February 11, 2010
A new page of obituaries
A new page on the Bardeens, Orrs and relatives was posted today, #4 in the set.
I have been spending a lot of time on the first of our History Tour Series, which is about the Universal Friend and her colony, which was the first permanent white settlement in western NY (in 1788). In many ways this was the first venture of an organized group from the old colonies along the seaboard into former Indian lands west of the Fort Stanwix treaty line established by the British in 1768, just after the French & Indian War. I am writing a book about the Friend’s life, focusing on the political, social and religious influences that shaped her movement, and the historic consequences of her journey and settlement to the west.
I am working (slowly) at getting the Hillside cemetery in Dundee, town of Starkey, on line. So far the index (not quite finished) includes more than 9000 names, which is why it is going so slow.
I’m also working on a presentation I’m giving in October, second in a series called Doing History. The first was four sessions, two given on each of two successive Wednesdays, and I plan to follow the same format. The title of that group was From the Ground Up, and was about the value of land records for family and local historians. I have the presentation on a CD, and when I have time (joke!) I want to add it to my website. The new group is called Milo’s Bones and is about the structure and uses of town history, again for family and local historians.
I am managing a large project as the county’s Records Manager, to index all the county’s maps in one place, and link it to images of the actual maps. We have now finished data-collection for all the recorded maps (say 12,000 of them), most of which are now in the final database index and linked to images through document-management software. All that took more than 3 years and is to some extent still ongoing. I have turned my main attention now to the unrecorded maps (about another 13,000). These are in most ways harder to index, because recorded maps have already been indexed to some extent, and we can use that as the outline for our data-gathering. No such luck with the unrecorded maps, which include just about anything one could imagine by way of maps and plans, from original town surveys to aerial photographs, highway surveys, bridge plans, railroad rights-of-way, even cemetery maps. In most ways they are more fun, but they do take a lot more time to finish off. Historians are paid to take the long view, thank goodness.
