Labor of Love

As keyboards clicked, eyes squinted, and fingers strained, dozens of volunteers packed a small computer lab in Trinity University’s Coates Library, helping to preserve fragments from a momentous era of American history.

These volunteers, which included more than 45 outside community members, faculty, and students like Gabriella Garrita ’21, were transcribing centuries-old documents from the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency that helped the transition of millions of African-Americans out of slavery and into citizenhood in the 19th century.

“Reading these letters, you feel like you’re right there with them,” Garrita says.

Transcribing these documents is part of an international, ongoing project to digitize these letters, which are currently preserved through digital images—but not always through searchable text—according to English professor Claudia Stokes.

“Transcribing these documents makes them more accessible,” says Stokes, who specializes in 19th-century American literature. “At Trinity, so many of us doing research rely on digital archives, so this is a great opportunity for us to manage and participate in the expansion of these digital resources.”

The workday, organized by the Colored Conventions Project on behalf of both the National Museum of African-American History and Culture and the Smithsonian, involved more than 60 other universities and educational centers around the globe. The timing of the event also commemorated the 200th birthday of renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Douglass, who was born into slavery and never knew his biological birthday, chose to celebrate his big day each year on Valentine’s Day. The date is now widely recognized as his birthday.

Douglass fought both for abolition before the Civil War and the well-being of blacks after the conflict and was a major proponent of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, better known as the Freedmen’s Bureau.

Letters from this organization, written by hand in sometimes difficult-to-read format, constitute more than a million records of formerly-enslaved blacks who were freed but left destitute after the Civil War.

In addition to the research value these letters hold, Stokes adds that transcribing these records will give the general public a unique insight into the lives and tribulations of American citizens living through a turbulent period of history.

“It’s important to us to demonstrate the value this kind of study holds for everybody,” Stokes notes.

Transcribing the letters, however, was no easy feat for the Trinity team. As Stokes and fellow  faculty members floated among computer stations, the sounds of consternation, effort, and ultimately ecstatic breakthroughs echoed through the room as each volunteer encountered challenging handwriting, style, and verbiage.

“Handwriting of the time was quite different from  what you see today,” Stokes says. “The ‘s’ looked like a long, lower-case ‘f’ in some cases; people wrote in a grid pattern by writing sideways across the paper, then rotating the page 90 degrees and writing across the previous text.”

Beyond these man-made issues, other long-term problems from ink discoloration, aging paper, and similar technical difficulties reared up occasionally. While the “transcribe-a-thon” was meant to help spell out new documents, much of the volunteer work also went into checking and double-checking previously-transcribed records.

“This is really, really hard to read some of these names, and some of the writing is blurred,” Garrita says. “But I’m glad we’re doing this: This is a great cause to support.”