Old Vault Letters & Franklin Beauty School - Elaine Patton, 5/13/13

Today's Old Vault letters: MSS0113-b01f15-04, -b01f20-04, and -b01f21-03.

The first letter is again addressed to Eliza Fannin and is so parental in tone, from "you haven't written..." to a quotation advising care of mind over appearance (the unnamed source here) to chastising her to take better care of her teeth (recommendation: rub with pulverized charcoal and a toothbrush). For some reason the last page (with the address) is largely occupied with a list of rulers of England.

The writer inserts forgotten words into the left margin with a ^ added wherever it belonged in the sentence. It was a little confusing to encounter the first time, since (unlike the pictured example) the word belonged further down the line, and I wasn't sure where the extra word was actually meant to go.

The second document is deceptive. It starts out as a typewritten article that had been OCR'd, but near the bottom and on the back of the page is begins handwritten (in smudged pencil)...notes? An addendum? It's a bit messy, and the paper is thin enough that on the back that the type shows through and further muddies things.

The last item was another transfer of property and so-so in difficulty.  Pretty legible with some difficult places helped along by remembering the general language of these things from past documents.

Last box (#49, photos 721-810) of Franklin Beauty School photos went by with no complications. This set had been skipped over initially, and I added them to the spreadsheet in order (I highlighted the left column yellow to distinguish them, since I wasn't sure whether they should be in order or just come at the end).

Old Vault Letters, Franklin Beauty School - Elaine Patton, 4/22/13

Finished box 53 (photos 1091-1119) of Franklin Beauty School photos. There was an even larger portion of color group photos in this set (as opposed to black and white headshots). One photo had a well-worn index card stapled to it. The back of the photo and the index card had statistics/pricing/? info for various services, from nails to pin curl sets to permanent color.

I reviewed a couple of Michelle's letters, MSS0113-B01f18-01 and -b01f18-02. I wasn't able to add much, though thankfully Michelle did get most of it. Same problem: itemized bill = challenge. I tried to research what some of the recurring terms/abbreviations were, but no luck.

I also transcribed MSS0113-b01f08-01 and -b01f22-01.

The first is a handwritten letter in Spanish, followed on the second page by a typewritten translation. I don't speak Spanish, but the handwriting was largely clearly enough to transcribe, and Google Translate was able to help me get the right word in a few places. (A few others I'm either reading wrong or have fallen out of use in the language, as I wasn't able to find anything to verify/correct them, e.g. the opening word "obsequiandy." Or so it looks like, anyway: obsequiando is a word, but the last letter in the original doesn't look like an O.)

The second letter is apparently written by Andrew Jackson and is a horrible mess. The text is just messy and the lines tend to start angling downward in the last couple inches, which made it a little difficult in a few places to keep track of my place in reading. Some parts of it, though messy, just stand out as perfectly understandable; other parts I get hardly anything out of. It gets progressively messier as you read towards the end. Oh, and the page is a little wrinkled on the left side (torn in some places), which obscures parts of some letters, so there's also that.

As a sample:

Pretty sure this is "it would," but other times that's how he writes just lower-case Ts.

"is [received]," with the latter apparently being spelled rec'seved or ree'sived or thereabouts. Or maybe it actually is spelled received and it's just badly written.

"... I am sure about that ..." Note that the S in sure looks more like an L, as well as the similarity of the As and Os in "about" or "that."

In the middle: "administration" (I believe). Note how it rolls downwards and scrunches together in the last few letters, despite the availability of another inch or two of paper.

Old Vault Letter, Franklin Beauty School

Today's letters: MSS0113-b01f16-01, -b01f19-01, -02, and -03. All were very on the legible end of things, though the first one got more challenging towards the end. The first letter also had some ink bleeding through from the opposite side of the page, and the paper itself looked very textured. The third letter (-b01f19-02) was very interesting in that it contained more misspellings than I've seen in other letters, and one section of it was written by a 9 year old girl to her cousins, "what ever your name may be." So cute! The final letter was actually a telegram (a long telegram) and supremely legible.

The Franklin Beauty School photos (Box 52, 996-1090) tossed out a few oddballs this time. Several enveloped in a row contained multiple photos each, all underexposed (I think underexposed-- not developed properly, in any event). The last 50-ish photographs deviated from official headshots to casual photos of people at the school at a lunch or party and otherwise mostly just hanging out.

Old Vault Letters, Franklin Beauty School - Elaine Patton, 4/1/2013

This week I reviewed Michelle's letters from last week, MSS113-b01f13-02, -03, and -b01f17-03. I was able to fill in or confirm words in a few places, though I too had trouble with the names in the first document and the items listed in the final one (I muddied the waters a little by suggesting alternate words here and there, but none that I can be absolutely certain of, unfortunately.) The last document was rather blotchy and apparently written in pencil so the writing was pale; I took it over to Photoshop and played with the contrast/levels/saturation, which did make it overall more readable, but didn't really help to elucidate any of the questionable areas.

I recorded information from box 51 of the Franklin Beauty School photos. Nothing really perplexing or unusual in this set, though there was a long streak of photos without any names or other information recorded. C'est la vie. Two or three of the photos are actually in kind of poor shape currently and are stained/faded/washed out. One picture had actually had a bit of the top cut off after it had been labeled, so only the woman's last name remains.

A discovered benefit of labels firmly written on the photos with a ball-point pen: even when the ink has rubbed off, the impression of the words remain.

Franklin Beauty School, Meeting Minutes - Elaine Patton, 3/18/13

Today I completed another box of Franklin Beauty School photos (entering metadata into a spreadsheet). Didn't encounter any problems; just found one envelope with 2 photos inside, which is marked on the spreadsheet.

I finished scanning all the pages for the meeting minutes: now to just get them all transferred into the blog. Still, the end is in sight!

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.

Minutes & Photos, 2/4/2013

I did a few more scans of Meeting Minutes and added them to the other blog; 2007 is almost done. One or two pages didn't get treated very well by OCR which slowed me down a little (in one, periods were all translated into underscores, among other errors, for some reason) but no real problems.

I spent the rest of the time recording photo information of various headshots and a few group pictures from the Franklin Beauty School, 1967-1971ish. No real problems for this, either, though one envelope actually contained 4 photos: 3 similar headshots and 1 black-and-white copy of one of them as well as a note that elucidated the reason for the multiple photos. Apparently the subject hadn't liked her original photo and, it seems, wasn't willing to pay for it, presumably leading to retakes.