Transcribing Historical Legal Documents
There are countless jokes about medical doctors having the worst handwriting of any profession. If you tried to transcribe 19th century Washington Court case files from the State Archives you may disagree.
When we set out to transcribe documents from the case file of the 1859 Washington Territorial Supreme Court case George A. Meigs & William C. Talbot v. Steamship Northerner we discovered some of the documents appeared to have been scribbled by the lawyers while bushwhacking through Territorial Washington. Or, perhaps, they were being canoed through choppy waters in Puget Sound. Many papers included such excessive legalese as to be nearly unfathomable. Sentences so long and laden with such repetitive vocabulary and convoluted grammar one needed to diagram them to figure out what the lawyer was trying to argue.
If you like these sorts of puzzles, take a look at the Library of Congress’ By the People document transcription crowdsourcing campaigns. In April the library called for volunteers to transcribe Historical Legal Reports from the Law Library of Congress. These reports are digitized from thin, typed carbon copies. Not as quirky as handwritten legal documents, but even the best optical character recognition software has difficulty transcribing these types of papers. Other By the People campaigns include Presidential Papers at the Library of Congress and Herencia: Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents.
There are other projects available for those who wish to volunteer their puzzle solving skills. One of the featured records waiting to be transcribed at the National Archives’ Citizen Archivist site is Colonel Jack W. Durant’s Record of Trial in the Court-Martial Case Files Relating to the Hesse Crown Jewels Case. More general transcription projects that include history and government documents can be found at the Smithsonian.
For those worried that our younger generations will be unable to do this kind of transcription due to cursive no longer being taught, don’t fret too much. A sixteen-year-old asked to review some scanned documents and give her feedback stated, “I read through about seven of them. I think that I could transcribe them if I needed to. There’s just some funky formatting and weird spelling errors in some places.” Our legal history will be in safe hands. (LJ)
