“I truly love it,” said 37-year-old volunteer Tiffany Meeks. In June, she began volunteering as a transcriber and picked up a new term: paleography, which refers to the decoding of old manuscripts.
I had the impression that I was picking up a new language. She said, “I was also brushing up on my old English in addition to my cursive.”
Not even cursive? No issue According to Isaacs of the Archive, volunteers may learn cursive as they go along; they are not required to know it at first. “It’s not required, but it helps.”
For instance, people who are reading Revolutionary War pension papers have the option to choose “no cursive required.” Volunteers may also assist in adding “tags” to records that have already been.
transcribed by other Citizen Archivists to make them simpler to search for, rather than reading and transcribing the records themselves. Ritter said, “You can also pick it up as you go along.”
