Adam Prudhomme
Beaver Staff
Handwritten letters are a great tool for researching a family’s history, not just for what was written, but how it was written.
That’s what Carol St. Clair will delve into at the next edition of Lennox and Addington County’s Learning Labs, which takes place at the county’s museum Nov. 25 from 10 a.m. to noon.
An expert on handwriting analysis, St. Clair will offer tips on how to piece together clues about a relative by simply examining their penmanship.
“I profile personalities,” St. Clair says of her analysis. “In finding samples of my great-great grandfather’s handwriting I realized I would have liked this guy. He was a smart businessman and he was honest. That’s what got me started and then my grandparents, I started bringing them to life with their personality.”
Making assumptions based on handwriting might seem like a stretch at first, but St. Clair says people do it a lot more than they might realize.
“This will give people a chance to start looking at their ancestors in a whole new way and get some of their personality,” said St. Clair. “When you get Christmas cards from relatives or something in the mail from someone you don’t know that’s handwritten, you start making judgements about their personality. Those judgements are right. You just don’t understand how you’ve come to that judgement.”
“I’m teaching people the basics of handwriting analysis and how they can apply it to their letters,” she added. “The different patterns, how letters are formed and what it means.”
While history books tend to boil down the past to just the important moments, St. Clair says a handwritten letter from an everyday person of that era can offer so much more.
“It’s a snapshot of their everyday life,” she said. “What the weather was like, what they paid for a pig at the market and that sort of thing. Love letters are wonderful too.”
During her talk she’ll also touch upon how to read old census records, which can be extremely helpful when piece together a family tree.
Admission to the Archives’ Learning Lab is $3. Guests are encouraged to bring samples of letters, diaries or other written records from their family archives.
Also on Saturday the county will be hosting a screening of Harry’s Story, a documentary about Flinton resident Harry Andringa. He was nine years old when Hitler’s Nazis invaded the Netherlands. His family risked their own lives by hiding Jews from the Nazis, saving them from the death camps. The film, which will be shown at the Museum and Archives, will begin at 2 p.m. Admission is $3.