STAC students and faculty are working together to transcribe decades-old documents of the Loyalists – New Yorkers who remained faithful to King George III during the American Revolution — as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches.
The Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation awarded STAC a two-year grant of over $229,000 to transcribe the documents and create a database the world can use. The funding will establish the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute for the Study of Loyalists in the American Revolution.
“Historical documents, particularly documents that aren’t digitized, always run the risk of flood damage,” said Heath Bowen, the Dean of Arts and Social Sciences and one of the leaders of the project. “They run the risk of fire, and they also run the risk of just overall deterioration.”
History professor Robert Ingoglia is overseeing the work of two STAC students transcribing the documents. Each document presents a new puzzle.
“They [Loyalists] liked to use the S that looks like an F, although it’s in English,” Ingoglia said. “You have to figure out what words they’re talking about. Some of the names are names that we don’t normally use nowadays, so trying to transcribe names [can present a challenge].”
STAC sophomore John Cording took E-Learning classes to learn how to edit the documents in a way that makes sure the digital transcription “is authentic but also legible, so we can then after [transcribing] it, actually read it and then further our research.”
That means keeping the original spelling of words, and keeping abbreviations despite how strange they may seem in contemporary English. “There’s some words that are spelled differently, like one word I saw, I believe it was “objectively” or something like that, it was spelled weird, [there were] a couple letters missing,” Cording said.
“It’s a process,” said Cording.
However, assuring authenticity also assures a long process, as the transcriber must transcribe “word by word”. After the painstaking work of transcribing the document, and noting any defects in the article itself, Cording will have his work checked by Ingoglia and fellow transcriber Drew Morgentaler. If there are any mistakes he has to go back in and make revisions.
The document the students are currently transcribing is a newspaper article, the Westchester Petition from 1775. Since the document is from a newspaper and was printed, the document will be slightly easier to transcribe.
However the hand-written petitions the students will soon be working on present an even bigger challenge – deciphering hand-writing from the 1700’s. “The manner in which people form sentences [was] just different,” said Morgentaler, a junior at STAC.
The work requires a team effort. Each transcribed document is checked by the other transcriber and Ingoglia.
The goal is to create a database which can be used by anyone, whether for scholarly or personal reasons, such as family history. Future students and scholars will be able to use the database to see who opposed the Continental Congress and supported the British.
Students, scholars, and families will be able to discover the political views, the occupation, and demographics of those loyal to the British in New York 250 years ago.
“[People] want to research a specific topic and then they can go to institutes like this, digital institutes, online institutes, that exist as a repository for various forms of information and data about that topic,” said Bowen.
This is why preserving these documents is important and has to be done carefully but diligently. “We can’t always assume that these documents are going to be around forever,” Bowen added.