Exploring my family history has led me down the rabbit hole of historical research. Census records show a great deal of my family's history, and my family's history also shows some holes in the census records. Although this work was done carefully by intrepid census takers, with boots on the ground, I have learned that they never actually counted...
Family History
My mother was an only child and her mother had inherited most of my great gradmother's papers. This family archive provides a detailed and personal view of life mostly centered around McKean County in Pennsylvania.
Calling Cards and Other Tiny Ephemera
08/15/2022
I am working on transcribing and naming a file from our family archive that I had labeled "Calling Cards Etc." I hadn't expected this file to very very interesting. Useful, yes, as I knew the cards would clearly tell me how some family names were spelled, but I didn't expect much of real interest. But mixed in with the...
Family Stories
01/03/2022
This morning I was reading a Quora post (Quora is a guilty pleasure) about how to reapond to unwanted advice ro new parents. One conversation veered into stories about insisting on breastfeeding in the hospital. I contributed this response... but after rereading it I realized this is the first time I remembered this interaction in a long, long...
A Life's Story by Dennison Woodcock
07/20/2021
I wrote about Dennison Woodcock and his poetry book last month. I have since discovered that there was no easy technical way to transcribe the text. The format and the old typeface is more than basic OCR (optical character recognistion) could handle.
Dennison Woodcock
06/29/2021
Dennison Woodcock was an important figure in some of my grandmother's stories. I remember the chair she explained was from the "butter bowl factory." I also remember it being a a very comfortable, small work or desk chair. My mom told me to look for the little, yellow book of his. When I found it there were a couple small...
My Great Grandmother's Autobiography
06/21/2021
I have just finished transcribing and editing my Great-Grandmother's autobiography. It is written in pencil, with lovely script penmanship in two little (3X5 1/2") notebooklets. I have tried to edit lightly, adding punctuation and updated spellings. There were also places where I have had to figure out a particular word, using a magnifying glass...