The Florida Genealogical Society (Tampa) is pleased to announce its program for Saturday, July 3, 2010, at 10:30 AM in the Auditorium of the John F. Germany at 900 N. Ashley Drive in downtown Tampa. Our speaker will be Karen Packard Rhodes who will present a program about "Reading Old Colonial Handwriting & Spanish Paleography." The lecture will discuss general considerations in reading old handwriting, including abbreviations, letter forms, condition of manuscripts, and the paper, ink, and pens used by creators of these documents. She will show show specific examples from documents in the General Archive of the Indies, the Library of Congress, and her personal genealogy files of the letter forms, punctuation (or, more specifically, the lack thereof), abbreviations, and other aspects of the old documents, dating from 1563 to the early 1800s, beginning with Spanish documents and ending with documents in English.
Ms. Rhodes is currently a post-baccalaureate student in history and Spanish at the University of North Florida, specializing in Spanish colonial Florida. In connection with her studies in Spanish Paleography under Dr. J. Michael Francis of the Department of History at UNF, Karen spent the month of May 2008 conducting original research at the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain. Karen completed the 40-course program of study from the National Institute of Genealogical Studies of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, "with distinction," with a specialty in American Records. Karen has received a grant from the University of North Florida to conduct research into the family lines of St. Augustine, Florida, during the Second Spanish Period (1783-1821) to correlate family relationships to the historical events of the period. Karen is the author of the book Non-Federal Censuses of Florida, 1784-1821: A Guide to Sources (McFarland, 2010).
