That's a Long Time to Be a Woman

Kathryn Larcher spotted this in the World Wide Words newsletter of March 8th:

On visiting the Daily Telegraph Web site Ian Harrison encountered this sentence in a report dated 5 March: "Historians have been kept guessing over claims Dr James Barry, Inspector General of Military Hospitals, was in fact a woman for more than 140 years." I can see the slogan already, "Transvestism: keeps you living longer".

Getting past the hard-to-parse lede, this is actually a pretty interesting article. Evidence suggests that James Barry was in fact Margaret Ann Bulkley.

Key evidence came from around two dozen letters, some written by Margaret as a teenager and others by Barry the student doctor.

Alison Reboul, a document analysis expert with the Forensic Science Service, has concluded they were written by the same person. Another newly-discovered letter was written by Barry to the family solicitor Daniel Reardon on "his" arrival in Edinburgh to study medicine in 1809.

Although the letter was signed 'James Barry', Reardon had written on the outside 'Miss Bulkley, 14th December’. "Reardon was a meticulous man," said du Preez.

"On the outside of all the letters he received he wrote the date and the name of the sender. You can't get much more conclusive than that."

Recognize the Writing, Dad?

Finally an answer to that postcard mystery in Stratford, Connecticut. East Sumner, Me., native James Merrill was intrigued by the story, and sent a copy to his daughter, Harvard librarian Jan Merrill-Oldham.

"It was the unmistakable handwriting of my mother Alice (Merrill), and I just stared at it and couldn't believe the story was saying it was written by someone else," she said. "I called my father and teased him and said, 'Dad, don't you even know your own wife's handwriting?"'

He took a closer look and realized his wife of 64 years, Alice Merrill, had, in fact, written the postcard.

"I felt pretty foolish when I realized it," James Merrill said. [Link]

93-year-old Alice doesn't remember sending the card.

[Thanks, Nancy!]

It's Not Illegible, It's Asemic

Those marks in the margins of your ancestor's diary may look like scribbles, but they might actually be asemic writing.

It looks like writing, but we can't quite read it.

I call works like this "asemic writing".

Asemic writing seems to be a gigantic, unexplored territory.

Asemic writing has been made by poets, writers, painters, calligraphers, children, and scribblers, all around the world. Most people make asemic writing at some time, possibly when testing a new pen.

If doodles count as asemic writing, here's a fine example from census taker George W. Rand, who left this work of art on a page of the Waterford, Maine, census in 1860:

Fortunately, not all of George's writing lacked semantic content.

[via MetaFilter]

Graphoanalyzing the Dead

Dolly Copp is well known in my neck of the woods for the campground that surrounds her homestead and bears her name. Irene P. Lambert learned by looking at her handwriting that Dolly was "strong-willed" but "self-conscious, afraid strangers would laugh at her."

Lambert claims to have considerable success with genealogical handwriting analysis.

In 1998, she was tested by the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, which presented her with handwriting samples from James Ball, a colorful figure born about 1783, apparently in Virginia. She was told nothing about the man, not even his sex. She was told only that one writing sample came from a person who was about 30 years old, and another when that same person was about 65 and suffering from rheumatism.

Her analysis closely paralleled the observations of two of Ball's contemporaries, a newspaperman and a judge, and several latter day biographers. [Link, via EOGN]

The Guy in Zero Was Penniless

Robert Rennick has written a couple dozen books on Kentucky place names and post offices, including the intriguingly titled From Red Hot to Monkey's Eyebrow. As it turns out, Kentuckians are good at coming up with weird place names, and even better at explaining their weird place names.

Some Kentucky towns are named for numerals, including Seventy Six, Zero and Eighty Eight.

Former House Speaker Bobby Richardson of Glasgow, the great-great-great-grandson of the original storekeeper in Eighty Eight, said his pop's handwriting was awful. So he got permission to name the first post office after a numeral.

"He counted the change that he had in his pocket and he had 88 cents, and it became Eighty Eight," Richardson said. [Link]