Librarian
Heather Perez
she/her
Contact:
Heather Perez
Special Collections Librarian
C-012
Special Collections Librarian
C-012
609-652-4532 (Reading Room)
609-652-4555 (Office)
609-652-4555 (Office)
Why Do I Need to Learn Cursive Now?
Many historical documents were handwritten in cursive - the Dead Sea Scrolls, Declaration of Independence, manumissions of enslaved persons, census forms, letters from Civil War soldiers, the original manuscript of Mary Shelley's Frankestein, minutes from the meetings of the National Organization of Women. In order to conduct historical research, you may need to learn how to read handwritten documents. Watch the videos and look at the samples below to learn how to do this.
Basic Handwriting Tutorials
Techniques for Reading Documents (Foreign Languages)
Can You Read This?
Quit claim, December 17, 1782 from Jeremiah Garatson to Ezekiel Camp
See if you can read it, and then click on the title to check your understanding against the "Transcript" on the Digital Collections.
Techniques for Reading Old Documents (English)
- Palmer's Guide to Business Writing (1894)The Palmer Method - named for its creator, Austin Norman Palmer - became the most popular handwriting system in the early 1900s. (Digitized version of the book from the Library of Congress.)
- "What Does That Say?" (NC State Archives)Includes a helpful chart of common abbreviations and a chart of variations of letters in colonial documents.
- Reading Old Documents (National Archives, UK)Includes tutorials on reading Latin and medieval manuscripts.