Internship Day Two

I really must insist on gushing about my internship a bit more.

Today I had to take little slips of paper and fill in data about each incoming piece. now that work is mostly tedious and very simple BUT getting to see all the stuff that i'm recording and actually handling it to get the info is AMAZING. Anyway, here's the highlight of today:

In the pile of manuscripts I saw this letter that had beauitful handwriting and leaned into read it. I believe it was from some time around or priot to 1850. It read a bit like a love letter, the writer was asking someone not to forget them and to think of them and the places they had been together - that was the gist of it except it was poetic in that not-really-trying-to-be-poetic- i just-write-beautifully-all-the-time-way people in the 1800's had about them. It was very touching to read. The coolest part was there was a lock of brown hair that was threaded and twisted into this intricate design and pinned with the little paper cutout thing in the center of the design to hold it there. It was common to put locks of hair in lockets but I had only vaguely heard of including locks in letters, apparently it was a very significant thing to do and if done with a male it meant it was SERIOUS between them. However, this letter was between two women, which was interesting. I think they were just very very good friends or maybe relatives, but it was so perfectly preserved like someone had made it today. A two hundred year old lock of hair in a letter begging not to be forgotten and here I am reading it two hundred years later. AMAZING.

I wondered if the person had written back. I wonder how they knew each other and what the connection was. I wished I had the entire history and why they were being seperated, it really just made this random name seem alive. the lock of hair wasn't creepy or anything, it was smooth and still a very beautiful shade of chesnut brown, very neatly kept in its design somehow for almost two centuries!

Other interesting artifacts were papers trying to explain alcohol abuse back when they were just beginning to realize it was abuse, cures for alcohol poisoning, ads selling a "hightech" new moustrap, and a prayer for those fighting in the civil war.

In short, I love my internship.