8 Replies Latest reply on Jan 23, 2019 2:17 PM by Beth Graham

    To Z or not to Z ...

    Adventurer
    Beth Graham Jan 22, 2019 2:27 PM

      ... that is the question. Can you help me discern between lowercase Z and lowercase S in handwritten text? My problem today is the word "recognize," which looks in the original most of the time to be spelled with an S, but which has been almost uniformly transcribed as spelled with a Z. (Per my good friend Merriam-Webster, "recognise" is a chiefly British variant; I know, though, that that spelling is used sometimes in 19th-century documents.)

       

      Here's a page from the bill I've been reviewing: https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/letters-to-lincoln/1863-civil-war-emancipation-proclamation-and-gettysburg-address/mal2088900/mal2088900-7/

       

      Compare handwriting of the word (hyphenated) toward the top of the page with handwriting of the word in section 6 and help a woman out, won't you?

       

      Many thanks (and if you have good sources for getting better at reading 19th-century handwriting, I'd welcome those, too) --

      Beth