Boomers flow like ink on a page,
Loops and swirls, wisdom with age.
Letters dance, a personal touch,
A signature that still means much.
Millennials tap, fast and bright,
Glowing screens, pixels in flight.
A cursor blinks, a world unfurled,
Their language lives in a digital world.
One handwrites, one hand clicks,
Both shape time with different tricks.
Yet meaning lingers, deep and true,
In words we share—old and new.
Whether cursive or a flashing line,
Connection lives in how we sign.
Can you read cursive? It’s a superpower the U.S. National Archives is looking for. More than 200 years worth of U.S. documents need transcribing (or at least classifying) and the vast majority from the Revolutionary War era are handwritten in cursive – requiring people who know the flowing, looped form of penmanship. Who knew this might be your superpower? And, it’s a dying art as only 14 U.S. states still teach cursive writing in school.
There are currently more than 5,000 Citizen Archivists reading tens of millions of documents for the Archives (most of this work is volunteer). Those records range from Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line to immigration documents from the 1890s to Japanese evacuation records to the 1950 Census.
To volunteer, all that’s required is to sign up online and then launch in. You just pick a record that hasn’t been done and read the instructions. It’s easy to do for a half hour a day or a week.
-Chip
P.S. Maria Shriver will be joining me on stage next Monday, April 14 at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall to talk about her new bestselling book, “I Am Maria.” The cost is just $50 which includes a book. There are just a few spots still open so you can register HERE.