Editor's Notes: Abstract Thoughts

EDITOR'S NOTES ABSTRACT THOUGHTS A s editor of the Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine, I don't just edit articles ..I also type almost all of the abstracts that appear on its pages. While this can be slightly tedious with the challenge of reading old handwriting and making decisions about how to handle archaic spelling and frivolous punctuation, it is also rewarding. An abstractor or transcriber gains a perspective on history that is different from that of either the historian or the genealogist. Historians teJ?.dto take a high-level view of history, all too often based on historiography rather than original documents. Genealogists tend to take a telescopic view, focused on those documents directly related to their own ancestors. Abstractors and transcribers, on the other hand, don't get to pick their viewpoint. Their duty is to convey the information in an entire group of documents, omitting no document-even if the persons therein are not key figures in history or did not leave descendants. We do, however, develop viewpoints as the documents provide us with a real-time window into events in the lives of many human beings. Sometimes this results in a significant reworking of our preconceptions about lifestyles and events of the past. As a student, I learned about the history of the Revolutionary War; as a genealogist I made note of my ancestors who fought in that war. I developed a mental image of the war, a melding of those two viewpoints. In preparing this issue, I had to alter that image significantly. In typing the requests for passes submitted to Pennsylvania's Revolutionary governments, I noticed the large number of requests, usually by women, to go to New York to visit or seek release of husbands and sons held on board the British prison ships. In this issue, one out of six requests is for this purpose. Isabel Henniger touches on the conditions on the prison ships in her article, but I was most struck by a footnote, quoting Hamilton Fish: "Actually, three times as many American Patriots were liquidated-13,000 on the infamous British prison ships and in New York prisons-than the 4,300 killed in the American armed forces during the entire war." Oh, yes, a very different image. Patricia La,w Hatcher, FASG