The Elusive F Word

Should you ever chose to write your diary by dipping a quill pen in inkblack, for the sake of readers a hundred years from now, please blot the page or let the ink dry BEFORE you close the book!

In 1854 William Short didn’t believe in that practice. When he closed the little diary without letting the page dry first, the ink smeared or bled onto the opposite page—or both.

Didn’t the guy believe that anybody’d ever want to read his stuff?

If I make it into Heaven myself, I plan to have a talk with this old-time Methodist preacher and he’d just better hide his quill beforehand lest I do something with it that he won’t like.

I have a bone or two to pick with him.

For instance, there’s the matter of his name.

He signed inside the front cover of his 3 X 4 ¾ inch diary thusly:

When I scanned and enlarged the man’s signature, I came up with:

OK. The last name is Short—in Spencerian script writers did not cross the final T in a word. In fact, in the middle of a word they often placed the crossbar of a T above the upright so it looks like an l with a line above it.

The writer of the diary uses the initial W for his first name. I guessed that would stand for William, that being a more common name than Wolfgang. Searching via Google I discovered many William Shorts alive in the 1854 time frame.

That left the middle initial—is that a capital G? or a T or an L?

Spencerian script encouraged the use of decorative curlicues and with my macular degeneration I have trouble distinguishing between a flourish and an actual letter.

My Google search led me to a William Lawson Short who lived in the right area at the right time.

I thought I’d pegged him.

From diary content I knew the date of Short’s wedding, so I traced marriage records and found that he is listed in court records as William L. Short, who married Sarah Belle Laning.

That locked it in for me. I had identified my man…..

HA!

Even his marriage license has his middle initial WRONG! The court clerk in 1854 couldn’t read Short’s writing any better than I can!

Further research led me to a 1906 Historical Encyclopedia of Morgan County, Illinois. Guess what? William Short was still alive in 1906 and he wrote a biographical sketch of himself, his marriage to Sarah Bell Laning and his time teaching at the Methodist Seminary in Jackson, Missouri, the year he kept this diary.

The encyclopedia even has a photo of him in his later years.

It even tells how in those later years, in 1893 he and Sarah Bell established a school for the blind in the town of Jacksonville, Illinois.

All well and good.

But the rascal gives his name as William Fletcher Short!

Fletcher!

That letter in the middle of his name is an F!

And here I’d been tracking William Lawson Short all this past week.

Not L, but F.

That’s what I said when I found out.

In other news, the at&t repairman (the third one in the past five days—Sunday, Tuesday & Thursday—came here to fix the same ongoing internet problem). Each one says, “It’s not my job…”

Well one came again Thursday. He said that our internet trouble is caused by our electric telephone wires outside the house being round instead of flat… or maybe he said flat instead of round.

I’d stopped paying attention by then.

Anyhow he told me that I need to pay another $110 to get whatever fixed. That’s an extra $110 in addition to the monthly maintenance fee we already pay—and have paid for years.

When the repairman told me that…

Alas, the F word that sprang into my mind was not Fletcher!