Felipe Chavez Letter Copying Books

Background Information:

This recovery and preservation effort is part of a collaborative project by the UNM Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections (CSWR) and the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives (NMSRSA). Both archives have separate and unique collections of Felipe Chavez material. See links below to the finding guides. Within both collections are letter copying books used by Felipe Chavez that recorded his business and personal letters. The NMSRSA has two books in their collection and the CSWR has four books.

Finding guides: NMSRCA Felipe Chavez Papers (1960-009); CSWR Felipe Chaves Family Papers (MSS 10)

The bound volumes hold copies of rare original handwritten letters sent by Felipe Chavez. The letters were written almost daily from 1859-1890 to various persons throughout New Mexico and beyond primarily regarding commerce and trade along with letters to family and associates relating to family, social, and political matters or contemporaneous issues during the New Mexico territorial period. Felipe Chavez was literate in Spanish and English with about 3/4 of the letters written in Spanish and 1/4 in English.

(The goal of this project is to make the pages from the letter copying books along with accurate transcriptions accessible to the public.)

Historical Note of Letter Copying Book Process:

Letter copying books involved an archaic process of creating copies on parchment paper of handwritten letters before they were sent out. As early as 1852 this ingenious method for duplicating or making facsimiles of handwritten letters involved the process of wet ink transfer done by moistening a sheet of parchment paper (pre-bound in the book) and placing the newly written letter before the ink had dried on top of a moistened paper. Oiled paper was placed before the parchment paper and after the handwritten letter and then the book was pressed so that the day’s letters and copies were dried. This method was precursor to the mimeograph.

Felipe Chavez Letter Copying Books Condition:

Each book contains from 80 to 1000 pages. Because the paper used was thin and translucent, it is hard to handle and the process itself created ink deterioration of the paper damaging pages and making them not in a condition for public handling. The process also caused ink-bleed creating feathered edges of the text thus making the text difficult to read. Although the CSWR books have been in the CSWR archive since 1930, it is a miracle that the books are for the most part intact. Perhaps them being fragile or often illegible has discouraged researchers in the past from studying these books.

Transcription Process:

In 2026 CSWR archivist Samuel Sisneros and graduate fellow Feliza Monta embarked on conceptualizing and testing the pages from the books for this digitalization and transcription project. A few years back they were involved with a UT Austin group using paleography skills to train metadata linking software in handwriting recognition. These efforts no doughty were transferred to the current AI structure. During the last couple of years, AI generated handwriting recognition technologies evolved rapidly and in 2026 CSWR decided to use the crowd sourcing platform From the Page with its AI generated transcription capabilities. Although CSWR is not using crowdsourcing at this point, we have started creating From the Page aided transcriptions with minimal editing on our part.

Below are the uploaded book pages along with the transcriptions of each page.