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...

Technology and the road trip

 As I've written elsewhere, we're just back from a road trip to Port Lincoln in South Australia.

Technologywise, we took more or less the same as we took to Tasmania  last year - I took the HP ProBook which continues to function well as a travel computer, supplemented by the little Lenovo M8 tablet to read the news in the morning, and my second hand Canon Powershot.

I did take a film camera with me as well but it ended up staying in the bag for the whole trip.

Everywhere we stayed provided internet, but of variable quality - for example in Glenelg the internet in the short stay apartment was quite slow, and we ended up using my 4G travel modem, especially as J had to make a zoom call one morning.

In other places, for example in our rental cottage in Goolwa it was blisteringly fast.

In a couple of places, motels used these damn captive portal solutions where you have to jump through hoops to log on, and we simply used the 4G modem in preference as it provided reasonable speed for minimal hassle ...

Landfill and Windows 10

 Back in February I was fairly scathing about a news report that suggested that the end of support for Windows 10 would result in a tide of older machines incapable of running Windows 11 being dumped in landfill.

I still don't think that will be the case as regards home users and most corporates have made the jump already - most corporates replace machines every three or four years - but it is interesting that my favourite supplier of cheap refurbished laptops is running a promotion on cheap sub $300 laptops and almost all the machines are Windows 10 machines - most of their more expensive offerings are Windows 11 based suggesting that some corporate are already into their first Windows 11 refresh.

It also suggests that most of the buyers of refurbished machines are already on the lookout for a Windows 11 machine as a second machine, which does tend to suggest they are not installing linux on them.

And yet linux does have an advantage in that it is not the product of an American megacorp, and in these days of uncertainty about the USA and its role in the world, there may increasingly be people who would prefer their computer operating system to be independent of the megacorps.

And it's not just the paranoid - there are cases of various governments moving to linux, or at least experimenting with it as an option.

Perhaps and just perhaps, and given some people's dislike for AI in everything, the end of Windows 10 might nudge the uptake of linux on the desktop along a bit ...

Documenting artefacts - a tweak to the mechanicals

 For the last eight or nine years I've been volunteering as a cataloguer for the National Trust of Victoria, first documenting the contents of Dow's pharmacy in Chiltern, and then Lake View House, also in Chiltern.

And the methodology I use has not changed much from the method I first described back in 2017.

There were some changes along the way, such as the use of One Drive directly rather than uploading the data from a USB stick at the end of the day but the procedure at the end of the project was still essentially the same, as is the procedure used at Lake View, except that the data is entered into a spreadsheet designed to ease the ingest of the data into the Trust's digital asset management system - so while the way I structure the data may have changed, the procedure is basically the same starting with a descriptive entry written in longhand in an A4 notebook which is transcribed into the appropriate columns of the data entry spreadsheet.

As a procedure it's robust and it works well - don't knock it, and longhand entries in notebooks have a certain permanence.

But yesterday, I tried a slightly different procedure.

I was working on the contents of the kitchen, which is a detached brick building separate to the main house. The kitchen lacks power sockets, and lacks any free surface on which to write, the available surfaces being covered in exhibits, and I didn't want to have to carry artefacts from the kitchen to the main house to document them one by one.

However, we have plastic chairs in store for outside presentations etc and a large brick floor area suitable for photographing artefacts on against a white sheet (and equally if I needed to use my lightbox, it can be run off a powerbank).

So, I thought, why not take a second laptop in, sit on one of the plastic chairs, and create a basic spreadsheet not unlike the original ones I made up at Dow's and then cut and paste the data as required into the bigger and more formal spreadsheet.

To do this I used my linux based IdeaPad 1 and created a base spreadsheet using Libre Office Calc

There's nothing magical about using Linux here, you could equally well use a Mac or a Chromebook, or even a second windows device.

I settled on the IdeaPad as it has decent battery life and can drive my endoscope if required to capture a makers name or serial number on an artefact. I did think about using my lightweight research machine but the lack of power sockets in the kitchen worked against it - it only manages two to three hours on a full charge, and can be slow to recharge. The IdeaPad usually manages a little over four hours on a charge and recharges fairly quickly meaning it can be charged over lunch for an afternoon session.

Likewise there's nothing special about using Libre Office Calc, Numbers or a Mac or Google sheets on a ChromeBook, the only special thing I did was save the spreadsheet in a recent Excel 365 format.

After documenting about ten or twelve artefacts - which roughly takes an hour I would upload the spreadsheet to a scratch work area on One Drive via the web interface.

Documentation sessions are separated on the worksheet by blank lines to make sure that we are copying the correct data - it would be a bit of a problem if objects were accidentally duplicated.

I would then go across to the main house and my desk, and on my main work computer - a Thinkpad running Windows 10 cut and paste data from the scratch spreadsheet to the main sheet, doing any editing and restructuring required along the way, and add in the photo data.

While it sounds a bit of a pfaff, I found that not having to retype the data entries from my longhand notes did speed the process up a bit.

Obviously I could have simply uploaded the data and taken it home to work on, but I did want to check the quality of the photographs as I went, and perhaps do a little basic photo editing to make a makers' name or feature clearer.

All in all, I think using a second machine like this was a win, even if the procedure sounds a little clumsy...

Microsoft are closing Skype

 I had an email this morning from Microsoft to tell me they are closing Skype.

Back in the early days Skype was invaluable, allowing me to keep in touch with my parents who lived overseas - allowing me to call my father daily as my mother was slowly dying, and the same thing to my brother when my father died, not to mention interminable conversations with lawyers on the other side of the planet to sort out his estate.

I used to use Skype to call home when travelling overseas, and for work calls to colleagues overseas and in Australia.

Through sheer inertia, I still have a Skype account and a Skype number, even though the need for them has disappeared.

Once, when internet coverage was patchy, long distance and international calls were still pricy, and phones didn't support internet calling, the ability to call someone's land line or mobile for a few cents was a godsend.

Nowadays, everyone has a smartphone, and we have alternatives such as WhatsApp, Google Meet, and Zoom, the pandemic darling application, Skype has perhaps outlived its usefulness.

Still, it was good while it lasted, and almost unique as an application that genuinely added to the quality of life.

Endoscope fun

 After my fun trying to photograph a typewriter serial number I had a look into the cost of endoscope cameras, and basic units are amazingly cheap these days - for less than the cost of a couple of beers I picked up this little toy from Amazon

to which I added a USB C converter and plugged it into my Ubuntu laptop, ran up cheese (a webcam management app), and selected the USB device, and hey presto! - it just worked

and if you've ever wondered what a 20c coin looks like in close up, here's a test image

Ok, it's not the greatest quality photograph, but I'm quietly impressed that it took me longer to get it out of the Amazon delivery satchel than it did to get it working ...

Finding Catherine

 Really this post should be titled 'Finding Katherine'.

As is my wont, I thought I would delve a little into the life of Catherine Scragg, the young woman assaulted on a train near Shrewsbury, close to the border between England and Wales, in August 1887.

I do this, in part, to humanise them and make them more than simply a name on a page.

At first Catherine seemed incredibly elusive, she seemed not to exist in the 1881 census.

Well that just shows that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the newspapers. Catherine was in fact Katherine, and was in fact born in 1866, making her 21 or 22 at the time of the attack not 25 as in some of the reports of the time.

As newspapers of the time tended to copy from each other with wild abandon, and fact checking was an unknown construct, the mistakes were reproduced over and over again.

However, the Shropshire Assizes for October 1887 correctly list her as Katherine Scragg. As there's only one Katherine Scragg in the 1881 census for the Stoke on Trent area (her parents lived in 41 Talbot Street in Hanley - checking on Google StreetView suggests that the house is long gone - and she was returning from a visit home when she was attacked) we can be reasonably certain that she was the same Katherine Scragg listed in the 1881 census as a pupil teacher.

But what of her life after the assault?

Well, there is a Katherine Scragg listed in both the 1891 and 1901 census listed as working as a school teacher in Cheslyn Hay in the English midlands between Wolverhampton and Lichfield, and not really that far from Stoke on Trent.

I'm not able to find when she died, but there's a hint that she may have married later in life, but to run that down is going to require a trip to the library to use their copy of  ancestry ...

Goodbye Lubuntu, hello Ubuntu

 

You might remember, back in October, that after my troubles with the latest Ubuntu upgrade and my Lenovo Ideapad, as an experiment I installed Lubuntu on the old Dell Latitude E5250 that I'd bought J as a stopgap machine when her old machine carked it at the start of the pandemic.

As an experiment it was pretty successful, and it's lack of external dependencies - no cloud storage for one - made a useful machine, so useful in fact that I've found myself using it for some family history stuff, especially where I don't necessarily have access to good fast internet. 

Despite the machine being being nine or so years old the machine's pretty responsive, and the keyboard is nice to type on and the screen is nice and bright.

And certainly Lubuntu does not stress the machine - it really is light and fast, and gets the most out of old hardware.

Lubuntu is however a community maintained distribution and as such updates can lag behind the main distribution, and as the machine seemed to be becoming a production machine, I thought I would move it over to standard Ubuntu before I had too much work on it.

So, I backed up my work to a USB stick, burned myself a bootable USB with the latest version of Ubuntu, and rebooted the machine.

I basically just followed the bouncing ball as regards the installation, reinstalled my extra software and copied back my data. Probably took a bit over an hour, but certainly less than two.

On first use the machine seems as capable under Ubuntu as it did under Lubuntu, but as with all these things only time will tell ...

Whose typewriter is this?

 

At Lake View House, we have a collection of Henry Handel Richardson memorabilia, books with dedications by her, an old school book with her notes, a copy of the poems of Lord Byron won as a prize for English at the Presbyterian Ladies College, a pair of her sunglasses, in truth, not that much to memorialize someone, but as, like a lot of Australian writers, musicians and artists of the time, she buggered off to Europe at the first opportunity, and apart for a short visit in 1912, never came back, spending the last part of her life in Hastings on the English south coast.

So it's not really surprising that we don't have a lot in the way of artefacts to memorialize her.

It's said that the desk in the study of Lake View is her writing desk, and displayed on it is a typewriter, an Imperial 55,  made in Leicester by the Imperial Typewriter company.

Now one might be tempted to assume that it's Henry Handel Richardson's typewriter, except it can't be.

Firstly, when I was working through the various editions of her books we hold, I checked them against both the State Library of Victoria and the National Library of Australia, and discovered by pure happenstance that the State Library holds Henry Handel Richardson's typewriter, gifted by Clive Probyn, a well-known Henry Handel Richardson scholar, in 2009.

The State Library also holds a postcard showing HHR's typewriter.

Now, I havn't seen either the typewriter or the postcard, but let's assume for a moment that they match and that the provenance of both items has been checked.

This would tend to suggest that the typewriter at Lake View was not hers.

However, it might be that she bought it as a second typewriter for use by her personal assistant during her last years when she was dying of cancer.

Now when I was documenting the contents of Dow's pharmacy, I chased down the date of the dispensary typewriter to 1924, in part by using the Typewriter Database.

Well, this particular typewriter is s/n 288219

I apologize for the crappy photograph - while the serial number is easy enough to read with the aid of a dentist's mirror it's hidden underneath the platen mechanism and almost impossible to photograph with a normal camera or phone - one of these little endoscope style cameras would probably be the solution - but trust me it's 288219.

So plugging that number into the typewriter database, what do we find?

machines with serial numbers between 284000 and 305929 were built in 1948, two years after HHR's death, making it rather unlikely it was owned by HHR itself - I don't have any provenance documentation, but the earlier 1970s insurance documents, while they mention the writing desk do not mention the typewriter, suggesting that perhaps it was acquired later.

 It could be that the typewriter was purchased and belonged to HHR's long term personal assistant and secretary Olga Roncoroni with whom she had an enduring and close relationship, and who acted as HHR's executrix after her death.

Olga herself died in 1982 and it is possible that some of the memorabilia that we hold came via her estate.

Solved!

I've found some additional documentation that gives a partial provenance.

The item actually has no connection at all to either Henry Handel Richardson or Olga Roncoroni. 

In fact, the item was donated by a lady whose mother lived in Lake View in 1910, and whose grandfather was a journalist at the Federal Standard newspaper in Chiltern.

Of course, the ages don't quite line up with the date of manufacture - if the journalist grandfather was in his twenties in 1910, he would likely be in his sixties when the typewriter was manufactured.

Old journalists of course never retire, and perhaps he kept working well after normal retirement age...

Finding Fanny Elizabeth Bull

 Over on one of my other blogs I've recounted the story of Fanny Elizabeth Bull, a young governess, who was assaulted - let's be honest, was subject to an attempted rape, in a second class compartment of  a South Eastern Railway train in August 1885.

Like all such accounts, quite horrific.

However the case is unusual as it went to prosecution - at the time the only way for a woman to bring a case of violent assault to court was to initiate a private prosecution, and most didn't, for fear of the damage to their reputations.

Fanny unusually, and with the support of the railway company did, and her assailant, who pleaded guilty, was sentenced to three months hard labour.

Finding information about the case was quite easy, fortunately as Fanny was most definitely Fanny Elizabeth her name was quite easy to search for on both Welsh Newspapers online and on the Gale Newsvault via the State Library of Victoria.

And knowing both her name and the name of her assailant, it was really easy to find the outcome of the case on the Old Bailey's website.

And then I thought I might try and put a little bit of flesh on the bones, and find Fanny's age, and confirm her employment.

This turned out to be harder than it should be.

The assault took place in 1885, and she was said to live in Brixton, which then as now was part of the Borough of Lambeth and she had joined the train at Eltham, travelling towards New Cross.

(Just to add to the fun the station she joined the train at is now Mottingham, and not the current Eltham station, which opened some twenty years later - at the time Fanny joined the train, the station was officially Eltham for Mottingham, and universally and confusingly called Eltham).

The newspaper reports describe her as a young governess who lived at home, suggesting she was unmarried, and taking a guess I put her between 20 and 25.

And then I hit a problem.

The England and Wales censuses for 1881 and 1891 are behind a paywall, and you need an account with one of the family history behemoths - which I don't have anymore.

I did manage to find the basics by using FindmyPast without signing up for a subscription, but I couldn't view the actual census documents - which was a problem as neither the 1881 or 1891 census listed her profession, and there were other Fanny Elizabeth Bulls living in London at the time who were roughly the right age and working as housemaids and domestic servants.

Was it an incomplete transcription or was the information simply not there?

And then I had an idea - our library has a subscription to Ancestry, so not knowing anything about how the setup worked, I emailed them asking about access.

Well, they did have a subscription, but you needed to go to the library to use it - it's only a ten minute walk away - the benefits of living in a small town - so I asked them to reserve me a timeslot on one of the public computers.

This turned out to be a really good thing to do - when I got there, there were no patrons, only Anna and Julie the duty librarians, and as a bonus, Julie runs the local family history group.

So I got some individual tuition on using Ancestry, and in around fifteen minutes confirmed that her occupation was not listed on the 1881 or 1891 census form, but she was listed in 1911 as being a Head mistress at the moderately prestigious Trevelyan School in Haywards Heath. In fact I probably spent more time talking to Anna and Julie than I did researching.

I was also able to confirm that Fanny Elizabeth was born in 1861 in Mortlake, and died 1916.

As far as I've been able to find out, she never married.

I'm pleased to see that she seems to have succeeded in life, despite her traumatic experience.