I will be transcribing archival documents/letters from the Victorian America era. While I'm quite familiar with Victorianism in general, I've never had the opportunity to do hands-on archival work before.
Do you historians have any tips on transcribing? Any and all advice is appreciated!
This website has some useful guides and tutorials. The best habit to get into is composing an alphabet when you come across a new script and using the wider context to decipher the more obscure letters.
Transcribe by hand, double space for inevitable mistakes, and keep at it! Remember it could be much worse, you could be transcribing medieval Latin.
Transcribing/reading old handwriting is just one of those things you learn with practice. The stuff I struggle with most is anything post-1920 or so really, especially academic men who think they are too good to write properly. The less historically important someone thinks they are, the tidier their handwriting generally. Pray you'll be reading the work of a secretary. :)
Mid-19th century American handwriting tends to be pretty easy to read to me, actually, it's very regular. Clerks' handwriting in ledgers and such is usually not even remotely a strain. And a lot of it will be typed, for anything produced by an official or business body big enough to afford a typewriter, so that's very easy. Are you going to be reading a variety of documents or just the work of one person?
