Diary 61 Reflection

This reflection will be about my experience transcribing entry 61 of James Merrill Linn’s diaries. This diary entry started with the continuation of Friday, April 18, 1862 and ended on Saturday, April 19. At the start, the transcribing process was very difficult because I was not familiar with his handwriting yet. But about halfway through it became a lot easier, and I really started to enjoy transcribing this diary entry. It was such an accomplishment to finally figure out a word after looking at it for a long time! Every time I got stuck I would put a question mark in the place of the word. Then, I went back through and tried to fill in all of the question marks. However I was still left with quite a few at the end.

There were phrases that I could nScreen shot 2014-09-14 at 4.28.13 PMot decipher at all without some help. This was one of them. I could not figure out the first word in this line for a while but then I thought it looked similar to “shortly”, but the “t” and “l” did not look right. The other word I could not get was the one after “was”. Going over the most difficult words in class really helped me. I showed the first word to another student who told me that it’s a name, “Shorkley”. And then it was brought to my attention in class that the other word is “adjutant”.

One other word that caused me trouble was the one after “canister”. I thought tScreen shot 2014-09-14 at 4.31.55 PMhe letters looked like “stuithing”, and even though I know that is not a word I still looked it up, hoping it was a common word in the 19th century. However it was not so I’m not sure what that word actually is or if it’s “stuithing” and had meaning to him and his family.

A very helpful part was when we met with Isabella O’Neill at the Bucknell Special Collections/University Archives room. Seeing my diary in person was not particularly beneficial, but rather some of the other archives she had. I asked Isabella to help me with some names I could not understand and she showed me a book of all of the Privates, Corporals, Sergeants, Lieutenants, etc. in Linn’s regimen, which was very useful in my transcribing process.

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