Intimate Connections: PRINT Transcription Workshop

The UCF PRINT project is excited to partner with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Step inside the lives of early Americans through the lens of hand-written letters.

Stories of families’ and religious organizations’ migrations from Europe to America are recorded in hundreds of letters written between 1630 and 1730 in the Pemberton Family Collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. But in order to share those stories, we need your help reading and transcribing them.

This free interactive workshop offers an introduction to transcribing letters from the past, and it will contribute to the People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel project (PRINT). Through this workshop, you will hear what researchers have discovered so far under themes such as love and marriage, friendships, family, and social networks in early America. Then you will participate in a small group workshop, taking out your digital quill to transcribe what is written in one of these letters. As a citizen-historian, you will contribute to PRINT’s goal of making accessible the connections within the manuscript correspondence.

The PRINT project is a collaborative effort to trace the communication networks of early modern European religious minorities and the ways they shaped the dynamic patterns of migration in the Atlantic world. Housed at the University of Central Florida, PRINT seeks to create a database of correspondence and then visualize the complex connections that arose in response to religious persecution and missionary work. PRINT Dynamic Networks

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, founded in 1824, is one of the nation’s largest archives of historical documents. We are proud to serve as Philadelphia’s Library of American History, with over 21 million manuscripts, books, and graphic images encompassing centuries of US history. Through educator workshops, research opportunities, public programs, and lectures throughout the year, we strive to make history relevant and exhilarating to all. For more information, visit hsp.org.

The Pemberton Papers Project, funded by the Lapidus grant through the Omohundro Institute, is a collaboration between the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and Dr. Rosalind Beiler of the University of Central Florida. Its goal is to digitize and make available volumes I and II (1641-1702) of the collection.

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