transcription a glimpse into some of the issues that transcribers face. In some cases, the handwriting is so bad that you really do need to rely on context for what the author meant to say, even if what you’re looking at on the page is pretty much just a squiggle. Eventually, if you become familiar enough with a person’s handwriting, you can decipher most squiggles.

But what do you do when a person is writing a name? It’s tough to figure out a name from a letter’s context. And you can’t always trust that the person writing the name knows how to correctly spell it—as anyone reading Alexander Hamilton’s and George Washington’s multiple attempts to spell “Kosciuszko” can tell you.

Indeed, Founders Online tells us that in August 1780 Washington and his military aides sent out letters referring to “Kosciusko” and “Kosciusco.” And that was just after Col. Thaddeus Kosciuszko sent headquarters a letter, demonstrating the spelling he obviously preferred.

That said, I can’t spell Kosciuszko myself. I just look it up and copy-and-paste when I need it.

(The image above is a sketch of a dolphin-shaped fountain ornament from eighteenth-century Britain, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)