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!
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.
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.
I wonder if you paste it into an ai app if it would translate it to engrish?
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?
have you tried any of the online shorthand translators? Just lookup “shorthand translation”.
I’m not sure I’d want to translate such letters; they probably contain intimate thoughts that most kids, no matter how old, really don’t want to hear about their parents. Cute note: My husband has some of his dad’s letters he wrote to his mom during WWII. In one of them, his dad wrote, “I can’t wait to get home and do the dishes with you”, Obviously code for sex.
LOTS of book recommendations here, let me point you to a “book price aggregator” site. Addall.com. It searches a bunch of bookstores around the US, and presents you a list of who has it, and how much.
Uh, you may not want to know what is in those paragraphs.
I know I wouldn’t want my kids to read all of the content of my letters home. ;)
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1544749069058377
Supposedly this will teach you how to use a translator.