Signatures are often-overlooked scraps of information that yield not only obvious clues about literacy, but also subtleties like depth and quality of education and preferred names, spellings and pronunciations. They are also, in original documents, tangible traces of our forebears’ corporality — evidence that that they were once here.
This is the seventh in a series of posts featuring the signatures of men and women born before 1900, men and women who could not take even a basic education for granted.
- Daniel Vick and Samuel H. Vick
Father and son. Both were born in slavery. Sam Vick probably retained no memory of it, but Daniel Vick was 20 or so years old, married, and with children before he was emancipated. As late as the 1880 census, he reported to the enumerator that he could neither read nor write. However, by time he cosigned the bond his son pledged when appointed guardian of the Henderson children in 1907, Daniel Vick could write his name. Though not as firm and fluid as that of the son he sent to Lincoln University, Daniel Vick’s signature was clear and complete — a perfect measure of the distance he had come in his long life.