My high school senior nephew cannot read or write cursive

[csziggy]

111. It's interesting that a Quaker school is demeaning cursive

In my genealogical research I am blessed to have several lines that were Quakers - who were known for their detailed record keeping in cursive handwriting. I have one line that I could trace back to the fifteen hundreds because of those excellent Quaker records. The hardest part was verifying which village they lived in since the monthly meetings of the husband and the wife's origins kept records of the marriage, births and deaths of the children, and all other events considered important - in duplicate, paralleling each other. It was not until the couple requested a letter to take to a meeting in Pennsylvania that I was sure which village had been their home.

The Quaker meetings kept notes on everything, especially the groups that moved to Pennsylvania. They provided letters for members who were leaving one monthly meeting group to move to another. They made notes about members who did not live up to the rigorous standards of the communities and every allegation of misdeeds. Many Quakers were not of an elite class, but most were well educated because it was valued in their society.

How will future students of that Quaker school be able to appreciate the history of the Quakers without reading the records that were written in cursive for several hundred years? I consider the claim that "it was a written language taught to over privileged whites so that their servants could not see their letters or their ledgers" to be a fallacy born of ignorance. That opinion is based on forty years of genealogical and historical research in which I found records for many levels of society that were kept in cursive writing.