Characters on the page

Given my heritage (Irish), my college majors (theatre & French) and my taste in literature (eclectic), it is safe to say that I have run into my share of characters in my life, both fictitious and real. In the genealogical sense, though, characters are often glyphs that we spend time trying to decipher. 

In the 1980s, calligraphy was all the rage, and I was sure I could parlay my nascent skills into cash, addressing wedding invitations and such. I was fascinated by the shape and form of letters, and the strokes that made them up, the feel of the nib on paper. In those days, when you wanted to use a specific font for a poster or program, the best you could do was to purchase rub-off letters in the font of your choice (your choice being predetermined by which fonts your office supply supplied), or to invest in overpriced pens and nibs and spend hours practicing. I did both, and even though I thought I could make a good living as a graphic artist, it turned out that before I could really get started, computers made it easy for anyone--regardless of their artistic sensibilities--to produce flyers and banners in cutting-edge dot-matrix fonts. The writing, as they say, was on the wall.

In graduate school, I indulged my love of farce and learned to read 15th century manuscripts--knowing myself how the pen strokes formed the letters and words meant that I could literally see and feel the actions of the scribe. The other part of the task, of course, was learning the old and middle French so I could make sense of the language made of these ciphers. Learning modern German was easy after that.

As a professional translator, I am sometimes called upon to decipher the odd handwriting in an official document, providing the holder with an official translation to pursue their chosen path in life. But what strikes me overall is the permanence of the written word. Poets before us have noted it, but the fact that I could spend hours hunched over a sheet of parchment that someone wrote on five centuries before I was even a twinkle in my father's eye is sobering. 

In general, if it was important enough for someone to write it, it was important enough to keep. In genealogy, we are fortunate that someone hung on to those traces of pen on paper; loopy handwriting, sloppy hen scratches, misspellings abound, but somehow they are nearly always recognizable (though there will always be the ink splotch or tear that will obfuscate just the number or letter we need for our research). 

I still write with a fountain pen--when I write by hand at all; the callous on my middle finger is all but gone. Decades ago, I spent many hours poring over microfilms of parish records in the national archives in Dublin, Ireland, armed with a steno pad, my trusty blue fountain pen, and paper; These records are now scanned--and indexed--and it is eerie to be able to revisit them. I am reminded that the lines not only trace the names of my ancestors in those characters, but these rural parish priests themselves were characters in the play called life--as they wrote notes, including IOUs in the margins to each other, they painted a more complete picture of these lives we strive to remember than any typewritten records digitized using the latest AI.

Edward Walsh's baptismal record