For the past several weeks, I have had the chance to clean 1865 Civil War Muster Out Rolls from Pennsylvania. It has been a great experience! Interestingly enough, we are doing it the slow and "painful" way. There are faster ways of cleaning the documents, but funding is short, so we are using the cheapest, most effective methods to clean the documents. So, for several hours on Thursday afternoons, I sit at a table with a document that looks just like the one above (usually in smaller pieces though, because they had been folded and tore along the creases) and clean. How does one clean one of these documents? You use eraser crumbs. Yup, good ole fashion (clean) eraser crumbs. It takes time and patience, but it's doable. And at the end of the session, the darker your eraser crumbs are, the more dirt you were able to remove from the document.
Today though, we had a staff person knowledgeable in mending documents come in and show us how to do so. I went in because this was too good of an opportunity to pass up! And it was an experience! So totally loved it. It is fascinating the equipment one uses, again, using the cheapest, most effective methods possible. We all had a chance to play, though not on the real documents! We used random pieces of paper that had been written on, crumpled, and tore. Trying to put these pieces back together again with starch and rice paper was tricky. And while my first attempt wasn't anything to write home about, it was amazing to me.
And I'm kinda hooked! I want to learn more and see more. I would love to take a class and really learn how to do this. I knew this internship would have its downside...almost everything I've been asked to do gets me excited. How do I chose which to focus on??? For now, I'm just grateful I'm getting the chance to experience it all!
That sounds very interesting and very cool!
ReplyDeleteIt was very interesting and very cool. Yesterday, when we were cleaning the documents, we kept saying how we could mend them once they were cleaned. We kept getting laughed at. LOL!
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