Old Vault Letters, Franklin Beauty School Photos - Elaine Patton, 3/11/2013

Today I wrote up metadata for another box of photos from the Franklin Beauty School and looked over letters MSS113-b01f12-06, -10, and -b01f17-02, previously transcribed by Michelle.

The photos were pretty straightforward. One had 2 different spellings for the woman's first name: the version written on the front of the photo I listed as her name, and the spelling on the back I included in the notes section with a notation that the spellings differed. A couple of other names I wasn't quite sure of...one surname I interpreted as Leal, but it looked as though another letter was in there (but none of the variations I thought of made sense, e.g. Lreal); a first name I interpreted as Sherry, but the second letter looks much more like a T (i.e. "Sterry" or possibly even "Stenny").  Photo RGD44-762 had an extra little note on the back that could be (*Tis or, I think (if you rotate it), ( →his, with the possible-arrow pointing away from the name Grey in the photographer's Elmon Perry Grey stamp. Or maybe the first character is actually a C, and I have no idea.

The third letter is rough. It's largely pencil on old, mottled paper, and it's basically just a ledger documenting money borrowed, so there's not much context to determine what exactly is written in some places. A lot of it is legible, but there's little pockets of confusion, like whatever comes after 10$ in the first line:

(for example)

I tried looking up other old ledgers to see if they could yield any clues or at least get me in that kind of mindset, and that gave me the idea that an odd word in a couple places might be "pd" as in "paid." In the above picture, what looks like Ao is repeated several times, but it would make more sense as a poorly-written "do" as in "ditto." However, only one instance has enough of a trailing line to suggest the extra line of the "d," so probably not.

Skimming through this paper did support an inked pair of letters as probably Dr, which can be an abbreviation for debit, which in turn suggests that what looks like Cer further up might be Cr. for credit. In the last letters I worked on, one of the writers would add extra loops to his Hs so that it looked like there was an E added in, so it seems plausible, at least, that the "e" seen isn't meant to be read. (The sum in the right hand column does go down at this point, and goes back up after a probable Dr.)

Cr / Dr

 These following words are probably meant to be the same, or at least similar to each other:

afo1?

But no real idea.