Last Wednesday, toward the end of my time, I ran into a problem as I was looking through the letters to add keywords into Endnote. One of the letters in my database did not match up with the transcription in the Documents of Brotherly Love. What was strange is that it wasn’t completely incorrect, just some of the words were off and not lined up, but that is not supposed to happen in a transcription. However, I also was not confident in my ability to accurately see the words in 18th-century Dutch, so I thought I might just be looking at things incorrectly.
Monday morning, I sought after Dr. Beiler’s help. She looked at the Dutch and told me I was correct in noticing that they did not match, but that they were similar. Together we uncovered the mystery. The mystery ended up being an easy one to solve because the editors had done most of the hard work, I just didn’t know where to look. As it turns out, many of the documents I am looking at were written between government officials and sometimes receivers felt compelled to have the responses copied and sent to other people to let them know what was or was not being done. This original letter apparently has five known copies, four written in Dutch and one in English. The editors of Documents of Brotherly Love chose to transcribe one of the copies not from the De Hoop Schaeffer collection, which is the collection I focus on but did note where the other copies were including two in De Hoop Scheffer’s collection.
So, whoever copied all the letters a few hundred years ago is the culprit behind the mess up and inconsistencies between the copies. During the weekly meeting, when I shared that two copies of the same letter existed in our database, this brought up the question of whether or not both should be included in the final database. Unfortunately, it seems that both being there can possibly bring up extra problems for the technical team, so ideally, they would only like to include one. However, since it is known that some of these letters were likely meant for important people, the possibility of deliberate tampering between the different letters was brought up. If that does happen to be the case, that would make transcribing and translating these two letters exceptionally interesting and important.
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