Elaine Patton, Old Vault Letters, 9/17/12

This week Michelle and I switch off to to try to fill in gaps in each other's transcriptions, so I had:

•  MSS113-b01f01-01full
• MSS113-b01f01-03full

 In this case, at least for me, I think it's better to try reading the letters (maybe a line at a time) before looking at the Word doc or only looking for the gaps to interpret. It was definitely nice to have someone else's interpretation to compare to, though! Like having an answer key on hand while working math problems.

Can't figure out the top word in this portion, and I don't think it's 'relationship' as was suggested:

I included the lower "my happiness" in the screen shot to provide comparison to the ending of the mystery word. It looks to me like it ends in Houston's peculiar double-S and probably a -ness at that rate. Of course, it does also look like the Ps in 'happiness' there. I suppose that could be considered a kind of efficiency on his part. It also might be two words, but they are awfully close together. I suspect the middle area is a "th", with the crossbar misplaced to the previous letter (or maybe they're both Ts?) since the only times I've noticed his lower-case Hs getting that extra flourish on the front is when he's actually combining his h with a t. Definitely seems to be a d in the middle.

I at first thought this was "abstracted" but ultimately decided "distracted" made more sense and fits, if you accept that the first two forms are part of a badly mangled, disjointed d:

distracted

 Ws are a weak point:

When

Or pretty much any spiky, wavy letter, I guess.  Although it's rather pretty and flowing, it's not as immediately obvious as one would like that the first letters in both pictures are Ms for "Mr." and "Mrs." Come to think of it, those Rs, though resembling a print lower-case R, look more like cursive Vs (as I learned them).

Mr Bagby

Mrs Houston

 And here's the word 'elegance' by contrast, which looks like it begins with an M to me (thankfully Michelle had figured it out already):

I realized his capital Os look like capital As:

Our

As I side note, I wonder what it must feel like to refer to a city bearing your name (and named for you at that). "...since I left Houston"... Surreal? Proudful?

I also had MSS113-b01f23-05fullrv, which was typed in 1933 (i.e. not a Sam Houston letter, obviously) and had been OCR'd pretty accurately, aside from the messed-up header. Zero problems with it.