Manumission registers, eastern Caribbean, 1820–1834
Editorial pass over manumission register transcripts from three small island archives, normalising the apparatus without normalising the names.
The three archives had each transcribed their own registers separately, over different decades, with different conventions for abbreviations, illegible passages, and marginal additions. The transcripts disagreed with each other in small consistent ways.
The brief was to give the consortium a single editorial apparatus they could all use, while keeping every name in every spelling it appeared in across the source documents. Where one register entered a name twice, both spellings stay. Where two registers disagreed about a date, both dates stay, with a note.
The edition is now in proof with the consortium. None of the three offices wanted a single normalised version. That decision was made at the start of the project and held all the way through.
