Comments on: Guest Post: Sibling Rivalries: A Note to Joseph F. Smith from His Daughter, Leonora

By: kevinf

kevinf — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 19:28:11 +0000

You could be on to something there, Toni. Thanks for the comment.

By: Toni

Toni — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 17:22:33 +0000

I believe it says kiss, also, but wonder if perhaps when the mother saw it, she also thought it said kill, hence the odd note about “hard work to make this out.”

By: Bruce Crow

Bruce Crow — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 15:06:09 +0000

Fascinating. I wonder if JFS also had to read twice to distinguish [kiss] from [kill]. And if perhaps that was why he saved the note.

By: kevinf

kevinf — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 21:53:32 +0000

Mina, context is exactly the issue here, and unfortunately, there isn’t much to go on. For now, we will just have to celebrate it as a child’s voice to Joseph F. Smith, Church Apostle, but to little Nonie, just plain “Papa.”

By: kevinf

kevinf — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 21:50:28 +0000

David,

Without a year for the exact date, it is pretty hard to figure out where young Joseph Richards or even their father was. JFS often traveled with his wives who took along new infants, but it would seem that in this case, Nonie’s mother Sarah was involved with the writing of this note. So it is hard to tell. It is possible, if the year were 1877, that she could have been writing about Joseph Fielding Smith Jr, born to Julina the year before. Without an exact date, it all becomes conjecture as to where JFS was and why Nonie wrote to him. It is possible even that he was working late at the office, Nonie wanted to send him a note, and this is what she came up with.

By: David Y.

David Y. — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 21:27:23 +0000

Ha! This dad has received that type of note from one of my kids wherein it was lovingly requested I administer some punishment on their sibling!

(Did we ever figure out why Nonie would request that Papa kiss her brother for her? Was little Joseph Richards away with dad on some trip? Do we even know?)

By: Mina

Mina — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 19:29:31 +0000

And context is everything. I once found a student’s notebook on the floor after class and picked it up to see if it had their name inside. It did, along with a schedule and a to do list. Also, this statement: “I need to kill this semester.”

I took it as, “I really need to do well this semester,” but…

By: kevinf

kevinf — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 18:29:26 +0000

I’ll echo Ardis’s comment about handwriting. It is pretty obvious to me now, but at the time, it was not. I showed it to my wife, a schoolteacher who has to decipher children’s handwriting all the time, and it wasn’t obvious to her either.

The important thing here is that this is part of the process. It is why history researchers share their writing in conferences and in peer review, because we often miss things that others pick up on right away. So what XiGauss picked up is helpful. Now, looking at the note again, the date may well be May 18, not Mar[ch] 18. The rest of the lower case Rs look similar, but we can’t know for sure. After reading literally hundreds of letters to and from Joseph F. Smith, and similarly many pages of journal entries, I am getting more familiar with his handwriting, but I am still occasionally not sure of what I read. Anyone who has played with the Church’s iPhone or Android indexing app has certainly found a lot of 19th century handwriting that is, to say the least, ambiguous or obscure.

So thanks to all for the comments, and Ardis is right on. We rarely see little if any items directly from children, and they can be just as important as the writings of adults. More than anything else, that is why this note stuck out to me.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 18:22:07 +0000

Reading this post reminded me of a note written by my lovely wife’s younger brother to their parents on an evening when he was displeased with the treatment he received from my wife and her sister as babysitters. The letter was detailed, of course, to include all of their infractions and none of his. His letter, however, was written without the tutoring eye of his mother, yet she has preserved it in one of the many family scrapbooks as a reminder of the complex relationships that marked their amazingly loving home.

(I, too, felt somewhat deflated at the re-reading of kiss instead of kill; as Ardis says, now it’s easy to see now that someone else has pointed it out…like so much else in my life.)

By: Amy T

Amy T — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 17:43:46 +0000

Oh, children's notes. One of my cousins sent a copy of a Christmas wish list that our great grandmother wrote as a child. ("All I want for Christmas"). To the normal difficulties of transcribing handwriting, you have to add the misspellings and childish script, but what a sweet record of family relationships.