I am currently putting two young children through school and it highlights how much influence teaching styles of the time have on handwriting style. My kids certainly write differently to how I was taught, and it got me thinking about the sheer number of people who seem to have similar writing to Zodiac, and whether this could be a product of similar age or country/area of origin.
With that in mind, a quick search of the types of handwriting taught in the USA brings up websites such as this :
https://www.thoughtco.com/cursive-handwriting-in-the-us-1079045
which, whilst informative, do not provide any promising leads from what I see.
It would be great if we have any forum members who may have schooled around the same time as Zodiac’s age range (so I’m guessing schooled late 1940s-1960 or thereabouts), and if any of them recognise the handwriting style as being similar to how they were also taught. I acknowledge this is a small point but it might help in some way to narrow down Z’s age or whether he was native to CA or elsewhere.
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I am in Australia. My brother is 9 years older than me and his wife is 7 years older than me. b 1949 and 1951 They have almost identical writing which is more printing than fluid writing. My sister who is 3 years older (b 1946) than my brother has writing that is more traditional style as you pointed out in your links
I was taught "modified cursive" and my writing is different again to my brother…although it bears some resemblance to my mother’s probably due to the fake notes I wrote for school.
All my American friends exhibit the writing like your links. I find that zodiac seems to print more than write. Maybe that is a way to hide his writing style.
