We have so many unique things in our collections, and every item has its own story to tell. My answer ends up being a list, and near the top of that list are the colonial records. A few years ago, I digitized many of these documents by photographing each page. At the time I spoke no Dutch, so the earliest colonial records were mostly a mystery to me.
Yet I felt a palpable sense of the basic humanness behind them. As I gently turned the pages of those large volumes, I could not help imagining the people who wrote each entry. The script, though flowing and elaborate, was not fanciful but practicalβa record of the human needs, daily events, and common agreements of the settlers in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam and later English New York, as well as the surrounding Dutch and English towns in Brooklyn and Queens.
However, as a photographer I think visually, so something other than text stood out to me. The pages of the colonial volumes are peppered with the signatures of the parties concerned, showing different handwriting, some fluid, others rough and spidery. Interspersed with the signatures are odd marks. Some are essentially large letters, while others are common symbols like crosses, stars, and what people today might describe as hashtags.
In some instances, the marks are elaborate; in others they look more like scribbles. They appear in the Dutch colonial records, and become even more common in the English volumes, but then largely disappear in the eighteenth century documents.
The meaning and history of these marks is an interesting part of the larger history of writing and the growth of literacy. NYC Municipal Archives. When the colonial records were created, reading and writing were becoming more important with each passing year. Increasingly, literacy informed religious life.
