Bucktrout Daybook and Ledger
from the Swem Library at the College of William and Mary

About the Transcription

We have transcribed the manuscript of the Daybook and Ledger as accurately as possible, though with several compromises. It is not practicable, for example, to reproduce the large brackets Bucktrout used to group items to a single price, but those connections are nevertheless clear. Where Bucktrout used an equal sign to separate dollars from cents in figures for money, we substitute the more conventional decimal point. Virtually all the invoices are headed “Dbt” to indicate a Debit, cancelled with the word “Paid” as appropriate. To reduce clutter, we have silently deleted the “Dbt” entries thinking them to be clearly understood. We have retained “Paid,” though capturing the precise placement of the word, sometimes repeated, has not always been possible. We have also retained the smaller number of “Credit” entries to distinguish them from the Debits, and we have interpolated some Credits in square brackets ([ ]) to prevent confusion. The digitized images of course reproduce each page exactly as it appears in the original and allow a quick and easy verification or correction of the transcription.

Where Bucktrout has crossed material out, we indicate that with a strikethrough (thusly). Where we cannot read a word or a figure, we record the gap as [illeg.] Where we are not certain of a reading, we follow our guess with [?]. With a text involving sometimes crabbed or unclear hand-writing and leading to some 342,000 keystrokes, inevitably we have made errors. We ask readers who catch those errors to e-mail comments to W&M Libraries' Special Collections Research Center so that we may make the corrections.

A number of times Bucktrout charges for particular items (e.g., panes of glass) in shillings and pence, even though the total bill is recorded in cents or dollars and cents And he consistently conceived of there being six shillings (72 pence) to a dollar. For a full analysis of such conventions, see Ronald Michener and Robert F. Wright, “Development of the US Monetary Union,” Financial History Review, 13:1 (2006), 19-41. In an e-mail of August 1, 2006, Dr. Michener cited the Michener-Wright article and summarized the practice:

In brief, the “pounds” used as a unit of account in Virginia in the pre-federal period were not pounds sterling but a local unit, known as Virginia money. That local unit was defined by the value of the Spanish dollar (which was, for all intents and purposes, the same as the US dollar, since the American dollar was designed as a direct equivalent of the Spanish dollar)... The dollar was rated at 6 shillings in Virginia money (equal to 6x12=72 pence) when the new federal unit of account was introduced.

Dr. Michener said the Michener-Wright article gives anecdotal examples “of the old pound units being used well into the 19th century.”

When Bucktrout used signs for shillings and pence, he varied them a bit, but they will be clear to those familiar with British monetary symbols before decimalization. Shillings are indicated with a slash and two dots, sometimes in a row, sometimes as a colon, which we have standardized (“/-”). If pence are included, a digit replaces the dash, i.e., “/6.” In some instances, Bucktrout inserts a superscript “s” ^(s)   to the left of the mark. He also once or twice puts two dots to the left of the shilling sign, signifying “no” shillings: e.g.,  “–/6” in an entry for November 1, 1851.

In some instances, Bucktrout's idiosyncratic spelling may obscure meanings, as might his various spellings of the same person's name. Some of his conventions are transparent, as, for example, Do for "ditto." Others are not For example "& cft" (and variants), although this may be shorthand for "and so forth." One feature here offers a regularized text, with standard spellings of words and names. The name index includes all the variants Bucktrout used for a particular name. It is also worth noting that the pages and dates in the Daybook are mostly but not always in chronological order; in the later pages, dates are very much out of order, for reasons we have not been able to establish.