How about this for a challenge!

[Rachel Caldecott]

I've started a new story, based on my great, great, great, great? grandmother's flight from Hungary in 1848. She gave a series of talks in the early 1900's in London, called Before, During and After the Revolution. I'm working from a typed transcript of the After the Revolution bit, which for me is the most exciting part. It tells of how she followed her husband as he fled and tried to evade the Austrian authorities. She travelled (mostly on her own), back and forth across Hungary and Romania, until she met up with her husband in Belgrade. They arrived in Constantinople, stayed for a while until they were forced to flee to Malta, then on to Marseilles, Paris and finally London. The rest of the material is in the form of handwritten notes (an example of which you'll find in the attached document). Her husband, (although you'd never guess from her notes) was an infamous spy and double agent, and there is quite a damning book about him and his activities and his relationships with people like Karl Marx. I also have evidence, from other sources, that as she travelled, trying to catch up with hubby, she had a toddler in tow and was pregnant with a second child. Both children died on her travels. Of course, she didn't mention that to the Victorian audience in London.

My challenge is to try to read more of the notes, in case there is something wonderful hidden in them. I don't suppose there are any computer programmes that can decipher hand writing like this?

 

[Amber]

The type of programs that take writing and turn it into editable text are called OCR (optical character recognition) programs. They've been around for at least twenty years but I don't know how good they are. They certainly weren't very good twenty years ago and of course, the better the quality of the original image, the more luck you will have. I'm not sure about the letter. It's hard to read even though her handwriting is even and consistent.

But how very interesting, the idea of a mother desperately trying to catch up with her husband. If she didn't write it down, does that mean she didn't know? If she didn't know -- would she have felt differently about all the risks she was taking? Many marriages don't survive the loss of one child let alone two - how did she feel? Or how did he feel? Did they blame one another or did they understand, as people who suffer great hardships seem to -- that life is sometimes near impossible to sustain? Clearly she had other children -- you're evidence of that. It sounds very interesting.