Present in the past
by Fiona Clayton, TEPC transcriber
Transcribing archival documents can be energy-consuming and draining. It’s the little details that keep one going. Sometimes one comes across little notes in the margins of the documents that add substance to the skeleton of the household. Perhaps a slave has escaped between the time the inventory was drafted and its revision. The inventories contain clues that may lead one to bigger stories, signposts that cause one to think a little deeper about the way things were.
Transcribing inventories is like spending the day visiting the homes of those who were living at the Cape at a time when it was a very different place. One is dealing with the intimate details of people’s households and on occasion the inventories give us a glimpse of the tragic lives of the majority of the population.
In a letter found with an inventory, a father asks for permission to keep the few possessions he and his late wife owned, for the sake of the small children who have been left motherless. The beneficiary of the estate of a smallpox victim writes to the Master of the Orphan Chamber to explain that he is reluctant to travel to the Cape because of the fear of contracting smallpox. During smallpox epidemics many slaves and settlers lost their lives – like the AIDS epidemic, smallpox did not discriminate in terms of age, gender, class or nationality.
It is weird and wonderful to think about how much modern society resembles the past.
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