Transcribing A Handwritten Journal

[yn9man]

In 1889 my great grandfather went to sea at the age of 21. I recently came across / discovered a hand written (mostly in pencil but in some places he used ink) journal he wrote during / on his first voyage from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Japan. My dilemma is as follows. Should I transcribe only what is written (including obvious errors, especially in his lack of punctuation and capitalization) or do I make corrections / changes using "common sense". I plan on sharing this transcription only with other family members and don't intend to publish. Is there written guidance or instructions when transcribing documents?

Thanks for any and all guidance, direction and assistance.

yn9man

     

[Bee]

Why not do both.

[Jo.]

A old manager of mine said,  We write how we speak!

Hence why grammar is often wrong... 

Personally I would if I was transcribing, keep it true to what he's written has by doing this you're be keeping his personality alive in a written form.. 

[mike175]

Obviously for your own use you can do whatever seems appropriate, but accepted practice in transcribing is to write exactly what you see on the page. Some people add "[sic]" after obvious errors to indicate they were originally written that way, but this can look rather messy if there are more than a one or two mistakes on a page.

Mike.

[sami]

My suggestion:

Write exactly what you see. Assuming you are entering the transcription into some kind of a Word document, then you can always easily create a 2nd copy and make changes, corrections etc. on that 2nd copy. No need to clutter the original transcription with comments, marks etc.

sami

[C_W]

Can you photograph each page. Then you can include the image of his journal with your transcript of the page, either in word or pdf.  Documents photograph surprising well.

[philipsearching]

Personally I would if I was transcribing, keep it true to what he's written has by doing this you're be keeping his personality alive in a written form..

I agree.

[mike175]

I like to save transcripts in plain text format. It makes it easier to import them into other software such as DTP which I use when preparing layouts for printing.

Mike. 

[ThrelfallYorky]

I'd say it's quite important to transcribe exactly what you have before you. You can later work from that to "clarify" it if you wish. Photocopying or photographing the original document also seems almost essential, too. The three versions together may possibly later be annotated with historical data and information to make a very useful documentary resource.