Every exam should include a verification that one can read script. This became blatantly obvious to even the fly on the wall today when I attempted to review a boundary with a 56-year old surveyor who can "read cursive, just not the stuff from the 1800's."
> Every exam should include a verification that one can read script. This became blatantly obvious to even the fly on the wall today when I attempted to review a boundary with a 56-year old surveyor who can "read cursive, just not the stuff from the 1800's."
Sometimes it's less a matter of reading and more a matter of deciphering. In my home county there were a couple of 19th century County Recorder employees whose handwriting can only be decrypted by relying on context with some trial-and-error thrown in. Wrap it all up with the fact that the information is only conveniently available on microfilm, and you have a package that's really no fun to open.
This is one I looked at yesterday. The writing on it is actually pretty clear, but I still have to look at it for a while to make it out.
Ugh!
I grow weary far too soon these days. There was a time when I viewed deciphering such writing as a fun challenge.
The "State Specific" portion of the Oklahoma LS exam 35 years ago was pre-NCEES. It consisted of 25 questions prepared by Herman Smith (OK LS92). A portion of the exam was Xerox copies of some ca. 1870 notes. If you couldn't decipher the notes, you couldn't answer the questions, plain and simple. I thought this was a pretty good exercise for licensure. And if you were familiar with Herman's M.O., you noticed he did not pick notes that were easily read.
BTW - My score was 93%.
Hmmm...I'm 56, maybe that explains why I can't read that #%$&@$!*$%@ stuff from the 1800s!
(That was cursive, btw...)
> ... #%$&@$!*$%@ ...!
>
> (That was cursive, btw...)
LOL:good:
If I can read it and you can't, then you're just dang incompetent. If I can't read it, then that scrivener just flat-out had poor penmanship. 😉
It's like searching for old boundary markers, some guys are much more skilled than others. Try to put your best guys on it for the job if it's an especially hard job.
I've looked and read records and notes that were written in "long hand" on a daily basis my entire career.
Download pages and pages of GLO notes every week of the original surveys and our county records are full of good and bad penmanship.
Within the last few months there was an article that cursive writing was not going to be taught in our school system any more.
Most signatures I see are not legible, will neither is mine. SWMBO signature is pretty much an artistic rendition ranter than a name.
I can't remember my last helper that had good penmanship. Mostly unreadable scribbles and half the words were misspelled. My quote to them is that if what you bring me can't be read you don't get paid. Rather than attempt to write good, they move on to a button pusher job.
In college I made extra money hand lettering plaques and signs for public and civic groups in special lettering of quotes and verses for them to hang on the wall and for placards and such. I did several wedding announcements and often worked on parchment.
As someone who hasn't had to decipher survey records but has tried to decipher census, marriage, and death records, just knowing mid- to late-20th century cursive script is not necessarily helpful to deciphering 19th or very early 20th century cursive script.
I spent a LOT of time transcribing several pages of a court case an ancestor was involved in about 1836 in Mason Co. (West) Virginia.
that's a booger bear when the ink has bled through the paper.
that's what a lot of the survey files from the TX GLO look like.
I've spent a lot of years reading land records pertaining to Loudoun County, Virginia, and I have found my least favorite scrivener in the chancery causes of the 1850s to the 1870s. It's terrible handwriting by any standard, but it will give up its import to steadiness and patience.
I took a records class a couple of semesters ago, in the Wyoming program I've had the good fortune to be in for a while. One of the first exercises the instructor put to us was a few pages of handwritten field notes.
I told folks here some months back about a young woman at the Clerk's Office who said, "I can't help you with that document, sir. It's in cursive."
Cheers,
Henry
That's one thing I like about Mendocino, they have the old Index books in the public area, much easier to read.
