NEW LONDON, N.Y. (AP) - At least 35 volunteers are helping to decipher a 19th-century whaler’s journal that New London’s Custom House Maritime Museum acquired last year, The Day of New London reported.
The volunteers are responding to a Jan. 3 email from the New London Maritime Society seeking help transcribing the 155-page journal that the museum acquired last year. “I didn’t expect so many,” Susan Tamulevich, the museum’s executive director, told the newspaper. She said the email blast went out to more than 4,000 people.
The volunteers will transcribe the handwriting of the anonymous crewman or crewmen who chronicled voyages of the Merrimac, which sailed from New London on July 17, 1844.
Jo Ann Morris, a retired high school math teacher with a master’s degree in library science, said studying the journal has made her reflect on the ways the world has changed since the Merrimac sailed. “First, you are swept away by the physical beauty of the writing,” Morris wrote in an email to the newspaper. “It is very similar to calligraphy and is executed in ink and quill. How very different and difficult from computer entry or texting. … This written word does seem so much more permanent than our digital ones.”
Laurie Deredita, the society’s librarian, is building an online display of the journal, posting pages as they become available. Deredita said she was “really pleased with the energy and enthusiasm” of the volunteers as well the “the quality of their work.”
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