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     I and other transcribers had some concerns about important log books being crowd sourced for transcription by random people only identifiable by a chosen screen name as some logs have value for reasons the on-site transcribers might know and will be watching for as they transcribe what random people, no matter how well intentioned, may not see as such.

     Since 2017 I have been cross referencing certain transcriptions I have worked on with what had been labeled the “Sophie Porter Journal” on a research website I found through an earlier cross reference involving another log. I have used her journal to list all the ships, captains, and wives that wintered at Herschel Island from 1894-1895, and only relatively recently found that the “Sophie Porter Journal” was actually the log book of the Jesse H Freeman and she, the captain’s wife, had been the keeper of the log. At sea, she had followed the format of ship log entries by including directions, wind speeds, weather, and other information routinely kept in a ship’s log which was the business ledger for the company, but also included with some personal notes. When wintering with the ships nestled in the ice until the spring thaw, she leaves out the readings and observation since the ship isn’t moving and concentrates largely on the social scene, including the names of indigenous people and incidents in their lives like births and deaths.

     When cross referencing the Newport log that I was transcribing in 2017 with the “Journal”, I found that quite often, for his purposes, the transcriber of it would leave in enough of the entry to give its essence but often did so by reducing an event to a simply summary as was done when stating,  “The captain replaced the steward,”  in his “Journal” version when in the actual log book the full story was the captain’s needing to deal with the crew’s boredom.  

     Choosing two additional entries at random and finding they too were more detailed in the log as opposed to the “Journal”,  I suggested that people on the Whaling Museum Women’s Committee not delay but start transcribing the log of the Jesse H Freeman immediately as the names of the captain’s wives alone are important.  

     Just placing the Jesse H Freeman log on the From the Page site for random transcribers to work on whatever part they chose when they chose to, only meant it would be gotten to eventually when it should be done now by a dedicated team as we needed to control this one and not rely on random transcribers.

     It was put on the crowd source site anyway, open to anyone at any time in any order, and I saw a problem. 

     Instead of the log of the Jesse H Freeman being transcribed in an orderly manner, one person was not only jumping around through the whole log, but was leaving partial pages for someone else to finish. This made going back to a previous page to insert something increasing familiarity with the handwriting led a transcriber to decipher was very difficult as there may be randomly chosen, partially done, or not started pages scattered throughout making finding a sought after page difficult to find, and all those little bits of history that made the job interesting were removed making a pleasurable task a chore.

     I wrote to the transcribers I work with asking that the transcribing of the Jesse H Freeman be done in page order. As a member of a team and having worked in tandem with other transcribers on the other logs, an orderly procedure benefited all working on it.

     I asked,

“If anyone here is [screen name] or knows [screen name], could you or they stop jumping around and transcribe the Freeman in order and not this haphazard jumping which is going to call for a lot of editing as the person leaves a trail of [?]s in whole paragraphs as they zip off to the next page.

     The Freeman is showing itself to be a treasure trove of information because of who kept it and where. The second thing is that as the log keeper is the captain’s wife who does not perform any ships duties but observes them, her entries are narratives that contain many details that a regular log might skip. Most logs refer to lowering the boats, Sophie not only explains the procedure in detail, but compares the Atlantic to Pacific procedure for lowering.

     Yesterday I came upon a half done page from which ChrisB ran away. The Freeman had encountered the boats of a sunken whaler and had the Captain’s wife tell her what happened and she wrote it all down. Because it was not part of the log, not being the Freeman’s business, whereas like other logs she normally stayed within margins, the story went from edge to edge of the page and the person who digitized the tale did not notice that so the first two to three words of the page long narrative were not included. Since we have the Freeman log I went to the library to consult it.

     Archive.org has volume one on its site and only mentions there is a volume two implying the second volume is missing or hinting they would like it digitized We have volume 2 at NBWM. It just hasn’t been digitized. Major find.

     Needs to be transcribed (internally. You have no idea what the jumping around is doing.)

     In the sunken ship narrative, needing more space, she continued the edge to edge narrative below the regular formatted entry on the next page and is not part of the July 4 entry although it is transcribed that way on the next page where the digitizer, apparently seeing the previous error without correcting it, adjusted the scanner to get this part of the edge to edge entry complete.

      This is turning out not to be just a standard log and needs special attention to both volumes and group interaction in order to not miss the important things that are historical. At Alaska, she points out the indigenous people on the US side are filthy, uneducated, trading for things like they were desperate. On the Canadian side they were somewhat educated, cleaner, and more organized in their trading.

     Things like that which would not have been included in a standard log. So, if you are or know ChrisB, could you or they do the log in page order not in random clumps needing heavy correction.”

      I erroneously assumed that as I had been transcribing for 8 years this request would be given serious consideration as it was not a random complaint but a request based on experience and what would make the experience more enjoyable and less of a chore.

     Instead I was informed first that “I think we all agree this is a prioritized journal for transcription, we will get it right,” and then assured “Our review system and rules document are set up to control the end product. Do you have a document to share with your extended research on this journal?”

 I also received this written lecture.

     “Any transcriber may wish to work with log/journal content, of course, as a historical or cultural project. The actual transcribing is what we are all doing together, however, and is not any single transcriber’s project. So in fact, we are all reviewers, editors, as well as transcribers. Our final edited product is crowd sourced, worked on by multiple people, and because of that better than if one person “owned” a page or a whole log/journal.

There is nothing in our rules document against doing partial pages. A link to the rules document, and summary transcription conventions are on every FtP page.”

  And in a rather nasty move the email contained, “Thank you [screen name] for any and all work you do in these primary sources. Feel free to come to our monthly Zoom meetings if you want to chat about the work, the process, or to share your thoughts.”

     Besides the slap in the face at the end, what needs to be noted in these emails is that in one I was assured,  “Our review system and rules document are set up to control the end product,” and that “we are all reviewers, editors, as well as transcribers. Our final edited product is crowd sourced, worked on by multiple people, and because of that better than if one person “owned” a page or a whole log/journal.

     That last about “better than if one person ‘owned’ a page or a whole log/journal,” would not take long to be proven just a boilerplate response without grasping the issue.

     In the meantime I responded.

     “If we were just monkeys in a room writing Shakespeare, there is more to transcribing than just looking at handwriting and typing it out.

     AI can do that.

     Also, although any transcriber may wish to work with a  log/journal content, and there is nothing in our rules document against doing partial pages, unless you are actually doing the transcribing you may not be aware that this makes it difficult and removes some of what makes it fascinating. As volunteers, this should not be a job and a mechanical one of simple rote copying.

     We are finding history and that needs to be acknowledged, accepted, and encouraged.

     Jumping is causing a problem.

     In my 8 years, starting as the sole full time transcriber volunteer beginning with the Catalpa, I have been given rules but never asked for input or being spoken to about the full transcriber experience that in my case alone has led to multiple historic discoveries such as The info on Smith of the Catalpa that was passed on to the Martha’s Vineyard museum that it did not have, the first reference to homosexuality in a ship log that the museum is blind to the importance of, the true story behind the panorama history, some bad racial business, multiple connections between captains, ships,. and events, that would have been missed if the transcription was a hopscotch crap shoot.

     If I can go through multiple pages having been familiar with the script and can type in info because I know the handwriting and previously encountered names, why should that involve reviewers, editors, as well as transcribers, crowdsourcing, being worked on by multiple people when a transcriber can just keep typing and be able to go back and replace a [?] because I know I had left a [?] somewhere and can find it.

     As far as it being “better than if one person “owned” a page or a whole log/journal”, really? I have eight years experience that belies that assertion.

     In spite of a simple request that members of the team act together in an orderly way for the sake of fellow transcribers, I was informed that, “Put simply, our process, working as a team, is the one we do and will continue. If you are unable to work this way let me know.”

     Obviously either I am not a member of the team who made a request of the other members of the team or I am not on the same level as the others, so teamwork is a one-way street that only applies when I am expected to accept whatever anyone else wants or does but am not a part of the team that should be treated as one when teamwork helps me.

     I chose the option to go my own way and, when I am done with a transcript not on the crowd sourcing site, submitting it to the museum and to the Quigley Institute for Non-Heterosexual Archival Archaeology  where it will be protected from those “reviewers, editors, as well as transcribers” whose “final edited product is crowd sourced, worked on by multiple people, and because of that better than if one person “owned” a page or a whole log/journal.”

     I offer proof that while everyone might see, few, if any, notice the history that is right there, clearly visible but ignored and, because of limited life experiences and personal, religious, and/or political beliefs, a person might feel free to gloss over certain information, or, being unversed in the proper historic euphemism, sees merely words and misses the concept. 

     I also offer it as proof that erasure still happens and is not always obvious.

     I offer it as proof that people are too comfortable in doing the erasing and/or accepting it. 

     And I offer it as proof that when an action does not affect a particular person or organization, it can be dismissed as unimportant because of this tunnel vision

     I assumed the above was happening, or at least the possibility of it happening existed and was comfortable in that assumption as I had seen it happen in other places on other issues, and am now further validated in that assumption as I have evidence of it in a very confusing turn of events.

     While transcribing the logbook for the Newport back in 2017 as it wintered on Herschel Island the winter of 1894-1895, I came across what had been listed as the “Sophie Porter Journal” which was actually the logbook of the Jesse H Freeman for which Sophie kept the log for her husband whom she accompanied on that voyage. The person whose transcription I found explained it was a “poetic” version of the log as it did not contain everything from each log entry but had been modified to emphasize those entries and their details dealing with Indigenous people, especially their medical needs, as he was a doctor who worked with the First Nations People of Canada.

     In his ‘poetic” version, Sophie is very maternalistic towards the Indigenous people with whom she lived on the island and took a number of photographs of her daughter, Dorothy, playing with the Indigenous children.

     However, this “poetic” transcription only included the time on the Island while the actual ship log included entries on the voyage from home port to the winter base. It is in these opening entries that we read of Sophie Porter’s first contact with the ”Natives” which revealed the attitude of the time when it came to people of other cultures. 

     In the pre-island part of the log, upon first encountering Indigenous People she found them dirty, disgusting, frightening, and not the type of people she or her daughter should associate with. 

     “ They were all very much interested in and friendly disposed toward Dorothy, who does not at all appreciate their advances, nor do I for they are so dreadfully filthy in their persons & clothes. I don’t want too close a contact with them.

    She also noted that when approaching Alaska the “Natives” on the American side of the border in contrast to those on the Canadian side were less educated, haphazard in what they traded goods for, and were worse off appearance-wise than those in the Canadian ports, thereby expressing the idea that it could be a question of nature vs nurture which gave hope that her attitude was changeable upon education as it would later prove to have been the case.

     As can be seen in the above image, there is one early entry that had been edited with a thicker pen in which she crossed out the word “Indians” and replaced it with the word “people”. It is not done as a correction as she wrote, as the pen is thicker as is the writing, which implies the change was made much later as the pen does not match the thickness of the rest of the log book except in another instance I found where she had obviously come back to make corrections as her description of the other women she met early in the voyage was similarly crossed out and changed, with what would appear the same second pen, from a complimentary description of the other captains’ wives as a nice group she would like to get to know better to “I met the other wives”.  

     Considering the similarity to thickness of pen and darkness of ink, these changes may have been made after the voyage as Sophie Porter reread her log entries as any decent writer would before handing in their work, and could indicate a wider opening of mind and change of attitude in many aspects of her life as she does at one time respond to the question of a friend back home about her ability to live in such an isolated place with a rhapsodic description of the Community.

     Obviously, somewhere along the voyage her attitude toward the Indigenous People changed as in later entries she refers to individuals by name and not the blanket title, “native” and she might include what brought about her more open attitude toward the Indigenous People in her detailed and sometimes self-reflective ship’s log.

     When I began transcribing, it was to avoid the docent duty of leading school field trips that the museum thought I would be good at having spent my professional career as a teacher, but it was that very detail that had me insist on not leading tours as I had seen how docents got treated on field trips in spite of the chaperone’s best efforts, and did not want to become that target in retirement when I could be enjoying what I was doing. I, instead, emphasized that my close to 40 years in the classroom had given me the ability to read all manner of penmanship, and was handed the log for the Catalpa of Fremantle Fenian escape fame to transcribe as it was needed for an upcoming exhibit. 

     Until then, transcription was strictly on an as-needed basis done by whoever in the research library had the time or a docent pulled off the floor for a while. Now there was an anchor person, and, to keep me busy and available, I and another volunteer, also not interested in noisy, easily distracted children, worked on two follow up ship logs and would be joined later by new people interested in transcription until the museum had a team of volunteer transcribers working on various documents depending on the need and requests of researchers.

     A transcriber followed one log keeper from beginning to end and got used to their personalities as revealed in the log entries and this often made transcribing a log progressively easier by becoming familiar with the writer’s style, expressions, and writing idiosyncrasies. Progressing through history recorded by a participant made some events like episodic television as some complications on the voyage came to neat conclusions throughout it while others continued as an ongoing storylines through the whole voyage and might have to be continued on the next ship as those entries on the stewards and cooks who behaved badly but were transferred along with their problems to another ship show some mobility among the characters in the tale.

     In this process, transcribers had been allowed to follow leads and in so doing have found historical details that were new or might modify existing historical assumptions and “urban “legends”.  I have written blogs about some of the connections discovered between things that were not seemingly connected even if those connections were as tenuous as the thread on a spider’s web.

     A transcriber could watch Sophie’s growth and would be able to compare old and new attitudes and recognize the moments that led to the change. They would see it because the whole process was in front of them.

     However, under the new system of crowd sourcing, which was introduced so more pages of transcription could be produced regularly, transcribers now do whatever page comes up on the screen. What is transcribed one day might have no connection to what had been done at the previous session’s transcriptions, so important entries are rendered routine and mundane whereas they could contain something that should have been noticed or might connect two things presently seen as unrelated. As multiple people are transcribing random pages on a central and publicly accessible web site, to one person Sophie Porter is a bigot, to another, an open minded example of what all our attitudes should be toward “the other”, while a third, who may have transcribed the moment the change began to take root, not having the book-ending sides, has no idea of the importance of what seems a routine entry. A minor act of kindness might be overlooked as it has no context to the transcriber. Instead of having the knowledge of that moment now, it might, or might not be noted by someone further in the future but denied us in the meantime when we could have had that information.

     Objections to the new approach have been expressed but have been answered with a descriptions of the assembly line approach where layers of people down the line double check the pages as they produce a true transcription for posting, but in the process all those people also see but do not understand the content as production, quantity over quality, takes over in creating a bureaucracy.

     Another transcriber found two entries in the log of a ship whose captain seemed enamored of flogging his crew at the least provocation, and was surprised, as a descendant of a whaling ship master himself who has spent much of his adult life dealing with the history of whaling on many topics including family history in the industry, that on two occasions the captain whipped “the dog”. This was a unique example of animal cruelty that he had never encountered before. 

     Under the new random-page system he might never have solved this mystery of animal cruelty himself, but, as he was under the old system at the time, he was able to complete the log as one continuous account and found that “the dog”, lacking capitalization which was a common writing characteristic, was actually the nickname of a particularly rough crew member and not an animal at all. Again, had this transcription been done under the new method, he would have been left believing he had found a rare case of animal cruelty while another random transcriber would only know it was a crew member.      

      Because of his curiosity about the dog, the transcriber did what we had been able to do before; he went and investigated the captain, and established that he was a consistently cruel master with crews that, over time, became more unruly in response to his brutality requiring more of it and that “the dog” was the main thorn in his side.

        A story within the log that brings humanity to it that could have been missed. His transcribing not only produced a document but his following leads revealed history and added it to the museum’s record.

     After my transcribing of the Catalpa log I, along with a new transcriber, was assigned the Arnolda. When reviewing the digitized manuscript before beginning, it became obvious that in digitizing the log, some of the pages from the Arnolda and some from the Rebecca Sims that were kept in a folder because of loose pages had been dropped and reassembled with some pages out of order. We had to reorganize the pages and, as there were two logs, each picked a one.

     I chose the Arnolda section which eventually showed up in the blog “Tangled Web” (https://www.quigleycartoon.com/?p=15357) because of the connections, real or circumstantial, that brought it all back to the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth on Cape Cod where I was a Docent.

    That was in 2016.

    When we finished this transcription, we were assigned the Newport as it wintered on Herschel Island and, again, we divided the log into two parts, and because of that arbitrary division, I came across the entry about the steward, Smith, being sent forward for Onanism and Sodomy. I obviously had a reason to notice this but have wondered if it would have been noticed had the other Transcriber gotten that section.

     So close, but no cigar.

     This log entry was the impetus for the Quigley Institute for Non-Heterosexual Archival Archaeology (www.gaywhalers.org) which has had some success in gathering accounts of Homosexuality on whaling ships while continuing to investigate if this was the first such entry discovered. There are some mainland court cases related to sexual predation involving captains and Cabin boys but the related documents are court records and not the ship’s log where, obviously, the log would not record the captain’s offenses. Investigation involved corresponding with various archives and researchers in what has now been a 7 year process and has included meetings with the administration of the New Bedford Whaling Museum that resulted in the Institute as the museum is curatorial and not research based.

     The evidence is there and it has not been silently treated.  

     Sitting at the most recent museum volunteer meeting, a transcriber who works remotely from home, as many of us do as all that is needed for transcription is a computer and a place to sit and do the work, mentioned his work on the Rebecca Sims which, as I mentioned, had been done 6 years previous. It had shown up on the crowd source page and when I consulted that site, I not only saw that he was a good way through an already transcribed log book, but out of curiosity when I looked up the Arnolda, Newport, and Mercator, the first whaling ship to enter Japan and whose records were used to prepared Commodore Perry for his official visit there, I found all four logs were on the crowdsourcing site and all of them were in some degree of completion meaning time, energy, and attention had been given by a number of people to completed work that has already been done and has been used for the last 7 years.

     I have written about these ship blogs, established a website, have met with Museum leadership, and have written about them in a book all while people were duplicating work already done and being used.

     My main concern was obviously to see how the entry about Mr. Smith, the steward, was treated by another transcriber and if, as I had had to explain Onanism to a surprising number of people, there might be some explanatory note from them.

     Instead I found the erasure.

     The “official” transcript on the crowd source site that had applied a carefully monitored process involving multiple checks and balances that I was assured guaranteed the final product was a true transcription, jumps from February 10, 1895 to February 12, 1895 totally omitting the existing entry for February 11, 1895 and as it is the longest entry compared to the others on the page and being at the very bottom of it and not mixed in the body of the page, this could not have been in error. 

     For whatever reason the transcriber, who can be traced down, chose to remove this passage and, if this were to remain the final version, would have erased rediscovered history, a history we already have the record of.

     This is not omission, but erasure.

Fewer and fewer people are learning to read cursive. In the future, only a select few will be able to read the original manuscripts while most will have to rely on what has been transcribed. Had I not transcribed this blog in 2017 and run with it, Mr. Scott would be lost to history for obvious reasons. Unless we can truly rely on some random person somewhere down the line and hope that the line is not peopled with those who find such erasure acceptable, this will repeat. 

      Sadly it was removed somewhere down the line.

     This is the actual page from the transcribing website. Note the number of entries on the original as opposed to the completed work on the website.

     It took six years for someone to come along and erase us again.

     According to the now official Transcript of the whale ship Newport, there was no February 11 in the year of Our Lord 1895, no such person as Mr. Scott, the steward, and just the usual Heterosexuality at sea because with this erasure, the only sex we know for certain that took place on Herschel Island in 1895 was that between the Heterosexual captains and their wives.

     This shows that the discovery of ourselves is very complicated and proof that we have been either simply omitted or, as this case shows, deliberately erased because of someone’s political, religious, and/or personal beliefs and not the reason of the historical record.

     We do have the full Newport log and we are in it.

     We must be returned to it.

     Although the Museum was able to access the site and re-insert the erased entry assuming from their paradigm that all is now well, the fact that, in spite of the digitized image being on the page with the corresponding transcription where the entry is missing right next to it, belies the assurances that, as “we are all reviewers, editors, as well as transcribers, and with the product being crowdsourced, worked on by multiple people……the final product is correct”  that I received in response to my expressed concern about transcript manipulation. 

      Odd that the only change to a transcription unnoticed by the chain of inspection is the one related to Homosexuality. Odder is that so many people can be able to edit and/or erase an entry, and, even after it is posted as complete, someone is still able to get into the transcription and edit it. I am aware that people with such access in other instances have that same control on other websites and I had already been involved in a confrontation that eventually involved another museum when an important fact was replaced with something that erased a fact worthy of research.

     In the case of a whaling captain listed on www.whalinghistory.org as “lost at sea”, in her “Journal” Sophie Porter described his death in detail, the reaction of those on the Island, and the disposition of the remains which were sent by the steamer Jeanie to San Francisco to be returned home to his family, all of which took place on Herschel Island and not at sea. Seeking to correct this, I was first rebuffed by the website for the most anti-historic reason.

     I presented the correction and the log entries upon which the correction was based and was informed, “Thanks for this added info.  I’m going to leave “at sea” because it is my shorthand for during the voyage.”   

     This, in effect, was this site providing misleading information in spite of having the actual facts, and I objected.

       “ Wouldn’t it be important for research precision that At Sea not imply while the ship was actually sailing around.

      This dealing with dying people in Herschel Island could be a study in itself, what with the frostbite, runaways, one guy just dying, Weeks falling, who got frozen for shipment and who was just buried. Also indicates where some whale crew members’ bodies could be found today especially as climate change is affecting Herschel with longer thaw periods and warmer ground.

Shorthand could misdirect.”

     Instead of agreement, I got further pushback which revealed that this person did not give much attention to the log entries I had sent as support for the correction as the response was, “You make a good point.  I will change it to “fell from the rigging while at Herschel Island,” to which I had to further point out., “He did not fall from rigging. He fell between below decks on the stairs hitting the keel and the skin and crushing bones.”

     An earlier project involved transcribing old whale ship crew lists where, for identification purposes and as ships went to many foreign ports and those in the Southern slave states, the skin description of the various shades of Black crew members had to be rather precise. Sometimes a term we find derogatory now did not have that connotation in the early days of whaling so, while some will be triggered by the term SAMBO, written as it is in capital letters and appearing long before the story to which it is now attached was written, indicated the Black Crew member was from South America and isn’t and never was a slave. Also found in the skin descriptions were possible clues before 1865 as to who was a self-emancipated person and who may never had been enslaved, described in such a way that their existence and final pay check could be verified and paid out upon completion of a voyage while also letting those concerned know who on the ship might need extra protection from slave recovering bounty hunters and in Southern ports.

      In doing the crew lists and noting the combination of skin color variations and what seemed to be a specific use of empty spaces for places of origin and present residence, and after consulting an historian working on a book about the self-emancipation of the formerly enslaved by sea, I sent my idea to the transcription team members as we often do so among ourselves when we discover something or might accidentally come across the answer to another’s question.

     “So far on the lists I have done, “Blk” is the skin designation for crew members who either have no place of origin, have no place of origin and no listed present residence, or have a slave state or city listed as place of origin but no present residence. Crew members who have both a place of origin in a Northern state or city, and a Northern city as present residence are listed as “Black”. Both designations are used on the same crew list by the same agent, and the voyages I have done so far are after the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, but before the Mass General laws: Part 1:Title XV: Section 102, after which the number of Black men on whale voyages plunged in number. In 1850 the second and broader Fugitive Slave Law was passed, and researchers might want to know if the number went back up and may be helped by the two different designations if they continued to be used. This could be useful to future researchers so it may need to be strictly considered.”

    This was a response to a suggestion that for uniformity all variations of Black skin terms be reduced to only Black, thereby, in my mind anyway, omitting yet another road to research as what could have been found under the original terms would not even be sought to begin with as no variations would be in the historical record.

     Although the uniformity approach was eventually abandoned after at least one in-person explanatory ride in the museum’s elevator, even in that there was an indication that history is first presented through a filter of someone else’s opinion and not left to pure discovery, thereby,  controlling research.

       I was informed in one of those “splaining” emails, “That is one possibility.  Having no place of origin only suggests they are not US citizens.  Black also can refer to Cape Verdeans, some azoreans, occasional native americans, and polynesians as well as slaves or american blacks.  The crew lists, when completed, will make one more tool to explore the topic of escaping american slaves.  Whether the designation is blk or black usually depends on who is entering the information.  You might see if you can coordinate the use of blk with handwriting.”

      This person is involved with the website that posts the lists, but does not transcribe any and is unaware and grossly uninformed in her response beginning with the glaring assumption in the opening line that totally dismissed what I had been seeing consistently on crew lists.

        Only, shuts the door to research.

     It was found necessary to first explain to me the various applications of the word Black and then, although patronizingly agreeing my theory could be true, while showing there was no examination of my theory by having what was outwardly obvious about blank spaces that could dispelled by examination, letting me know in the writer’s opinion it most likely wasn’t. 

       The reluctance to correct how the Captain died and the suggestion to erase facts for the sake of uniformity of crew lists, and, perhaps removing some words that might make people uncomfortable about history in contrast to all the comfortable events in it, seemed oddly unhistorical in nature.  

      Obviously this transcript system is faulty and needs to put something in place to prevent this in the future.

      We were its first discovered victim, and the re-insertion of the erased entry cannot be the end of things with people happy a bandage was applied.

       It is proof the erasure continues. Obviously the safeguards do not work.

     The museum could either address this and have FromthePage come up with safeguards or withdraw from the program if, after being presented with such a blatant erasure, the platform makes no changes.

      I expressed my concern to the Museum leadership.

  “As has been my complaint, this crowd sourcing besides having logs transcribed twice, has also allowed for editing. When I saw that the Newport, transcribed in 2017 and which has been used in publications and inter-entity research, was on FTP, I went and checked for faithfulness.

PLEASE NOTE.

     The entry for Feb 11 1895 is missing from the FTP transcription but not the 2017 one.

It omits the extremely important  entry. Why? Political. personal. or religious beliefs?

     This is a total white washing of the truth.

This erasure was done in the name of the museum as the person transcribing did so on the museum’s dashboard.

What If I had not caught this?

What if I had not sat next to Gordon at the volunteer meeting?

The official version of the museum would have been erasure.

There may be the claim it would have been replaced down the line.

Really?

 If it was done now what guarantee that it would be put back in later?

NONE

Since the system has had four important logs, Newport, Rebecca Sims, Arnolda, and Merctor Cooper that have already been transcribed years ago on FTP, included with one glaring erasure, there is little faith someone down the line will reinsert.

We are to preserve history, not abet its erasure.

     The Instirute for Non-Heterosrxual Archival Arcahgeology is not pleased and will add this to its files and publications as proof it still happens (Here I attached relevant screen shots)

.     This is deliberate censorship that would have been left on the record denying real history. The entry is too large to be missed.

This must be addressed by the Museum as it is being addressed by the Institute. 

     Censorship is no longer a possibility it is history now.”

The response was one would expect from people quick to defend but slow to consider the larger picture.

    It is not just about this one entry which is my wheelhouse and which I am sensitive to as a Gay man, a transcriber, and someone who knows how revisions omit, add, substitute, or invent false histories that deny the future the truth. Even in my own case I had to save my story.

     After the reflexive denial of any responsibility, alternative explanations for the erasure were offered including that I may have accidentally erased the entry in the original final transcription through cutting and pasting as opposed to copying and pasting. But as the February 11, 1895 entry was that important to me, in order not to lose any part of it, I have the original I had sent to the museum upon task completion on the museum’s drive that I will consult only to read in order to avoid any mistaken erasure, while I have other copies on multiple devices and thumb drives, one being a collection of read only files of which the Newport transcription is one of many. 

     “just did a forensic investigation of your charge that we purposely omitted something from a transcription. I can assure you this is not the case.

      We looked at the version history in Google that was uploaded by me on Dec 21, 2016.  That was the only date I was in the document.  Joanne was in the document on May 15^th, 2017 after you completed the transcription to review it. The Feb 11th entry was in her reviewed version. After her review, according to Google,  you were the only person in this Google document, three times: May 2,2018, Sept 26^th, 2018, July 19^th, 2019.

     We will add the missing Feb 11^th into From the Page. Do you think you may have cut and pasted instead of copy and pasted? You were the only person in the doc.

 To your other charge in your earlier email, that we are duplicating work. Nothing could be further from the truth. We migrated two unfinished logbooks from Google to From the Page when we adopted the new platform. If you have other issues please let me know before you circulate your observations.”

     In attempting to plead innocent of any “charges”, the use of the term revealing how this was going to be approached, listing the times the Newport transcription was accessed, verified both the assignment of the log book in 2016 and its review done by 2017 acknowledging it did exist and the entry had been seen by the reviewer which brings up the question that if the transcription had been merely migrated, all this would have been on the crowd sourcing site and would have been left as is being completed, accepted, and approved.

     As the Newport log had been so important to me I downloaded it on multiple devices and on a number of thumb drives, one which contains many files and is read-only, in order to visit the log without the chance of losing all or any part of it as removing it from one thumb drive or device still left it on the others. The attempt to shift blame to me does not stand up to the fact that the review took place in 2017 with an email acknowledging the entry had been there, the log was posted to the crowd sourcing site within the last year, and it was completely re-transcribed in 2023 erasing the entry. If it was simply migrated, its contents should have been obviously there to anyone looking, and this would be further proof the erasure was deliberately remove somewhere along all those steps that should have seen an entry was missing even if the process had been reading the dates of every entry seeing if any date had been missed and if so, why, and inserted.

     The part about migrating only two incomplete log books is belied by going to the site and seeing the names of four ships that had been completed in past years but are being redone now.

     The process of migration involves moving previous transcriptions over from Google Docs where they were originally done to the new platform and, as one person or group of people  goes over the original and the migrated to make sure that not only did the body of the work get moved but also any side notes left on the original by a transcriber. This group is not transcribing, merely inspecting, unless they choose to make an edit.  While the migrated complete works are being dealt with, the incomplete transcripts that are migrated would have certain pages on the site with one half of the screen being the digitized manuscript while the other side would be blank, while on a migrated complete page, there would the original on one half and transcription on the other. If from the first to last page a migrated work is all blanks on the right typing side, it is open to full transcription. 

     The explanation offered implies that either the Newport was one such incomplete transcription with some blank pages that needed transcribing, which is clearly not the case, or the original was not migrated leaving only open pages and the log book merely a link to a book to be completely done. 

     If what is on the site reflects the final product after the original 2017 review and the chain of checks and balances employed by the site, deliberate and accepted erasure is evident. 

     When a transcript is being worked on, there are tabs on the upper right of the page for transcription, edit, needs review etc during the process which are replaced by “complete” at the end of the process, and the pages of the Newports were designated “complete”.

     Anticipating responses to my emails to the museum president and  the head of curation, what responses I received having come from “middle management”, I went to my computer expecting but upon opening various files, documents, and pages in case I needed to answer a question with a fact, file, or document, I logged onto the crowd source site to have the relevant links ready, but received this message on the screen.

        I sincerely hoped this was just a highly suspect coincidental glitch and wrote to the site administrators and to the museum asking how this can be corrected as the “website” link only redirects to the museum’s public website. This certainly was in error and not a deliberate blockage that is intended to silence a person who has the screen shots already and vociferously objected to the erasure.

The blockage has also eliminated my ability to go the transcription to verify that the missing entry had, indeed, been replaced. So far, all I have is the word of people who had originally explained to me this would never happen, but the museum has blocked my ability to verify that.

     The emails were sent on Friday when the museum was open. I am still blocked with no response from the website or the museum.    

      At the February 2024 New Bedford Whaling Museum Volunteer monthly meeting the museum president reiterated the museum’s commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). This is a lesson in that.

     The situation with the erased log entry was simply routinely handled by replacing the erased entry and all was good again in the minds of the cisgender, heterosexual people with whom I registered my objection to erasure, who saw this as only a clerical error easily rectified while resisting any offered information to show that was not a mere clerical error but one more erasure of anything “Homosexual” in an age of Trans oppression, Drag Queens being made illegal in certain states, and general calls for banning “Homosexually themed” books regardless the attempts to hide what the book banners are doing behind euphemisms. Ask any teacher of any gender variance, “the safety of the children’ is applied to any politically motivated action by someone seeking, or already in elected office.

     The situation was handled and we should be grateful for this crumb while the totality of the picture which has been the past, present, and future of anyone who does not fit the Heterosexual paradigm is ignored. The solution eased their discomfort. It neither dispelled mine nor guaranteed there would no future occurences

     There is an opportunity for the museum to learn why this is not a matter of simple editing. The refusal to even hear the view from the other side, the assaulted side, goes against DEI.

     They need to learn the seriousness of this and not just push it aside, looking at this as merely an oversight, an error, my fault, it is just a question of editing a document.

     But this erasure was found on the website that the museum has defended, and continues to, as accurate and better than if one person transcribed a complete document, so it appears acceptable to the museum.

     The museum may be content that all is well, but that is only by looking from the Heterosexul perspective while ignoring how this affects us and what it means in the history of Gay people.

      It is also being handled as if one side has total control and complete understanding of all aspects relying on its having spoken, its view being the only one, and we should just go to our rooms and know our place. 

     The notion that I may have accidentally erased them myself should be seen for what it is if this and my reaction to the erasure were looked at as they relate to my reality and not from the point of view of how it affects them. If they took the time to actually know me as more than a retired teacher who joined the ranks of the old, cute, easily replaceable volunteers they would know that when it comes to issues like this I know the value of documents and know how to preserve certain ones because they are related to specific issues and are respected for that.  

      This is not a one off. 

       It might be a first for the Museum but not to Gay history where erasure has been the standard operational procedure 

       The museum will only get away from this if it stops looking at it from a Heterosexual privileged position, taking administrative actions that make them feel good while being totally impotent in reality, and starts to look at what it means to those who were targeted.

      In this case, Heterosexuals assumed that if they explain the situation it is my burden to either accept the explanation or face some kind of repercussion such as being silenced. They ignore the homosexual in the room who could explain  the depth of the erasure so the museum will see the seriousness of it and be vigilant and less reflexive in defending a website.

        Having my access to the crowd source web site’s Whaling Museum section blocked could also indicate that as I accidentally came across this erasure, the fear is there that I might find others, and that must be avoided.

        At no time in any exchange was anything said about looking into the offending transcriber. Rather it was suggested I had accidentally done the erasing before I was blocked.

       At no time in any exchange has regret that this happened been expressed in sincere terms not followed by a “but”.

       At no time in any exchange have I been asked why this is such a concern. It isn’t theirs, so it can’t be a legitimate one.

       And at no time has consideration been given to finding out how bad this is and how bad it looks for the museum that already is under scrutiny for poor security.

        The museum knows I am working to restore our history in whaling’s history, have published blogs, have established a website for this purpose, and have notified the museum of my intention and the existence of my institute.

        After my meeting with the museum president and head curator about a possible Gay committee like the Museum has for other groups in the community which they advised would be limited by museum by-laws and other constraints, I informed them of my follow up action.

     “I am going to make a list of all whaling information resources, encouraging people to transcribe, I will include the NBWM rules for transcribing, and will design some way to coordinate things to eliminate duplication.

I am looking up a clearing house for professors and researchers looking for topics and will put together some sort of general plea for people who have the info but nothing to do with it. I am also putting something together to go to all Gay media outlets about the entry discovery and the need for follow up.

(The museum) had me go to Providence one time to help transcribe some documents, and they had a transcription party where people showed up, began the process, and unfinished work was completed at home. There were certain steps that we could duplicate and these sessions could be organized here somewhere in NB if not the museum itself, the meeting room table filled with transcribers on their laptops one day a week.

     I will forward whatever I come up with.

     I have gotten an email address,joequigley@gaywhalers.org, as a place to send finds and contributions for which I will require the info that was in the ODHS minutes so everyone who contributes is acknowledged and credited whenever their research is used. I have an account with an archive site that notifies me anytime my name is used in a paper and whenever I produce something such as my contribution to the book that accompanied the Catalpa exhibit gets archived. I am a footnote in a report on educating Gay students and the resistance met.

     Thinking of calling it the Quigley Institute for Non-Heterosexual Archival Archaeology. Fancy names attract results. So far we have the two log entries and what was in Sophie Porter’s personal journal which I will have to reread to get the Drag reference, and anything else I have come across.”

    I followed this with two later updates, “This is what I have come up with so far. I mention the Museum toward the end and want to make sure it is acceptable” including the link to the website so the museum could inspect it, and, “As follow up to our earlier conversation, I have put together this website. I am hoping that once seen, people will want to help and perhaps in the process benefit the museum. So far I have posted the Newport log book that contains the first found reference to Homosexuality and am working on the full log of the Charles Phelps in which was an earlier entry but found after the Newport entry. I might post the Phelps in serial form once I get to a point where it is leading up to something.

I have credited the museum where appropriate.”

     The museum is definitely aware of my interests, so when I objected to the erasure there should have been more than the defense of random anonymous people, boilerplate brushings off, and our concerns as Gay people so easily swept aside or distracted with patronizing explanations that are dead at the first word.

     Every Gay person is expected to arrive at their graves as the person society gave them permission to be, but we object to that and do so in manners consistent with our life experiences. As I am attempting to restore us to history inspired to do so from working at a museum, I found erasure of it and was met with the effort to excuse it away as unimportant without being listened to.

     Blockage from the involved website where the offense was committed and allowed to continue in spite of or because the people in charge of preserving history chose to erase that were defended in that by a museum, and the person who objected to erasure silenced and blocked out of the discourse.

    I committed myself to historic restoration and have the moral obligation to follow through. I stated my goal publicly so I cannot deny it,  and I will not play the meek role of the person who will acquiesce to what will surely be a form of bullying.

    They should not have blocked me out as the issue is the erasure of Gay history being objected to by a Gay man.

     What makes it worse is that the entry was erased and I saw it removed from MY transcribed blog. This was not someone else’s work, so the erasure is personal to me as a Gay man and me as a professional whose work was tampered with to misrepresent the truth and erasing me in the process.

     The last few days or two have not been easy. I have had to consider if it might be important to bide some time, give people the opportunity to learn and come around, perhaps be the patient person who leads grown up, educated adults by the hand.

      After having sent my emails to the transcription platform and the museum about my not being allowed to access the museum’s pages, I waited four days for a response. In the meantime, I went to the site and registered as a random anonymous transcription volunteer making sure I put nothing in the form that could have me rejected as already registered, and had no problem accessing the museums section on the site. So I cannot access the pages with my museum connection but can as a random person who, like the person who erased the February 11, 1895 log entry, can control the historical record by erasing those entries or details within them because of personal, political, and/or religious beliefs.

     This is not reassuring.

     I then went to the page in the log that contained the entry and was able to verify that the entry has been reinserted, and this log is now untouchable.

     Attempting to see if I would be able to further edit the Newport log, I attempted to access the “help Transcribe” link and was informed the Newpirt is now untouchable as it should have been since 2017.

     On the fifth day after I had been denied access, during which I got no response from either the platform or museum, I received an email from the volunteer transcriber supervisor. Major intra-departmental emails are sent via our list-serve, and as the erasure came up suddenly and something had to be done, apparently, not having been removed, I received the email that deftly danced around the issue.

     “All transcriptions on Google docs are not currently accessible as no one is actively working on transcriptions in that platform. Transcriptions on From the Page for logbooks that are not completed continue to be accessible. Also, if you encounter “Collaboration is restricted” on any log, it is still viable for transcription; the site owners are working on the issue.”

      Another treatment of this erasure as just a simple glitch not delivered by staff of the museum, but another volunteer leaving the other volunteer transcribers whose work could also be subject to post-completion editing uninformed because, if nothing else, it is not her place to do that but the obligation of the platform and museum leadership. 

     It is still being seen as a simple clerical error, I believe because we have not reached the level of acceptance that would see this assault for what it really was.

     They are comfortable because of what was done, so all is right for everyone.

       I got locked out in an attempt to end or at least control the discourse and was told in no uncertain terms to “talk to the hand”.

This is that speech.

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