Old Vault Letters, Elaine Patton, 9/24/12

Today's set of letters included:

• MSS113-b01f01-04
• MSS113-b01f02-01
• MSS113-b01f02-03
• MSS113-b01f03-02

 MSS113-b01f01-04 is a portion of a letter, I think, and what's in that file is choppy as well, so between that and the handwriting, it took me a little while to piece together what was being said. Some iffy words:

widow

deceased

This one I can't figure out. The only context for it is "Warren in the [that word] was Lydia Bins nee Warren..."

MSS113- b01f02-01fullrv and -b01f03-02full were both pretty clearly written (ahem, and neither are written by Houston himself). Yay! Uncertainties were related to unfamiliarity with a place's name and possible misspellings. E.g.,

I'm leaning towards "Indian Purposes," but there's definitely a few too many letters for that.

MSS113-b01f02-03 has the double difficulty of loopy, sprawling letters and pronounced bleed-through from the opposite side of the page. It also tends to address the recipient in abbreviations, i.e. Hon Secy of the Navy [I think]. For this one I copied Michelle's practice of making the lines in my document match the lines of the letter instead of writing out a normal paragraph. Actually, most of it isn't that bad, but when it is, it's very bad.

Interestingly, the lower-case Ts are distinctly formed, unlike his habits in last week's set, in which it shared space with the H.

the

The upper-case Ts are not quite as nice. Context suggests the word on the far left is "The." The second block is a name.I've decided that in the second block (a name), the given name is John, abbreviated as Jno., which is ridiculous but widely accepted, but I'm interpreting the surname as Tod, though that T looks nothing like the "The" T. Then again, Houston has demonstrated some idiosyncrasies in writing "th--" before, so... (Looking at "Texean" below, I think it really is just another "th" thing.)

The /// Jno. G. Tod

Then there was the matter of the Rs. The hypothetical Rs, anyway. I went back over my and Michelle's blog posts and the closest I saw to this shape in our screenshots was the random scribble in drink, here, so I'm going with R.

reporting | rate

But then, at the closing--

"I have the honor to be ___ ____"

R-o-h-h? L-e... R-[some-other-letter]-o...? Not R at all? I have no idea. You'd think a valediction would be something rather predictable.

Other thoughts:

I wonder whether this was a misspelling, a common misspelling, or an accepted alternate spelling of Texan:

Texean

Most of the very few references I can find online to that spelling refer to the "Texean and Emigrant's Guide." Not to mention "Tescas."