Indelible pencils

 

Ebay (and Etsy) can be an excellent research resource for finding resources and artefacts relevant to daily life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century be they coins, postcards, old medicine bottles, they're all there.

And sometimes I browse ebay looking for, well I'm never quite sure .

Anyway, last night I came across this example of a British field service postcard, a postcard issued to troops on the western front and elsewhere to send reassuring messages home.

Now if you look at it, you might be forgiven for thinking that the address was written in purple ink.

But it isn't, it's written in indelible pencil.

As I've written elsewhere, pencil was used extensively in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, to write notes and postcards, simply because writing with ink was a complicated business requiring ink, a steel pen and a flat surface, which all made the writing of quick notes tiresome.

Pencil though has a problem. 

It scuffs, meaning that if pages written in pencil rub together, the pencil script can rub off. In his book about his epic ride with Ella Maillart across China in the 1930s, the writer Peter Fleming complains that some of his notes were illegible after a few days riding as they'd been jogged in a saddle bag and he hadn't had time to write his notes up properly.

The indelible pencil was designed to solve this problem by adding aniline dye, the chemical dye that gave Victorian ladies shimmering purple dresses, to the kaolin and graphite mix during pencil manufacture using the Conté process.

This produced a pencil that provided a permanent scuff proof text. It was also mildly toxic, especially if you licked it to get a stronger colour, and possibly provides a conservation challenge.

However copying or indelible pencils were used extensively during the first world war to complete paperwork and simply for messages home, because the hell of mud blood and filth in the trenches didn't really provide a suitable environment for writing with a nib pen, and as I've said pencil scuffs, making it no use in an environment where the papers could have been roughly handled.

A further search of ebay turned up other examples of world war 1 postcards written in indelible pencil, and not just British examples, the Germans used them in both world war 1 and 2, for much the same reason as the British, to provide a means of writing that was reasonably permanent and could not be changed easily. In fact some countries still require the use of indelible pencils in elections to minimise the risk of vote tampering.

However, for most purposes the indelible pencil was replaced by the cheap ballpoint pen by the mid 1950s, except for a few specialist purposes such as being used by dentists to mark up dental casts, but they are still produced and reasonably easy to get hold of.

While I never used one in my short career as a field ecologist I can see that they'd still be useful scribbling observations in the rain and damp.

And I must admit to a "Proust and madeleine" style moment when I first came across the field postcard example above.

I remembered my Uncle Dave using one to complete his vehicle log book some time around 1960.

I'm not sure when my uncle Dave had been born, I havn't traced that part of my family history yet, but he must have been born while Queen Victoria was still on the throne. (My father was the youngest of ten, and I once worked out that when he was born there was still a Kaiser in Germany, one in Vienna, and (only for a few days more) a tsar in Petersburg, not to mention a Sultan in Constantinople. When he died at the great age of 98 all these were long gone.)

Anyway, my father's eldest sister married my uncle Dave.

With classic bad timing, Dave had signed on in 1913 as a private soldier in the artillery on the basis of his skill with horses and horse gear.

He survived the first world war, learned to drive a truck, and got a job as a chauffer - there are photographs of him in the 1920s in a peaked cap and leather gloves standing beside some big black car - with the Co-operative Funeral Service driving hearses and funeral cars, as well as driving members of the nobocracy to the grouse shooting and their summer houses - he claimed to have once driven JP Morgan junior, and been tipped five pounds by him because he had to wait while Morgan finished a meeting that ran well over time. 

How true the story is I don't know, but it's certainly not impossible

- J P Morgan did have  a house at Gannochy near Edzell in the 1920s and 30s,

I don't remember him driving any of the big black funeral cars, but I do remember him driving a green electric laundry van.

My guess is that in the run up to retirement, he had been given an easier job by the Co-op, driving a laundry truck picking up and dropping off laundry at hotels and the like.

As I was a small child I don't remember the details, other than it was green and very quiet, I'm guessing it was based on milk float style technology, but I do remember filling out a log book with a purple pencil and him licking it.

Strange what you sometimes remember...

Data recovery at home

 J was looking through some documents to do with her mother's death  that she had got some years ago from her sister, deciding what needed to be kept and what didn't. In among the papers was a CD labelled Graham family photos.

We had been living in England when J's mother died, (this had been round about the turn of the millennium) and it had been left to her sister to get rid of her mother's effects, and it looked like  an album of family photos had disappeared.

So, did the CD have the missing photos?

Well, J's sister's husband been a photographer with The Age in Melbourne, and later on a TAFE photography lecturer, as well as being someone who was both interested in the history of photography - he built himself a copy of a nineteenth century glass plate camera at one point -  and had dabbled a bit in family history, so it was just possible he had copied them, perhaps for a project of his own.

Unfortunately we couldn't ask him exactly what had happened as he died a few years ago.

And of course computers don't have CD drives these days.

So, nothing ventured, nothing gained, I bought a $20 external usb cd drive from ebay and connected it up to an old Windows 10 laptop.

Nothing doing.

The drive just went didididuh and refused to read the CD.

I tried the drive hooked up to a linux machine with the same result.

Either the drive was damaged, or the CD was.

Not having any spare data CD's to hand I couldn't check if the drive worked.

And then, fortunately,  I remembered that the scruffy old linux machine in the outside studio actually  did have a cd drive, and what's more the heating had been on so the machine was not cold (CD drives don't work if they are too cold - tolerances - and don't like condensation if the air is damp),

So I stuck the CD in and hey presto! this time I could read it.

The files turned out to be in .bmp format, but the pictures were all there, so I uploaded the files from the CD to OneDrive and shared them with J.

Job done, and I might even have convinced J that these old machines running Linux might even be useful...

Really really finished!

 Back in April I blogged that I had completed the documentation of the contents of Lake View House in Chiltern for the National Trust. 

Yesterday we had the close off meeting and I'm done. I've basically worked myself out of a job having catalogued the contents of both Dow's Pharmacy and Lake View.

They did ask me if I wanted to stay on as a front of house person, but that's not really me, so after the close off meeting I formally resigned as a volunteer - I felt it was important to do that, rather than simply fade away, as I had a 'Working with Children' registration that comes with being a registered volunteer, plus there's some other bureaucracy about being an official volunteer.

So, after eight years, I'm done.

Of course I feel a little bit sad, especially after all the nice emails thanking me for my work,  but like with any project, I'd reached the point where it was time to let go and move on.

Let's see what the future brings ...

Digitising heritage libraries

 Earlier today I tooted the following

Essentially, La Trobe university has digitised and catalogued the Sandhurst Mechanics Institute historical book collection.

Momentarily galling. 

Especially, as up at the Athenaeum we are working on trying to make sense of the heritage book catalogue, actually an excel spreadsheet, we inherited from a now disbanded local library corporation.

When done, we should have a portrait of reading tastes in a small goldfields community and how it changed over the years.

Currently I'm working through the catalogue trying to rationalise and standardise the publisher's names, and even that's quite interesting.

We can see that most books in the nineteenth century were imported from England, and there seems to have been a love of sensation literature and the gothic, as well as more serious works such as an 1861 edition of Darwin's 'On the origin of the species' and a more prosaic 1862 book on chicken husbandry.

Post world war 1, there are a few more Australian books and a developing interest in crime fiction and escapist western novels. although some may been a little more serious drawn from life such as the books written by Dane Coolidge, who in his time was not only a well known author, but also had a reputation as a photographer and anthropologist, as well as a collector of mammals.

What there does not seem to have been, is any serious interest in devotional works.

When I was documenting the contents of Lake View house, it was noticeable that the nineteenth century devotional works used in part to 'dress' the house, did not show the same signs of use as more popular works - Mary Braddon and Charles Dickens certainly came before God as far as people's reading was concerned, and I can make the same sort of anecdotal observation about the Stanley Heritage book collection.

Once our collection's properly re-catalogued it might be interesting to see how much overlap there is with the Sandhurst collection from Bendigo ...

Pocket is shutting down

 As I guess we all know by now, Pocket is going to the data centre in the sky on July 8.

It's an annoyance, I principally used pocket to save articles that were potentially interesting, but I didn't have time to read at the moment.

I'd usually set aside some time at the end of the week to go through my pocket saves, and if the article actually was useful, such as this North Yorkshire Archives Service article on parish registers, save it somewhere useful in OneNote and then archive the pocket save.

I did do the pocket 'export your data' thing just in case there was anything useful I'd missed. I never found the pocket recommendations or suggestions that interesting or useful - they tended to be too USA centric, and given that my interests are a bit niche, sometimes a bit odd - articles on reading old handwriting produced a slew of revelation centred right wing Christian stuff.

Well that's all behind us. I have a subscription to Inoreader which has a 'read later' feature which may help, otherwise it will be bookmarking pages to deal with the happenstance discoveries...

Family History and structured data

 It was a chance remark that it was easy to use Excel to transcribe marriage certificate data by someone at the monthly meeting of our family history group that gave me the idea.

Family history is largely built on birth marriage and death data, and in the process of building family trees you inevitably end up with a large pile of scanned documents all of which tend to have similar incomprehensible machine generated names.

But, if you look at England and Wales marriage certificates they are all structured similarly - for example here's the one for George Wardle and Madeleine Smith

and Ethel Voynich's marriage certificate 40 years later has the same structure

and J and I got married in York in England, the header on our marriage certificate is essentially the same as that of Madeleine Smith's a 141 years earlier

which is quite an amazing example of  format longevity!

In fact the basic format of an England and Wales marriage certificate looks like this

And from this we can extract the following information

• When they got married
• Where they got married
• What they did for a living
• How old they were
• Where they were living prior to being married
• Who their father was
• What their father did for a living

It's not quite perfect of course - on Madeleine Smith's marriage certificate, the ages of both parties were given as full age, which probably meant that both were over 21 and did not require parental consent.

Likewise, on Ethel Voynich's marriage certificate her profession is left blank, despite being listed as a novelist/author in the census the year before.

However, it's fairly easy to see how this could be transcribed to a spreadsheet

Because I do a lot of my family history work on a pair of Linux computers, I used Libre Office Calc to create the spreadsheet.

Rather than have one line per person, I decided to have one line per event which makes it slightly unwieldy, but means that we have the data captured on a single line including the source filename.

Scotland, of course, does things slightly differently.

Technically there are no marriage certificates, only extracts from the register, which you can request to have printed and certified by the government as a true copy.

When you search Scotland's People, the government genealogy website, what you get is a scanned page from the register as in this copy of the registration information for the marriage of James Mathieson, my grandfather on my mother's side to his first wife Catherine Gracie, who later died of tuberculosis

However the data is basically the same as you get from the England and Wales marriage certificate, even if it is structured a little differently

The major difference being that the Scottish register also records the mother's maiden name

This gives me a spreadsheet with the following columns

• date
• where they were married
• party 1 name
• party 1 age
• party 1 condition - ie had they been previously married
• party 1 profession
• party 1 address
• party 1 father's name
• party 1 father's profession
• party 1 mother's maiden name
• party 2 name
• party 2 age
• party 2 condition - ie had they been previously married
• party 2 profession
• party 2 address
• party 2 father's name
• party 2 father's profession
• party 2 mother's maiden name
• witness 1 name
• witness 2 name
• source document

and of course because this is a reference document rather than a word for word transcription, it's perfectly possible to add in extra information from other sources, as I have done to add in Ethel Voynich's mother's name from her birth certificate.

I've opted for the more neutral 'party 1' and 'party 2' rather than 'husband' and 'wife' as you get cases of marriage by declaration in Scotland where people never actually formally married but conducted themselves as if they were - one of the most dramatic examples being the Yelverton case - and of course various other informal unions from which it's possible to create a pseudo marriage record from death certificates and children's birth certificates.

There are two major advantages to creating a master spreadsheet like this - firstly it's searchable. Given the lack of imagination of my forebears as regards names, my ancestry is stuffed full of James, Johns, Catherines, Madeleines and Isobels, it forms an aid to working out who is who. The north east Scottish tradition of giving the first born child the mother's maiden name as a middle name can be incredibly useful for separating out which James was which.

Secondly it's relatively easy to separate out information to create little index card like files. As a proponent of self documenting file structures I like to keep the information for each person in a directory named for them. Adding in a little 'about' file and an index file helps improve manageability.

If you'd like to take a look at my draft master index file, please do so. It's in Libre Office ODS format, but if you prefer to use Excel you should be able to open directly especially as there's no clever formatting or macros.

I bought an old Chromebook...

Chromebooks, well I have a soft spot for chromebooks, minimal but reliable devices.

But why buy an old one? Especially when I’ve already got a competent ChromeOS device in the form of my Lenovo Ideapad Duet.

Well there are a lot of reasons not to buy an old one. The principal one is, that while new Chromebooks get 10 years of automatic updates out of the box, older ones don’t.

Now this isn’t quite the problem it might seem, it’s quite possible to run one without regular security updates, and in fact I got about two and a half years more out of one before it finally succumbed to hardware failure.

But what it does mean is that it is possible to pick up an old Chromebook in decent condition for not a lot of money. And because a lot of them are targeted at the education market, the hardware tends to be a bit tougher than is the case with other cheap machines.

Most of them have quite nice screens and keyboards, meaning that providing you have internet access - a given for a Chromebook to do anything useful - you have a machine that you can type on, using the Google Docs App and that makes a pretty good device for writing drafts and taking notes, and remember that, given Chromebooks role in education, they have pretty good battery life.

And of course, you can be assured that any document you create is saved to cloud storage, rather than having to backup your data at the end of a session, as would be the case with a linux based laptop. 

As we know support for Windows 10 is ending, and a number or groups are advocating sidegrading old Windows 10 machines to Linux - not a silly idea, but one thing that most Linux distros don't provide is automatic cloud backup.

Windows machines don’t have this problem - data is normally saved to OneDrive automatically, but decent refurbished machines running a recent version of windows are not as cheap as refurbished Chromebooks, and with the imminent end of Windows 10 support, there’s always the risk that a combination of  feature creep and bitrot could break automatic backup to One Drive for Windows 10 machines.

So, tossing the ball back and forth, you can argue that if you want a machine simply to write on, an old Chromebook wins out over both an old windows machine and a refurbished device running Linux.

But back to my Duet. Excellent device that it is, it has a problem.

Form factor.

The Duet, like the Microsoft Surface, is difficult to use when you don’t have a flat surface to type on, simply because the kickstand to support the screen requires that you have to have a certain amount of real estate to set up on. 

If you don’t believe me, look around you next time you’re on a long distance train or, worse, a plane.

V/line trains, unlike some European trains, don’t have shared tables, but instead have aircraft style seating with tiny fold out tables.

You can just about squeeze a standard clamshell laptop on one of the tables, but a surface - no. (Incidentally, the ipad mini that I added a keyboard to a few years ago, doesn’t have that problem, it mimics the clamshell design by using a triangular design to support the keyboard)

And the same goes for typing on your knee in a meeting. It’s perfectly possible to use a clamshell type device on your knee, even though the ergonomics people will have a fit, but the kickstand type device, no so much.

And that’s why I bought an old Chromebook - it gives me a device that has good battery life, a decent size keyboard, and decent screen, automated cloud backup, but is roughly half the weight of using an old laptop running linux, which if you have one on your knee for two or three hours at a time does make a difference…