By Susie Wickman at Genealogy Journey
Writing Your Family History – in Shorthand?
Write your family history-in shorthand?
On the way to a business meeting, note-taking crossed my mind. It occurred to me to wonder about our relatives who were secretaries and did their note-taking in shorthand.
For those of you who had a stenographer (a person who specializes in taking dictation in shorthand) in the family, are there shorthand family history stories that need to be told and recorded?
Did your mom write her shopping list in shorthand?
Did she make secret Christmas lists in shorthand to keep them a secret?
Or worse, did she write your family history in shorthand and now you need to get it translated to be able to read it? (This brings to mind the current discussions of not teaching cursive handwriting in schools. Those of us who write our stories in cursive hand-writing may be challenging our descendants to have them translated.)
This would make a perfect vignette or short story in your family history. 
Is this a current skill or going the way of the dodo?
Please share your family’s shorthand stories.
I volunteer with a Friends of the Library group that accepts used book donations. We quite often get Gregg shorthand instruction books. We usually send them on to Thriftbooks, an online bookseller/aggregator. You might check used book sellers for copies. My mother (b. 1923) learned Gregg and used it in her early work life. She would occasionally write a sentence or two to amuse us kids, but we never learned it.
Sue, thank you for sharing and stopping by.
Am I to assume, no one writes letters anymore? OMLord!
Hi Jo. Are you referring to cursive writing? Maybe it is a look at the future. I have people in my family that do not write cursive. They print everything.. Thanks for stopping by.
Shorthand is a lost art. There are a few people who remain interested in it, but it’s not taught in schools in the US and most people under the age of 40 have no idea what it is.
Lee, thanks for stopping by. I think cursive handwriting is going in that direction as well. Genealogists in the future will have new and different challenges than we do.
Maybe part of the solution for those of us who like to write in shorthand, and even in cursive longhand, is to tuck a kind of “key” into the beginning of our journals for our descendants, to help them “crack the code.” This could be a good practice to get into with each new journal we start. There is an interesting video on YouTube where the presenter says “Many historical documents from the 17th to the 19th centuries remain unread in archives today because they were written in shorthand, difficult to decode and difficult to catalog.” Centuries ago, there were many different shorthand systems and in some cases the historians didn’t even know where to begin because they couldn’t even identify the system. Providing a key somewhere in our journals could be very helpful. For Gregg shorthand, that could be a chart of the basic outlines, and a chart of the brief forms and commonly used words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DYIXlzmxN8&t=1160s&index=42&list=PLZQSDGZ1sBDWrSxHc9hZs8w0thKDvoFY-
Unrelated… I also like to keep a 4-generation family tree at the beginning of my journals. The Mormon church used to sell journals that included a blank family tree to fill out, but they seem to have stopped selling them, much to my disappointment. I guess there aren’t as many people keeping handwritten journals any more. I thought that was such a great idea. though! So I’ve kept up the practice by gluing one in near the beginning of each journal (on those blank pages at the beginning). I think it’s a great way to identify yourself and provide some context. We never know what might happen to our journals in the decades ahead or even if our journals will always remain in our family lines for sure…
Teri, nice to hear from you again. It’s so interesting. I had no idea shorthand was that old and that there were that many forms. I have to laugh. It makes me think of when I was a kid and we were making up secret languages.
Two years ago I took up Gregg Notehand (a less abbreviated version of Gregg shorthand for note-taking purposes rather than for verbatim dictation). To practice, I began keeping my journal in Gregg Notehand, realizing my descendants probably won’t be able to read it. Our family homeschools, so I’ve been teaching it to my kids at least (cursive, too, of course!) Privacy is becoming an endangered species in the world, so I see value in shorthand on that level.
I do see the potential difficulty of having any of our family history in shorthand. The mother of a friend of mine labelled their family photos in Gregg shorthand, and now nobody knows how to read them. My friend would like to learn shorthand to remedy this, but life is busy and just hasn’t been able to yet. It may take a descendant with a sense of adventure to take it upon themselves to learn a forgotten writing system, to be able to chase down the path of their ancestor’s life– that could be seriously fun in its own way, though! Remember the buzz created when they finally were able to transcribe the now-famous Samuel Pepys’ diary!
Teri, thanks so much for stopping by and for commenting. That is so interesting. I wasn’t sure there would be an actual connection there. Thanks also for teaching your kids cursive. Apparently, that is also becoming an issue. It is no longer being taught in some schools and there is already a concern on how they will be able to read family history related documents, later, when hopefully they become interested.