Fanny Stepniak and the 1907 RSLDP congress

 I've written before that Fanny Stepniak, Sergei Stepniak's wife, was a bit of a mystery to me.

There's evidence that she worked with Constance Garnett on Russian translations after Sergei's death, but very little to suggest she continued to be politically active.

Well, that's possibly not the case.

I've just finished Robert Henderson's book on the pre 1917 Russian exile community in London, and in his description of the 1907 party congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party - the pre revolutionary underground political party that eventually became the CPSU - he mentions that Fanny Stepniak was personally included by Lenin in the vote of thanks to the organisers at the end of the  party congress.

The party congress was held in exile in London and is notable for being where the Bolshevik faction under Lenin gained control of the political direction of the party.

Strangely, the congress was held in the Brotherhood Church, the christian anarchist group that gave rise to various Tolstoyan communes in England, including Purleigh, from which Tom Ferris and Bertie Rowe travelled to meet with Tolstoy in the winter of 1902-3, and the communes at Whiteway and Stapleton just outside of Leeds.

I'm guessing, and it is only a guess, that as well as being in contact with Constance Garnett, she was also in contact with the Maudes, and used her contacts to help arrange the use of the Brotherhood Church by the RSDLP...

Field postcards

 I've written both about the use of indelible pencil and more generally about the use of ordinary pencil on postcards in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

I've recently acquired two examples of first world war British field postcards, one written in pencil, the other in indelible pencil

The pencil example is addressed to a Miss N Abel in Clifton Road in Aberdeen and dates from 1917

Simply signed 'Jack', it confirms the receipt of a parcel.

I did have a go at tracing Ms Abel using Scotland's People. There's exactly two female N Abel's in the 1911 census, one of whom is only 9 months old and the other aged 21 at the time of the census, which would make her 26 or 27 in 1917 when Jack sent the card acknowledging his parcel.

Unfortunately the N Abel who was in the 1911 census was a jute worker living in Dundee, not Aberdeen, so it's more than possible that the person the card was sent to was not jute winder in Dundee, or perhaps by 1917 she had moved to Aberdeen.

The second example is written in indelible pencil and was sent to a Miss E Webb in South Cerney outside of Cirencester

While the address is clear enough time has not been kind to the back of the postcard making it almost completely illegible, but playing with contrast and a few other tricks provides an almost legible image

and suggests that the author of the post card is both well and will be sending a letter at the first opportunity and it is signed by a Cliff(?) Hunt.

Unfortunately a search does not show a Cliff or Clifford Hunt with the British Army in 1917. I've almost certainly misread the name and need to do some more work on this.

However I've had a little more success in tentatively identifying the addressee.

In the 1911 census of England and Wales there's an E Webb who was born in roughly the correct area in 1896, which would make her 21 or 22 when the postcard was sent to her in November 1917. It's possible they were sweethearts and one hopes that if Cliff survived the war they married and had a long and happy life together

A most impressive array of bottles...

Ever since I documented the contents of Dow's Pharmacy in Chiltern for the National Trust, I've been fascinated by nineteeth century medicine bottles. 

When we were in Melbourne recently, I noticed an impressive display of nineteenth century medicine bottles in a pharmacy on Wellington Parade in East Melbourne.

To try and give an impression of the size and range of the collection I've used an online jpeg stitcher to combine my images. 

It's not ideal, but it does give an impression of the collection.

I'm happy for you to right click and download the images, but for a more detailed view here are the individual images in left to right order

If you do want to take a look yourself, remember it's a working pharmacy, not a museum, the staff have a job to do and customers to serve, so it's best to go at a quiet time and it would probably be appreciated if you bought a couple of things when you visited.

LibraryThing and the Athenaeum

 Maybe I have a new project.

Up at the Athenaeum, we have a heritage book collection – basically all the books they bought between 1862 and the early 1970s when it ceased to function as a library and reading room.

As far as we can tell they never threw anything out, only replacing books if they remained popular, which gives us a picture of reading tastes, and how they changed from the Goldrush era onwards.

Now we have an excel spreadsheet listing the roughly three thousand or so books but data quality is not great.

Publishers and authors names mis-spelled, different abbreviations  for the same publisher, etc etc.

I’ve spent the last few weeks checking publishers’ names to see if it was fixable, but really it’s not, the simplest solution is to recatalogue the entire collection.

This of course is a problem in itself, we’re not a library, we don’t have a catalogue system as such, all we want to do is catalogue the collection as accurately as possible, and then load the data into Victorian Collections for long term preservation.

Well, I think we have a solution - LibraryThing.

Originally designed to help people catalogue their personal libraries, it’s been used successfully  to catalogue small research libraries.

While is does have add on modules to give it the functionality of a larger scale OPAC, we only need its cataloguing capabilities. After all we are not going to add, lend, or deaccession material.

Data can be exported in both excel and MARC format, which means that not only could be load the data into Victorian Collections, we could potentially load it into a Library Management system, such as our local library’s Sirsi Dynix system, if desired.

But the real killer is that we can validate entries against both the British Library and the National Library of Australia, meaning we don’t need to create every entry from scratch.

The British Library link is especially valuable as in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century about 90% of the books in the collection were imported from the UK, with the remainder coming from the US, especially after the first world war when there seems to have been an interest in Westerns and crime novels – the original pulp fiction.

Legal deposit rules mean that the British Library should have a copy, and hence a catalogue record of every book published in the UK in the nineteenth century.

(It’s not quite perfect sometimes when I check entries manually I find there are minor inconsistencies in entries between the BL’s catalogue and the National Library of Scotland’s catalogue entries for the same book, but they are probably not significant enough to cause a problem).

Nineteenth century Australian publications might be more of a problem.

Not all are in the NLA’s catalogue, but the State Libraries of NSW and Victoria respectively are fairly comprehensive.

The only problem is that LibraryThing does not link to them, meaning that in these cases we would have to create a manual entry.

The other problems that I’ve come across are Book Club editions, and books published in Australia in the second world war.

Due to the shortages of materials in Britain book exports to Australia almost stopped, but a few UK publishers entered into licensing agreements to have local editions produced here in Australia by Australian publishers, and not all of them seem to have made it into the NLA catalogue.

Likewise, there are some post world war II pulp fiction reprints that were produced locally but don’t seem to be in the NLA catalogue. Again these would have to be investigated on a case by case basis.

However I’m confident that we can use LibraryThing to automagically ingest in excess of 90% of our holdings.

Probably the next step would be a trial run of a couple of shelves worth of books and see how it goes.

That should allow us to refine and document our methodology and perhaps come up with a more realistic estimate of the number of person hours involved.

Smartwatches - what's the point?

 A long time ago I bought myself a cheap no name fitness tracker, which worked quite well, allowing me to track my bike rides and to beep when I had a new email or text message - a feature that turned out to be quite useful, especially when I was wearing nitrile gloves and documenting an artefact - I could glance at the tracker and decide if the message was worth degloving for.

In time I replaced it with a brand name device, an Inspire HR, which actually did a little less, but came with nicer management software.

However, it did everything I cared about, was light and comfortable to wear, and didn't need to be charged too often.

Then, three or four months ago, Telstra, our phone and internet provider, emailed me to say I had a pile of loyalty points that were about to expire.

Unfortunately, the points were not enough to make a serious difference to the cost of a new phone, but they did have the Ryze wave smartwatch available, and I had enough expiring points to cover it, making it effectively free.

Now, I've always been curious about smart watches, so this seemed to be an ideal way of finding out if there was a use for one in may life.

Out of the box it did everything that was expected of it, had a nice legible display, and was a perfectly competent device - a bit bulky on my wrist but comfortable enough.

But...

I realised after a couple of months that I was only using the same functionality that I was from the Inspire HR, or indeed the cheap fitness tracker,

Basically, it really wasn't adding anything to my life.

So I stopped wearing it and went back to my battered and scratched Inspire HR.

Now, it's entirely possible that if I had brought another brand of smart watch, it might have had some attribute that really helped make life easier or better, but reading through the specs for those made by Google, Garmin and Apple, I don't really see anything stand out as regards to capability.

So, are they just expensive doodahs, or am I missing the point?

Linux on an old imac

 I appear to have accidentally done something useful.

J's old 2017 iMac had been sitting in a corner in the study, waiting to be wiped and taken to the recycler.

Too old, too slow.

So, today I decided to wipe it.

Rather than do something straightforward I thought I'd try installing the latest version of Ubuntu out of curiosity - I'd heard good things about the current version of Ubuntu and older intel based imacs, so it seemed worth a go.

Certainly, when I tried installing Ubuntu on an older imac five or so years ago I found it really didn't work that well, so it seemed like a fun idea to try installing a newer version of Ubuntu on more recent hardware,

Obviously, bluetooth mice and keyboards don't work until you've installed the new operating system so you need to use an old wired keyboard and mouse. The other thing I found was that you needed to plug the install USB into the back of the mac and not into a USB socket on the keyboard, otherwise I just used a standard installation USB I'd made a few months ago using Rufus and writing the volume as a dd image.

Well, surprise surprise, it recognised the image and booted cleanly

I chose a minimal install because I wasn't totally convinced it would work that well, but it got to the end of the installation process cleanly and rebooted nicely

and once logged in did the usual welcome thing

as I'd gone for a minimal install, I had to install Libre Office and Kate, not to mention Notable by hand and all seemed to work.

To check the webcam, I installed Cheese

giving you a picture of Yours Truly taking a picture of a picture.

Now so far, apart from being mildly surprised at things just working, I hadn't really found a killer use for the device, but I had been wondering on and off whether to buy a larger monitor or an old all-in-one machine to work with scanned hand written documents - working on a laptop can be a bit trying at times - so I downloaded a copy of a Madeleine Smith's marriage certificate

and that convinced me I might accidentally have made a useful machine out of the old imac.

It's not quite perfect - power management doesn't seem to work quite how you'd expect, with suspend and power off not doing exactly what you'd expect, but I can live with that. 

Otherwise I'm pleased with the result and reckon I've saved myself the cost of a decent monitor ...

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…

Katherine and a Chromebook

 After I'd looked at the material I downloaded last week when researching Katherine Scragg, I found I still had a couple of questions around the date of her death and a possible marriage late in life which I needed to resolve before writing up her life after her 1887 assault in a railway carriage outside of Shrewsbury.

Now, during yesterday's internet debacle I'd tried using the Library's internet with my Chromebook, only to find the Library's internet was also down. In fact the whole town was offline.

So, today,  just for fun, rather than take the Ubuntu machine I use for family history research up to the Library, I took my Chromebook - lighter than the Ubuntu laptop, but with a decent screen and keyboard.

After all, I reasoned, if the Library's version of Ancestry works well via Chrome on Ubuntu, it should work on a Chromebook, and I'm pleased to report it did. Perfectly.

Logging in was a bit of a fiddle, but that was down to the truly appalling Sirsi-Dynix library management system web client that buggers about endlessly redrawing the screen when logging in, but once connected everything just worked.

So, while hardly a surprise, it's useful to know and saves me having to cart a full sized laptop up to the library when all I want to do is run a couple of queries on Ancestry...

Researching Ethel - the methodology

 While I used our local library's Ancestry subscription to confirm the details of Ethel Voynich's life, I did a lot of the initial work using the free search facility on UK census online, which lets you look at a OCR transcription of the record - the transcriptions are not a 100% accurate, and like all machine generated transcriptions they have minor errors, which is why you always need to use something like Ancestry to confirm the details.

The original inspiration came from a comment in Jonathan Scheer's The Lockhart Plot, and much of the initial background came from Wikipedia and working back from the material and references in their article on Ethel Voynich.

Ethel was of course the daughter of George Boole, who was a professor of mathematics at what was then Queens College Cork, and is now University College Cork.

Cork is in Ireland, and the birth records are held in Dublin and are freely accessible via Irishgenealogy.ie. although you do have to provide your contact details. 

(If you are looking for an Irish ancestor and are not sure where they were born, you need to look at both Irishgenealogy and the Government Record office in Belfast, as the Dublin records office holds the records for the twenty six counties of the republic, and records from the six counties of Northern Ireland were transferred to Belfast after partition. The Belfast record office lets you search for free, but you have to pay to view and download records.)

I used FreeBMD to search for details of their marriage, but details such as their marriage certificate come from Colin Mackinon's website.

Working notes were in the main created and maintained using Notable, and a record of activity and next steps required maintained on Trello.

 To research the articles and write the drafts I used both Linux and Windows machines while working on this. Most of the initial rough drafts were written using Libre Office and transferred to Word for the final edit before posting to Wordpress.

Blogger posts were created by typing straight into the blogger app and sub editing afterwards.

Katherine, Ethel and Ubuntu

 I've mentioned previously that I'd installed Chrome on my old Dell Ubuntu laptop, and since then I've been threatening to go up to the library and try accessing Ancestry via Chrome.

(The town library has a subscription to Ancestry that's free to use, but access is restricted to the library networks - something that reminds me of the situation all these years ago at York where we had a CDROM image server that provided access via a Citrix thin client, and invariably we would end up having mildly surreal discussions about virtualisation and location with library information providers, who didn't quite get that while both the CD ROM server and the Citrix client server were in the library, access could be from any subnet on campus.)

Anyway, today I had an hour or two free so up I went (it's only a block) to the library with my old Dell Ubuntu laptop to download the relevant census records for Ethel Boole and Katherine Scragg.

I fully expected it to work, but I had never tried using the Library's edition of Ancestry from a Linux machine.

I'm pleased to report that it just worked - I logged in to the Library's website via the Library's 5GHz network, pfaffed about for a minute trying to remember which menu section allowed me to access Ancestry - for the record it's 'Digital Library' - and I was in and away.

Everything just worked, I could download files, save items as pdf, and because hardly anyone was using the 5GHz network everything just flew - advantages of doing it early in the afternoon before the schoolkids descend.

I saved everything to a scratch directory, which I uploaded to a scratch area on OneDrive, much as I did when documenting the contents of the kitchen at Lake View, before leaving to walk home.

Nice when everything just works as it should...

Family history and AI

 Every since Julie and Anna at the Library helped me track down some information on Fanny Elizabeth Bull, I've been going along to Julie's family history sessions, and very valuable the have been too.

Now, you might have an image of family history people as slightly weird older people wandering round graveyards, scratching down notes, and then annoying the hell out of people in registry offices and then spending the evening with a cup of tea drawing out part of a family tree with a cat and a scratch pad.

And certainly, if you watch cosy English detective shows on TV, that's very much how they are protrayed.

well, as you can see, the cat part is still true, but the rest of it is so very last century.

Digitisation, the rise of the family history behemoths, and expansion of various hobbyist sites such as Find a Grave (now owned by Ancestry) has turned what may once have been a fairly genteel hobby into something quite hi-tech.

There may still be people out there with nothing more than an A4 notebook and a box of HB pencils, but they are most definitely a minority.

So today we discussed such topics as the strengths and weaknesses of various online family tree builders, using local software such as Gramps, as opposed to the online solutions and the use of GEDCOM as a data interchange format.

We also touched on the 23andMe debacle, and on the use of genetic testing databases by various law enforcement authorities, all of which I was reasonably familiar with and could contribute to the discussion.

And then we moved on to the use of AI - and I found myself immediately out of my depth.

It's been two or three years since I did a significant amount of family history work, and that which I have done has been done using old school online techniques, such as when I was trying to trace Irene Hogg.

It turns out that most of the more committed family historians in the group have been making extensive use of AI to summarise newspaper reports, help transcribe records, and refine more complex queries.

The use of it in genealogical research is quite fascinating and obviously something I need to get up to speed on and to that end I've started a wiki page  as a place to dump links that I find relevant or useful ...

Finished!

I've completed my project to document the contents of Lake View House in Chiltern for the National Trust.

It's quite good to have finished roughly on time as I've avoided having to work into early winter when working in a building with no heating and no dampcourse to speak of can be a bit grim, not to mention the potential for moulds and other nasties.

Yes, of course you can rug up, and over the years I've posted various selfies of me working in thermals and a beanie, but it's more than a bit grim when you have to resort to fingerless gloves to type when working.

However, I enjoyed the experience and had quite a bit of fun along the way tracking down information about the various artefacts.

Not sure what my next project, if any, will be, but for the moment I'll concentrate on tidying up and systemizing my pandemic era family history notes, and perhaps finish off Katherine Scragg, I've still got to definitively trace where life took her after her assault ... 

Iceland, volcanoes and the fall of the Roman Empire

 Today brings news that there is evidence from Iceland and Greenland of increased volcanic activity around the time of the plague of Justinian, that might have helped push the successor polities in the west over the edge and also bring to an end Byzantine attempts to reconquer Italy and parts of Spain and North Africa. (The original Southampton University press release is available online if you want to follow up further.)

Basically the idea is that the increased dust in the atmosphere - a sort of quasi nuclear winter - would have caused crop failures as it did in 1816. This, combined with a population debilitated by disease would have left the various city states and other polities that emerged out of the end of the western empire dangerously weak.

Of course, this would not be the whole story - Roman civil administration had effectively collapsed over much of western Europe by the 450 as a result of the invasions of Germanic speaking peoples, but in a lot of cases there had been a melding in which the daughters of Roman administrators married the sons of Germanic warlords (and vice versa) to form a new governing class resulting in various kingdoms, such as in the case of the Merovingians in Gaul or the Gothic kingdoms in Italy.

However, as I blogged back in 2010, there's also a hypothesis that the global dimming event was not caused by volcanic activity alone but by meteorites hitting the Gulf of Carpentaria and an unidentified location to the north of Norway.

Of course, both theories may be true - the meteorite strike may have triggered volcanic activity, especially as both impact sites are not that distant from areas of high volcanic activity (Iceland and Indonesia).

 However, it's an intriguing idea, be it simply through volcanic activity, or something more dramatic like a large scale meteor strike...

Mrs Potts and garden archaeology

 A few years ago, when working in the garden, I turned up an old flat iron base

Heavily corroded and covered with clag, I put it to one side on a pile of bricks beside the shed and left it.

Yesterday, down at Lake View, I documented some Mrs Potts irons, which were a late nineteenth century innovation where you had a set of three flat irons with a detachable handle, the idea being that you left the bases on the kitchen range to heat up, fitted the handle to one, did your ironing and swapped the bases in turn as they grew cold, and reheated the irons until you were done.

Mrs Potts irons were quite common and turn up all over rural Australia, so it's no surprise that there's an example at Lake View

One of the bases looks like this (the picture's failed QA and will have to be rephotographed), but it has this quite sharp profile, three holes and "Mrs Potts Iron" embossed on it.

Now the flat iron I dug up a few years ago has a similar profile so I went out into the yard and had a second look

The last few years of being out in the rain and frost have freed some of the dirt and clag and quite clearly the profile is similar to a Mrs Potts base and importantly has three protrusions where the handle attachment fits on a Potts iron, and while you can't see this I could kid myself I can make out 'TS' in the correct place on the iron amid the corrosion.

So, tentatively, I'd say it was a Mrs Potts iron base...