Posted on 11/24/2024 5:58:45 AM PST by texanyankee
Both of my parents graduated from 'Business College' in the late 1930s and were working as clerk/typists in civil service & the freight lines.
They met & began dating before the outbreak of WW2.
My Dad ended up joining the Coast Guard & served in the Pacific theatre. While his ship was undergoing repairs from the campaign at Amchitka, he eventually made it back to Texas & my folks got married in July of 1943 before returning to his refitted attack transport and resuming the campaign in the Pacific.
During his tour of duty between 1942 and 1944 they exchange hundreds of letters. I was fortunate to have rescued & scanned 650 of their letters to share with my siblings & my nieces & nephews.
In many instances both my parents would include in their letters paragraphs that were written in shorthand. In one instance an entire page was in shorthand. I have no idea how to decipher what they wrote. I wondered how the shorthand script managed to slip thru the censors but then I realized that shorthand was well known & used at that time.
Any suggestions on translating shorthand would be appreciated!
Maybe they were underground codes, like “John has a long mustache.” :-)
Find yourself a copy Of GregG Shorthand Manual Simplified. You probably have to go to the library to find it As it is it is a rather old book.
See if you can find the Gregg Shorthand book at a thrift store. Also, homeschoolers might still teach it, maybe check where they sell school books. Good luck!
I distinctly recall as a kid that we had an edition of “Gregg Shorthand” in our bookshelf at home. Must have been my Dad or Mom’s.
It has long since disappeared.
Which gives me the idea that maybe I could find an edition on eBay. I know it would be a long & tedious process for me but winter is coming on and it might be fun.
thanks.
yeah, I think I’ll begin checking out eBay.
thanks.
Used bookstore or Amazon, eBay, for old Gregg SH book. Find older 70-90 yo woman who used it I’m old, took dictation from a fast talking company officer, used my SH to take notes all through college and probably could still read most of Gregg Shorthand.
Amazon carries books featuring the Gregg Shorthand method (most popular in the US), as well as the Pitman method (mostly used in the UK). There are many books on each. You can teach yourself shorthand or use the books as resources for deciphering.
If you want to learn it yourself, there are lots of old textbooks on it. I learned shorthand in the late sixties but it was a later version (Diamond Jubilee instead of most likely Gregg taught in the 30’s). It really is pretty simple, based on abbreviations and phonetics. Otherwise you can search for someone who learned it in school.
Good luck in your endeavors. After my mom passed away I found a shoebox full of love letters from my dad. I transcribed them and had it bound in a book, copies which I gave to my siblings and the grandkids. They loved it.
“After my mom passed away I found a shoebox full of love letters from my dad. I transcribed them and had it bound in a book, copies which I gave to my siblings and the grandkids. They loved it.”
That’s my dream - to somehow compile them all in some sort of physical format.
I started back in July to gather & group the letters and then scan them. Currently I have all 650 letters arranged by date & numbered sequentially on my computer. I have already downloaded them onto flash drives & shared them with
my siblings, but my idea is to somehow find a way to get them published.
My parents both learned shorthand in college. It was almost universally taught in the 1940s and 1950s. After my mother died, we found a stack of letters that my father wrote to her when they were dating, which were mostly written in Gregg shorthand.
Most kids in my grandchildren’s generation view cursive writing as an indecipherable secret code.
I wonder if there are any translation programs for Greg shorthand, like handwriting recognition programs?
If it’s a standard shorthand, that will be helpful. But you need to understand how shorthand works in order to translate it — it’s a phonetic system.
Also, there are a lot of common shortcuts and abbreviations, and they may have had their own personal ones.
I’ve used a stenotype machine before, which has similarities, but I never learned written shorthand.
It’s possible to do, and I hope you can get it done. It sounds like a really neat project!
My sister and her husband used to play Pictionary with another couple back in the ‘80s. The girls both knew shorthand, so they’d draw the most ridiculous squiggles including the word in shorthand. It threw a monkey wrench into the game, and was pretty funny. The girls were able to “guess” the word on the first try.
Staples did a good job for me. Hardbound, about half an inch thick, cover embossed with a photo of my parents as newly weds with Dad’s customary greeting Dear Norma in his handwriting at the top left hand corner of the photo and his customary close Love, JC at the bottom right hand corner of the photo. Don’t recall the cost but it wasn’t exhoritant.
My mother was a whiz a shorthand and typing. She is gone now.
https://www.amazon.com/GREGG-Shorthand-Manual-Simplified/dp/0070245487
I wonder if you paste it into an ai app if it would translate it to engrish?
Cursive is the new shorthand is definitely the case with most youth in America today.
https://www.alibris.com/booksearch?title=gregg+shorthand+manual&mtype=B
No library is going to have the manual. Leftists have been taking older books out of libraries for years ad they attempt to engage our history and make us ignorant.
Free pdf file at http://greggshorthand.github.io/Annivman.pdf
images at http://duckduckgo.com/?q=gregg+shorthand&t=vivaldi&iax=images&ia=images
Are you sure you want to invade their privacy?
Both my parents were quite reserved in their writings when it comes to personal/private affairs - especially since they knew their letters were reviewed by Navy censors. They often quoted Bible verses and went to church services regularly.
I’m fairly confident their exchanges in shorthand were similar in nature.
But, then again who knows!
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