This booklet is a handy introduction to colonial calligraphy. With clarity and concision Harriet Stryker-Rodda, noted American genealogist, outlines how to read manuscripts two and three centuries old. This brief but comprehensive work will prove useful to the genealogist at whom it is aimed as well as to other researchers into America's past.
As the note on the author at the end of the booklet says, this essay "grew out of a lecture she has presented at least fifty times since 1969, beginning with the World Conference on Records in Salt Lake City." The booklet itself is a revised version of that lecture after the New Jersey Historical Society published it in its journal, New Jersey History, in 1980.
Mrs. Stryker-Rodda explains the evolution of letters, providing comparative charts of handwriting, English and American, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Clarified are the distinctions between such bothersome characters as I and J, f and s. Punctuation, too, is addressed, as are Latin abbreviations. Also she discusses the tools of the old scriveners - pen, ink, and paper - and ends her study in 1830 "when the modem steel pen nib was introduced." (p. 14)
It seems to be an axiom of geography that settlements arise along rivers and heavy trade routes. One has only to consider the city-states of ancient Mesopotamia, or Rome, Paris, or London. In many ways Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century was similar more to an ancient or medieval land than to anything of the twentieth century.