In Review

FINE LINES: A digital humanities project is bringing together history students and retired volunteers to work with correspondence from the William Henry Seward Papers, like this page from an 1822 letter. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

In an unusual cross-generation archival collaboration, volunteers from the Highlands at Pittsford—a University-based retirement community—and students under the guidance of Thomas Slaughter, the Arthur R. Miller Professor of History, are joining forces to transcribe and annotate family papers from the William Henry Seward Papers. The collection of correspondence, legal papers, diaries, account books, and manuscript records of Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state was bequeathed to the University by his grandson. Slaughter and his students are creating the Seward Family Digital Archive to provide a searchable public website with materials from Rochester’s collection—the University’s most frequently cited manuscript collection—the Seward House Museum in Auburn, New York, and a small private collection still held by the family. But reading handwritten script doesn’t come easily to the digital generation. So they’re partnering with retired volunteers for whom a letter written in cursive is familiar terrain. A letter from Lazette Miller Worden, sister of Seward’s wife, Frances, (above) shows the system of vertical and horizontal writing that correspondents in the period sometimes used “when they had a lot to say, ran out of paper, and wanted to get the letter in the next mail,” Slaughter says.

—Kathleen McGarvey