Old Vault Letters, Michelle Godfrey, July 31, 2013

This week I switched to letters completed by Elaine back on April 22nd, MSS0113-b01f08 and -b01f22.

The first one was written in Spanish and I managed to get through it with a little help from my limited knowledge of the language. Using an online dictionary and changing the MS Word document options to Spanish (Mexico) settings also helped.

Our second letter written by Andrew Jackson was really hard to read and make any sense out of it. Fortunately, Elaine had tackled so much of it and I was able to fill in a few of the questionable spots.

Old Vault Letters, Michelle Godfrey - July 24, 2013

Today I worked on letters from MSS0113- b01f15, -b01f19, and b01f21.

-b01f19 contained the missing page 6 from last week, so it was nice to finally get the whole letter completed.

-b01f15 was a letter from 1830 to Eliza Fannin while she was away in Salem, North Carolina.  It was written by a family member who was giving her a lot of practical advice, such as ‘don’t neglect your teeth’ and if she had rotten teeth, go to a “good dentist; have them operated on as much as necessary”.  The last page was confusing because it had the postal information, as expected, but also had a list of the Kings of England. 

The final letter had very challenging handwriting and names that were hard to figure out. One nice thing was that the letter had bold dark ink which helped to make it easier to read.

sample of names within letter

 

Old Vault Letters, Michelle Godfrey - July 17, 2013

Today I returned to Old Vault Letters for MSS0113-b01f19 and -b01f15-06 (both pages01 and pages02). 

I previously worked on b01f19 but was unable to fully complete the transcription because the pages were scanned and arranged out of order. The page adjustment has been made and now we just need to locate the final page number 6 and include it with the other five pages of the letter.

The letter from b01f15-06, has also been adjusted to present it as one large sheet of paper. For the most part, the writer kept both sides of the page divided, but there are a few places where lines of handwriting from the left side drift over into the right side portion of the page.  This letter also had a lot of spelling and grammar errors.

the words 'and', 'again' and 'your' written across both pages

Sheet music collection Mary Sommerfeld July 11, 2013

Not too many done today.
Finished 9 entries and added in 3 to the spreadsheet. A total of 12.
Two interesting scores were from the early 1900's, music to be played to
accompany silent movies.

The Ladies' Messenger Scanning, Michelle Godfrey- July 10, 2013

Today I scanned ten issues of The Ladies' Messenger from 1887 to 1889. There were two folders that contained multiple copies of the same issue. In one case, that turned out to be a good thing because the issue had a page that was very dark due to aging. I used one of the duplicate copies to rescan the same page and got better results.

The incentives to get agents to sell subscriptions were interesting.  If they got 12 subscribers, they could receive a blue gold locket. With 125 subscribers, they could receive a Singer sewing machine! Considering the subscription rate of $1 per year, it doesn’t seem like the  jewelry had much value.

A Handsome Blue Gold Locket or the Handsome Singer Sewing Machine

Sheet Music Collection- M. Sommerfeld July 2, 2013

Working with the sheet music cabinets on the 5th floor I was able to complete a total of 25 entries.
Twelve were completing item already on the spread sheet and three were complete new entries.
There were two entries where the music was actually filed under the name of a co-composer. I made note of this occurrence in the "Mary's note's" field.
Today's covers feature men hair styles that make a bold statement, and one that is a more cleaned up image. Can you remember the Hudson Brothers and their shinny clean pop tunes?