William Sims Bainbridge Family History Digital Libraries Human–Computer Interaction Series

Human–Computer Interaction Series

Editors-in-chief Desney Tan Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

Jean Vanderdonckt Louvain School of Management, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium The Human-Computer Interaction Series, launched in 2004, publishes books that advance the science and technology of developing systems which are effective and satisfying for people in a wide variety of contexts. Titles focus on theoretical perspectives (such as formal approaches drawn from a variety of behavioural sciences), practical approaches (such as techniques for effectively integrating user needs in system development), and social issues (such as the determinants of utility, usability and acceptability). HCI is a multidisciplinary ﬁeld and focuses on the human aspects in the development of computer technology. As technology becomes increasingly more pervasive the need to take a human-centred approach in the design and development of computer-based systems becomes ever more important. Titles published within the Human–Computer Interaction Series are included in Thomson Reuters’ Book Citation Index, The DBLP Computer Science Bibliography and The HCI Bibliography.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/6033 William Sims Bainbridge

Family History Digital Libraries

123 William Sims Bainbridge Independent historian Chantilly, VA, USA

ISSN 1571-5035 ISSN 2524-4477 (electronic) Human–Computer Interaction Series ISBN 978-3-030-01062-1 ISBN 978-3-030-01063-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01063-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956268

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1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings ...... 1 1.1 The Digital Library Initiative ...... 2 1.2 An Historical Trapper ...... 6 1.3 Connections to Nature ...... 11 1.4 A Professional Genealogist ...... 19 1.5 Applying Technology to Human History ...... 24 1.6 Conclusion ...... 29 References ...... 29 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs ...... 31 2.1 Accuracy and Completeness ...... 32 2.2 Identifying the Subject ...... 34 2.3 The HTML Approach to Documentation and Connection ..... 42 2.4 Adapting Conventional Software ...... 49 2.5 The Death of Children ...... 52 2.6 Conclusion ...... 63 References ...... 64 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media ...... 67 3.1 Documenting Old Home Movie Travelogues ...... 68 3.2 Understanding Home Movies that Did Not Involve Oneself ...... 75 3.3 Contemporary Videos ...... 79 3.4 Innovative Video Technologies ...... 87 3.5 The Game of Life ...... 93 3.6 Conclusion ...... 98 References ...... 98

v vi Contents

4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs ...... 101 4.1 Expansion of Narratives from Diaries ...... 102 4.2 Controversy About an Explorer’s Diary ...... 105 4.3 The Mysterious Plane Crash ...... 109 4.4 Correspondence ...... 114 4.5 Episodic Memories ...... 121 4.6 A Family Narrative Example ...... 126 4.7 Conclusion ...... 131 References ...... 132 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members ...... 135 5.1 The History of Interviewing ...... 136 5.2 Finding the Appropriate Conceptual Framework ...... 141 5.3 Open-Ended Questions ...... 147 5.4 The Process of Interviewing ...... 155 5.5 Conclusion ...... 160 References ...... 161 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts ..... 165 6.1 Documenting Artifacts In Situ ...... 166 6.2 A Brief In Situ Example of Preservation ...... 172 6.3 Toys, Play, and Reality ...... 175 6.4 Scanning and Searching ...... 178 6.5 Scanning Basics ...... 182 6.6 Free Camera Functional Preservation ...... 186 6.7 Conclusion ...... 197 References ...... 197 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes ...... 199 7.1 Gramercy Park ...... 200 7.2 Bailiwick in 3-D ...... 206 7.3 Historic Virtual Reality ...... 215 7.4 Historical Virtual Worlds ...... 222 7.5 Conclusion ...... 230 References ...... 231 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Ofﬁcial Records ..... 233 8.1 Human Factors in Family History ...... 234 8.2 Sociology of the Census ...... 243 8.3 Personal Reﬂections on Legal Records ...... 249 8.4 Medical Records ...... 253 8.5 Church Records ...... 258 8.6 Conclusion ...... 262 References ...... 263 Contents vii

9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through Social Media ...... 267 9.1 Creating a Family Archive in Facebook ...... 268 9.2 The Content of a Family History Archive ...... 272 9.3 Seeking Green Hollow Farm in Facebook ...... 278 9.4 A Family of Homes ...... 286 9.5 Wikis of Fictional Families ...... 293 9.6 Conclusion ...... 298 References ...... 299 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History ...... 301 10.1 The Valley of the Shadow ...... 302 10.2 The Greenwich History Projects ...... 309 10.3 Durability of Communities ...... 320 10.4 Teaching a Profession ...... 325 10.5 Conclusion: A Research Agenda ...... 331 References ...... 333 Chapter 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings

Abstract Popular computer technologies may be used effectively today to assemble historical data about families into accurate and meaningful narratives, whether by family members themselves or by professional historians. A major technology development effort was the Digital Library Initiative of the 1990s, led by the National Science Foundation, that set the stage for several aspects of current family history archiving. To provide contrast with this vast collective effort, and prepare for consideration of family data challenges, the distinctive life of trapper and utopian Sewell Newhouse (1806–1888) is summarized, highlighting the fact that human fame is capricious and can distort historical records. The next example of connections between kinds of data and human meanings, one activity of a rural family in the early 1940s, links to general principles of the relationship between humans and nature, and between individuals and world events. Consideration of the career of genealogist Louis Efﬁngham de Forest (1891–1952) suggests how the profession of family historian may evolve, while raising questions about how families may handle uncomfortable facts that may be discovered. The conclusion combines photographs and census data to show how the structure of a nuclear family may be delineated for the period 1900–1940.

The great popularity of online genealogical services, despite their severe limitations, suggests that family history work has great potential for the future, but only if efficient and effective methods can be developed to collect information about our past and assemble the fragments into accurate and meaningful narratives. Professional genealogists have existed for over a century, and recently a new profession of digital curator has emerged (Botticelli et al. 2011). Defined by Wikipedia, “Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets… Successful digital curation will mitigate digital obsolescence, keeping the information accessible to users indefinitely.”1 Yet in most cases much of the historical work must be done by family members themselves, which means that they will need instruction on how to find relevant antique information, how to assemble and preserve the information describing their own lives, and how to handle the neces-

1en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_curation. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 1 W. S. Bainbridge, Family History Digital Libraries, Human–Computer Interaction Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01063-8_1 2 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings sary information technology tools. At the same time, history teachers will need to add courses about family history to their curricula, recognizing that their scholarly discipline long ago abandoned its obsession with “kings and battles,” and the full diversity of humanity deserves to be remembered. This book provides a comprehensive background, for the full range of information types and information technologies, in the context not only of traditional historical scholarship but also of computer science and social science. Family histories are both intimate and cosmopolitan, connecting oneself to the wider world, linking from today to both yesterday and tomorrow. I would not have been able to write this book, had I not belonged to a family that cared very much about its own history, or had I not inherited two centuries of family documents, photographs covering 17 decades, and home movies and videos covering 9 decades. While trained in sociology, my dissertation and several later works were historical studies, and for a quarter century I have worked at the intersection of social and computer sciences at the National Science Foundation.

1.1 The Digital Library Initiative

In 1994, the National Science Foundation made six major investments in developing new technologies, which could today contribute to family history systems, here listed in Table 1.1. Called the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), this ambitious activity continued about a decade, going through two additional stages, the second focused on smaller but more diverse grants, then the third stage aimed to partner with other nations, recognizing that by definition the World Wide Web was international (Griffiths 2004;Lesk2012). I had hoped there would be a fourth stage, developing digital library technologies suitable for use by families and small organizations, but that never happened. A member of the DLI team, I represented the social sciences, and the six grants in Table 1.1 were managed by my computer science colleague, Stephen Griffin. These grants were made in September 1994, for a total of $26,842,849, which was about $44,000,000 in 2017 dollars, according to the inflation calculator placed online by the US government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.2 Today, anyone who wants to can go to the online NSF grants abstract search system to read the original abstracts describing the grants, and take a few simple steps to find additional information.3 For example, the one-paragraph abstract of the Michigan grant says: “This project conducts research that will lead to the implementation and deployment of a digital library testbed and environment of textual, video, still image, and data sets, from both primary and secondary information suppliers. The project will make available capabilities and services to a large number of users at multiple locations. The basic approach is one of self-assembling agent based federation of distributed

2data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl, accessed October 2017. 3www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/advancedSearch.jsp. 1.1 The Digital Library Initiative 3 $4,674,232 $4,394,188 $4,878,659 $4,021,998 Cost $4,516,573 $4,357,199 Carnegie-Mellon U Illinois, Urbana-Champaign U California, Santa Barbara U California, Berkeley University Stanford U Michigan, Ann Arbor Takeo Kanade Bruce Schatz Terence Smith Robert Wilensky Principal investigator Hector Garcia-Molina Daniel Atkins Title The University of Michigan Digital Libraries ResearchInformedia: Proposal Integrated Speech, Image andUnderstanding Language for Creation and ExplorationLibraries of Digital Video The Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project Building the Interspace: Digital LibraryUniversity Infrastructure Engineering for Community a The Alexandria Project: Towards a Distributedwith Digital Comprehensive Library Services for ImagesReferenced and Information Spatially The Environmental Electronic Library: A PrototypeIntelligent, of Distributed a Electronic Scalable, Library The six original grants of the Digital Library Initiative Grant ID 9411287 9411299 9411306 9411318 9411330 9411334 Table 1.1 4 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings collections.”4 The abstract also lists the programs involved in the DLI that contributed funding, as luck would have it naming my own program first, that together define the conceptual location of the DLI: Sociology; History and Philosophy of Science, Engineering and Technology; Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research; Digital Society and Technologies, Information and Knowledge Management; Digi- tal Libraries and Archives; Applications of Advanced Technologies. However, DLI was not merely an NSF effort, because The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) formed a three-partner team with NSF to achieve a technological revolution. Abstracts list the principal investigators (PIs) who received the grants and ran the research projects. The Michigan PI, Daniel Atkins, is well known, possessing a Wikipedia page that mentions: “He led workshops to develop the National Science Foundation (NSF) Digital Library Initiative, which included joint programs with the European Commission.”5 It links to his academic webpage that reports today he is “Professor Emeritus of Information, School of Information and Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering.”6 Another link goes to a highly influential document usually called The Atkins Report,but more formally, Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastruc- ture: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure, dating from January 2003.7 A third link goes to a February 8, 2006, news item in the online NSF archive, that announces: “Dr. Atkins will join NSF on June 5 as Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI), which has a Fiscal Year 2006 budget of $127 million.8 So, Atkins and the other DLI PIs were extremely influential people, but given that this book concerns family history, what do we immediately know from these sources about this particular person’s family? He and his wife set up a scholarship fund at the University of Michigan, and its webpage says, “Dan and Monica have two children and five grandchildren, all of whom live in Ann Arbor. ‘Being mom and grandma is the job that trumps them all,’ says Monica.”9 The second grant in the table, Informedia, was a pioneering effort to develop automatic means to achieve “the integrated application of speech, language and image understanding technologies for efficient creation (acquisition, recognition, segmentation, and indexing) and exploration (query, search, retrieval, and display)” of a library of digital videos.10 This is directly relevant for family histories, because antique home movies can be translated into digital videos, and much of contemporary life can now be documented through instant videos recorded by common mobile devices. Within two years, the project was testing the educational benefit of its initial

4www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9411287. 5en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_E._Atkins. 6www.si.umich.edu/people/daniel-atkins-iii. 7arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/106224. 8www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=105820. 9www.si.umich.edu/giving/dan-and-monica-atkins-scholarship-fund. 10www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9411299. 1.1 The Digital Library Initiative 5 fully annotated library. It “contained 1600 video segments spanning 45 hours of video… concentrated in the areas of biology, math, and physics. The interface to this library was a Microsoft Windows application with query and browsing capabilities… Users included teachers and students in high school biology and physics classes, and students in summer school programs emphasizing science topics. Primary tasks were fact-finding and the creation of multimedia essays” (Christel and Pendyala 1996). This project was literally visionary, in several meanings of the term, achieving much but not reaching the lofty goals many people had in mind. Two limitations in particular are relevant here. First, a quarter century of research has not yet reached the point at which even very large and expensive automatic systems can fully and accurately index all the objects, people, and places included in a video, or transcribe the words they speak to each other, except in very limited special cases. Second, as is the case for most if not all human endeavors, there is some danger that important aspects of the Digital Library Initiative may be lost to history. For example, the quotation in the previous paragraph about the “1600 video segments” came from what used to be the major digital library publication, D-Lib Magazine, that was accessible for free to everyone in the world, from its first issue in July 1995, but that ceased publication with its July/August 2017 issue. Considered as priceless history, we may hope that its 265 issues remain available forever, and four “mirror sites” were set up in four different nations, which could preserve the archive if the American site went down. But the main site says, “Over time, these mirror sites will be discontinued.”11 In its early years the Digital Library Initiative was very much an idealistic social movement, that has faded to a significant extent, absorbed into Silicon Valley corporations and the universities. The abstract for the third grant, to Stanford University, defined its scope sufficiently widely to include family history digital libraries, without specifically mentioning them: “The Integrated Digital Library is broadly defined to include everything from personal information collections, to the collections that one finds today in conventional libraries, to the large data collections shared by scientists.”12 Its most influential outcome was a biproduct, the Google search engine (Page et al. 1999). The three other original grants in the Digital Library Initiative pioneered many technical advances in data management, and all of them included mapping the surrounding environment, which can be central to the histories of families (Smith 1996; Ogle and Wilensky 1996; Zhu et al. 1999). About a decade after the birth of the Digital Library Initiative, Douglas Seefeldt and William Thomas told their fellow historians that their academic field was still in the early stages of adapting to the digital revolution: “For history, the future digital environment might challenge some of our traditional methods, perhaps even the craft- oriented practices of our discipline. Our sources alone in the future will be almost entirely digital—instant messages, emails, doc files, pdfs, digital video, podcasts, and databases. Their scale and complexity will demand that historians use tools and techniques not yet a part of our practice to create their own digital sources and

11www.dlib.org/about.html, accessed November 2017. 12www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9411306. 6 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings employ those created by others” (Seefeldt and Thomas 2009). The somewhat obscure reference to “craft-oriented practices of our discipline” may hint at the possibility that future historians will primarily be amateurs, guided by but vastly outnumbering academic historians, or even professionals providing commercial services to families that wish to assemble their own histories. In any case, experience will be exceedingly valuable.

1.2 An Historical Trapper

This book integrates the past, present and future, yet it is only the past about which we have extensive information. One challenge raised by that fact is that the past did not possess all the information technologies we have today, let alone those that will be developed in the future. Related to that is our lack of information about large factions of the population in past decades let alone centuries, when only rich and powerful people tended to be memorialized. A good example is Julius Caesar, whose own words we may read in his rather intelligent book about the Gallic Wars, and whose face we may see in sculptures that generally agree about his high cheek bones. One goal of this book is to encourage everyone to preserve rich records of themselves and their families, but until the present moment that has been possible only for a small subset of humanity. One compromise solution this book will use is to often focus on people of the past who happen to have been well documented, probably because they were more prosperous or notorious than the average, yet who illustrate human characteristics shared by many people, and also permit consideration of a particular information technology method. Consider Sewell Newhouse. Not exactly a household name, he lacks a page in Wikipedia, and is not mentioned on the page for the Oneida Community, yet was absolutely essential for its success. As its page reports: “The Oneida Community was a Perfectionist religious communal society founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 in Oneida, New York.”13 The Wikipedia page for its founder is viewed by somebody about 100 times day, rendering him an historical celebrity: “John Humphrey Noyes (September 3, 1811—April 13, 1886) was an American preacher, radical religious philosopher, and utopian socialist. He founded the Putney, Oneida, and Wallingford Communities, and is credited with coining the term ‘complex marriage’.”14 New- house could be described as the most loyal follower of Noyes, standing by him even in the last days of his rule, and more signiﬁcantly creating the trap manufacture business that supported the community economically, before at its dissolution it morphed into a silverware company. From the standpoint of archaeology, cultural anthropology, or history museums, traps are artifacts, that reveal in their design and application sig- niﬁcant qualities of the culture and individual people who created them. Among the

13en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community, accessed October 2017. 14en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Humphrey_Noyes, accessed October 2017. 1.2 An Historical Trapper 7 less obvious topics this book will explore, is the documentation and understanding of the artifacts belonging to a family. A popular online source of information about deceased people, that will be used at several points in this book, is Find A Grave, an information collectivity comparable to Wikipedia in that most information is uploaded by non-professional volunteers. Using its search engine with only the name reveals 3 deceased Sewell Newhouses, but the correct one is obvious, because he is buried at the Oneida Community Cemetery. His page shows a picture of his tombstone, and this very limited information was posted by a contributor: “Birth: 1806, Death: 1888, Son of John Newhouse, husband of Eveliza Hyde, father of Milford James Newhouse.” The Find A Grave search engine lists fully 238 men named John Newhouse in about as many cemeteries, no Eveliza Hyde or Eveliza Newhouse, but one Milford James Newhouse who is also buried at Oneida.15 Adding the cemetery to the search terms and looking at all 7 Newhouses buried at Oneida reveals one named M. Eveliza Hyde Newhouse, who clearly was Sewell’s wife and was not picked up by the original search because her common name was not actually her first name.16 As Wikipedia reports, Find A Grave began with a single individual who had a personal interest in the topic: “The site was created in 1995 by Salt Lake City resident Jim Tipton to support his hobby of visiting the burial sites of celebrities. He later added an online forum. Find A Grave was launched as a commercial entity in 1998, first as a trade name and then incorporated in 2000.”17 Thus, it is quite possible that some family historians in future years will build a business or important non- profit organization on the basis of innovations that began as an amateur, home-based activity. Potential future developments that grow out of family history digital libraries will be suggested throughout this book, but as the final chapter demonstrates, there are also many opportunities to connect small family histories together into vast community histories. Text search of the two most influential nineteenth-century books about American communes, Communistic Societies of the United States by Charles Nordhoff and History of American Socialisms by Noyes himself fails to turn up the name Sewell Newhouse. Noyes boasts that in 1868 his commune manufactured an astounding 278,000 complex, steel animal traps, but fails to mention Newhouse, who was largely responsible for this technological triumph, his egotistical focus being on himself and his religious ideology (Noyes 1870). Nordhoff does refer to Oneida’s trap business, but only among various other much less significant industries, the word “trap” appearing 11 times, but “Newhouse” 0 (Nordhoff 1875). The last of Nordhoff’s trap references is in his bibliography: “The Trapper’s Guide. Wallingford, 1867” (Nord- hoff 1875). He fails to mention that Sewell Newhouse was the author of this highly popular and frequently reprinted book, with this full title: The Trapper’s Guide:

15www.ﬁndagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Newhouse&GSiman=1&GScid=65556& GRid=47725734&, accessed October 2017. 16www.ﬁndagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Newhouse&GSiman=1&GScid=65556& GRid=49825876&, accessed October 2017. 17en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_a_Grave, accessed October 2017. 8 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings

A Manual Of Instructions for Capturing all Kinds of Fur-Bearing Animals, and Curing their Skins; With Observations on the Fur-Trade, Hints on Life in The Woods, and Narratives of Trapping and Hunting Excursions (Newhouse 1869). Currently available for free in multiple editions online, it includes portraits of Newhouse and of the rather distinctive traps he invented, plus information contributed by others at Oneida, although primarily recording the mind and experiences of Newhouse. This case illustrates the fact that an individual may be unknown in one historical context, yet famous in another. Today, when anyone may self-publish a paper book, or share long manuscripts in dozens of ways online, any avid hunters could write up their experiences, perhaps concentrating on the skills and tools like Newhouse, or whatever aspect of hunting appeals to each individual. The question them becomes: Who will read such autobiographies, or who will write biographical essays about the hunter, based on a collection of sources? In the case of Newhouse, the ﬁrst chapter of a 1907 book, Steel Traps, by Arthur Harding, eulogized Newhouse. Remarkably, it emphasized the mutually respectful close relationships in young adulthood he had with Iroquois Native Americans, using language that must have seemed appropriate at the time, but today might seem offensively condescending:

The Indians were very fond of shooting at a mark both with the riﬂe and the bow and arrow, but they would seldom try conclusions with “Sewell” - as they all called him - for he could always out shoot them with the riﬂe, and very few of the tribe were as skillful as he with the bow and arrow. In wrestling too, a favorite game of the day, Mr. Newhouse was more than a match for the best men of his time both white and red (Harding 1907).

Perhaps coincidentally, this text framed a photograph of Newhouse, and thus seemed to be expressing his fundamental nature. And yet today it reads as naïve advertising material, couched in ethnic stereotypes. Indeed, Harding did not himself observe Newhouse interacting with his Iroquois friends, publishing three decades after the trap-builder’s death, so this text can also be categorized as personal mythology, which Newhouse himself or his family members may have cultivated. A question that may have no answer is the extent to which family histories should avoid drama- tizing the lives of members. At least since the remarkable work of Snorri Sturluson around the year 1200, scholars have contemplated the tense connection between fact and legend (Sturluson 1916). Wikipedia defines the core concept: “Euhemerism is an approach to the interpretation of mythology in which mythological accounts are presumed to have originated from real historical events or personages. Euhe- merism supposes that historical accounts become myths as they are exaggerated in the retelling, accumulating elaborations and alterations that reflect cultural mores.”18 There are many ways to consider a human life, and not all are either narrow or idealized. Sociologist Maren Lockwood Carden studied Oneida’s history closely, writing about its transformation and thus multiple meanings in her classic book, Oneida: Utopian Community to Modern Corporation, where she identified New- house both as essential to its economic success and the last of the members to accept its demise (Carden 1969). After considering other Oneida industries, she observed:

18en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerism, accessed October 2017. 1.2 An Historical Trapper 9

“Of all of Oneida’s products, however, the Newhouse trap remained the most important. Neither Noyes nor anyone else in the Community seemed disturbed that their perfect society depended for its living upon such a cruel instrument” (Carden 1969). A large collection of Newhouse traps is permanently on display at the museum and tourist center named the Oneida Community Mansion House, which originally was the commune’s main residence, but its website does not say anything about Sewell Newhouse himself.19 Traps following his design are still being manufactured today, and the website for the Oneida Victor company offers a Newhouse bear trap with a 16.5-in. jaw spread, offset jaws, double springs, and fully 44 in. long for $600 plus shipping, but also does not tell the life story of Sewell.20 However, it is worth noting that the physical artifacts owned by people, as well certainly as those created by people, are signiﬁcant parts of their world and their personal life story. An entire chapter of this book will be devoted to documenting artifacts that help us understand family history. To connect Sewell Newhouse to his extended family, we need to explore other data sources. One step beyond Find A Grave is Salmon Creek Genealogy & Pub- lishing, which offers a kinship tree, apparently of all Oneida members.21 It suggests what other information also supports, that the marriage between Sewell and Eveliza was rather conventional, despite being within a group marriage system in which the extreme case was John Humphrey Noyes who had 13 children with an equal number of women. Sewell and Eveliza had one child, Milford, who married Arabella Campbell Woolworth, and they had one child, Edith Newhouse. With a mysterious Raymond Smith, Edith had two children, whose names confusingly repeat the names Milford Newhouse and Arabella Newhouse. Coming up to the present day, the genealogy begins concealing names for sake of privacy. This book will cite many occasions like Salmon Creek Genealogy in which people with limited means and often no academic connections have shown the ability to create portions of family history digital libraries themselves. Commercially connected to Find A Grave is Ancestry.com, a subscription online source for many kinds of information related to family history. For example, many users have drawn upon the records to construct family genealogies, often but not always of their own family, and not always agreeing with each other. Looking at several of them, then back at Salmon Creek Genealogy, highlights the complexity of the Newhouse family, because Arabella Campbell Woolworth produced with John Humphrey Noyes a child named Irene Campbell Newhouse, who herself reportedly had three daughters. Arabella’s marriage to Milford came during the dissolution of Oneida’s group marriage system in 1879, their daughter was born in 1881, and

19www.oneidacommunity.org/current-and-past-exhibitions, accessed October 2017. 20www.oneidavictor.com/our-products/newhouse-bear-traps.html. 21www.laurahatch.com/Oneida%20Community%20Web/wc01/wc01_054.htm, accessed October 2017. 10 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings

Table 1.2 Childhood retention rates at Oneida Part I: number of children in the commune 1850 1860 1870 Oneida boys 44 43 22 Oneida girls 39 46 27 Part II: retention rate over the following decade 1850–1860 1860–1870 1870–1880 Oneida boys (%) 75 64 64 Oneida girls (%) 87 85 56

Arabella’s daughter with Noyes had been born in 1873.22 The handwritten manuscript schedules of the US census, dated June 1, 1880 and available today at Ancestry.com as well as in various archives, show Sewell Newhouse, age 73, living with three other members of a somewhat complex but little family: his son Milford, age 32, Milford’s wife Arabella, age 29, and Arabella’s daughter (with Noyes) Irene, age 6. The historical census files have been the subject of numerous rigorous studies, which illustrates the multi-faceted connection between family history and social science that will be a theme throughout this book. Until recently, researchers had to travel to a small number of archives, containing either the original huge books of forms filled out in ink by the census taker, or use microfilms of them. Sections of later chapters will draw upon two census-based studies I published back in the 1980s, one charting the population decline of the Shaker religious groups 1850–1880, and the other the problematic diagnoses of inmates in mental institutions in 1860 (Bainbridge 1982, 1984a, b). About the same time, I studied the original census documents for Oneida and a comparable commune named Zoar. Like Oneida, Zoar was religious, but it did not practice group marriage, having more conventional family structures. One interesting comparison was what fraction of the children were still in the commune from one census to the next. Zoar and Oneida had very similar child retention rates, but the Shaker rates were much lower, especially for boys. The Shakers prohibited marriage and sexual behavior, while Zoar and Oneida differed in whether these features of family life were traditional or experimental. Table 1.2 summarizes some of the data for Oneida, for members under age 20 at a particular year. In 1850 and 1860, many of the children had been brought in by parents who joined the Oneida religious movement, while those counted in 1870 were overwhelmingly children born into the commune. That reveals one of the explicit functions of the complex Oneida marriage system: birth control for the ordinary members, if not for John Humphrey Noyes. The lower retention rate for boys in the period 1860–1870 may possibly represent some dissatisfaction by young male adults about this system,

22www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/520507/person/24887136133/facts; www.ancestry. com/family-tree/person/tree/27582228/person/12512788760/facts; www.laurahatch.com/ Oneida%20Community%20Web/wc01/wc01_165.htm. 1.2 An Historical Trapper 11 in which they were expected to have limited romantic relationships with older women of the commune who were often past the child-bearing years. When I originally published research ﬁndings based on this dataset, I noted: “Defection rates for Oneida women many be exaggerated slightly for the 1870–1880 period. There was a high rate of marriage shortly before the latter census, and I may have failed to identify all of the women who married, because marriage meant a change of last name.” In the case of Oneida, our current online datasets include full genealogies, but I used ﬁrst name and date of birth in the old research to get the best estimate then possible. Oneida was not a normal family, nor was trap-inventor Sewell Newhouse an average guy. But some of the general issues raised by this case would apply to many people. Most obviously, considerable effort may be required to map the structure of a family, as it changes over time, and in cases when names change. The Oneida children who disappeared from the census may have left in at least four ways: (1) they died, (2) their parents defected, taking the children with them, (3) at early adulthood they defected individually, or (4) they were expelled for misbehavior. Similar transitions happen today, having consequences not only for the family, but also for how a digital library would represent the transition, and what information it would eventually contain about the person. Having considered the full life of one person, and the rather large “family” to which he belonged, we should now go to the opposite extreme, looking at one very small portion of life, in a small family, but that connects to several wider issues and diverse forms of data.

1.3 Connections to Nature

This section presents an episode from the history of my own family, intentionally rather personal and even minor, precisely to frame the range of kinds of material that realistically family histories should contain. Indeed, this section, with very slight edits, could become one of several dozen vignettes a family historian might write, thus one of the small end-products of family documentation. From the standpoint of historiography, a well-constructed vignette such as this would not merely report a brief episode from a life, but connect it to larger themes relevant to the family and to the wider society in which they lived, in many cases employing a variety of data sources, as this one does. It begins with one paragraph from a letter my father, William Wheeler Bainbridge, wrote to his mother, June Wheeler Bainbridge, on September 16, 1941:

If you were here to read the Danbury papers you would see your son’s name in the paper every Monday. You guessed it - but still you knew that when reading a letter from me you would need to take time out to hear about the pigeons. We have had three races to date with about 50 birds in each race. Each race one of my birds have been within the first three home. The first two races a bird placed third and last Saturday a first. They have flown 100 miles twice and 160 once. The races coming up are Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington and Charlottesville Va with a final special from Greensboro N.C. I don’t know how they do it. From Wilmington last week they averaged 55 miles per hour. 12 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings

The letter was hand written in ink on stationery printed with “Bailiwick, Bethel, Conn.” at the top on one side, documenting that William and his birds lived in the town of Bethel, Connecticut, actually in an antique farmhouse outside of town which he and his wife Barbara had named “Bailiwick,” partly as a pun representing their apocryphal belief that it had once been owned by James Anthony Bailey, the circus ringmaster who partnered with P. T. Barnum who in fact was born in Bethel.23 Danbury is an adjacent and larger town, big enough to have its own newspaper. Many issues of historical newspapers have been scanned in and are offered by several online organizations, some for free and others requiring subscriptions. The Danbury Gazette is available at GenealogyBank.com, but searching for William’s last name turns up only 6 articles, dating from 1813–1814 and concerning a remote relative.24 NewspaperArchive.com has many Connecticut newspapers from 1786–2005, but not including any from Danbury, while the online archive of the Danbury News Times covers only this century.25 At several points in this book we will find that online newspaper archives can be useful, but their coverage is very partial. Searching the catalogued family home movie archives turned up a section showing William’s wife, Barbara, tending their pigeons, undoubtedly filmed by her father on a visit to Connecticut, because it had been spliced into his other home movies. Figure 1.1 is a composite of four frames from this 16 mm film. The quality is frankly low, largely because of the complex history of the film itself. It was stored at William and Barbara’s later home in Greenwich, Connecticut, when the house burned, killing both of them and their daughter Constance, as well as degrading but often not destroy- ing much of the historical material it contained. The film had melted in places, but much of it was converted to VHS videotape when that medium became popular and a local service could do that work with a damaged film. Then years later I entered the video from a VHS player into a computer as an MPG file. This history suggests the complex challenge of preservation that is a major theme of this book, and assembling four frames of a movie into a single image suggests one of many ways to connect separate pieces of information. The image in the upper right corner shows the pigeon coop, with Barbara at the right, coaxing two pigeons to move down from their perch. The image in the upper left corner shows the pair just before she began her action. The two images at the bottom show pigeons afterward in adjacent areas immediately in front of her, with the lower-left image depicting four of them at an entrance to the inside of the coop. A later shot in the movie, not included here, shows a life-size pigeon doll or wooden statue, affixed as a decoration to the upper left corner of the coop, outside the field of these four images. The original film was undated, but must have been rather close to the date of the letter, probably not later than the following summer, for reasons that will become clear. Through this book, another key theme is how to exploit and discipline the personal memory of the historian, who often will be a member of the family being documented,

23en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Anthony_Bailey. 24www.genealogybank.com. 25newspaperarchive.com/us/connecticut, www.newstimes.com. 1.3 Connections to Nature 13

Fig. 1.1 Frames from a home movie of the family’s pigeon coop with memories that can be very valuable in making sense of photographs and other records, but also can distort interpretations. Over recent decades there has been a good deal of research to develop a category system for comparing kinds of memory, although the scientific issues have not yet been settled, and we shall consider several of them in this book. But as a start we can work with one popular typology. For present purposes we can quote the Wikipedia page that is about conscious memories—those that can readily be verbalized rather than being implicit or unconscious: Explicit memory (or declarative memory) is one of the two main types of long-term human memory. It is the conscious, intentional recollection of factual information, previous experiences and concepts. Explicit memory can be divided into two categories: episodic memory, which stores specific personal experiences, and semantic memory, which stores factual information… Autobiographical memory is a memory system consisting of episodes recollected from an individual’s life, based on a combination of episodic (personal experiences and specific objects, people and events experienced at particular time and place) and semantic (general knowledge and facts about the world) memory. Spatial memory is the part of memory responsible for recording information about one’s environment and its spatial orientation.26 Within this framework I can actually report three kinds of personal memories about the pigeons: episodic, spatial, and second-hand, the third category being things I was repeatedly told about the birds. I was not yet one year old when William sent

26en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_memory. 14 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings the letter to his mother, and I have no recollection of the pigeons when they were alive. But I do have an episodic memory, probably from 1949, long after they were dead. In addition to their coop, they had inhabited the attic of a barn-like garage, and when consideration was being given to demolition of the rather poor-condition garage, I was allowed to climb a ladder into the attic, where I found the desiccated corpses of three or four of the birds. Imagining a paleontology adventure, despite my mother’s objections, I carried them to my room in the house, set up a card table, and tried to assemble their skeletons into fossil displays. The result was complete failure, because the bones were fragile and resisted removal. Two spatial memories provide further conceptual structure. First, I recall that the pigeon coop was immediately to the right of the garage, as looking from the driveway. After the demise of the pigeons, it was used for chickens, then removed. Second, years later, throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, I recall where William kept the silver-colored metal trophies he won in the pigeon races: on the top shelf of a bookcase, initially one built into to a wall of the living room, then transferred to a different built-in bookcase added when another room was transformed into a library. The pigeon connection between the coop and the garage suggests how significant the hobby was when it was practiced, and the display of the trophies implies that William’s memories of it remained salient for years afterward. Note that the structure and physical features of homes will be the focus of one chapter of this book, and will appear in others as well. Two somewhat connected second-hand memories concern what I was told about the pigeons. First, when training the pigeons, William would take them in a cage on the railway train from Bethel, perhaps on the way to his employer in New York City, then at one or another stop on the railway line would release the pigeons, noting the time they flew toward their Bethel home. Second, there had been a mechanism in the garage attic that rang a bell and recorded the time the pigeon finished its training flight. We can infer that each pigeon experienced this training in several steps, being released from progressively more distant train stations. There is no record which pigeon clock was used, but they are well documented online, including many antique ones for sale at eBay.27 Family photographs preserve scenes that were viewed by the photographer, and can stimulate memories in anyone familiar with the location around the time the picture was taken. One photo of the garage survived, here reproduced as Fig. 1.2, which connects to an episodic memory because I took the picture myself in 1949, and remember the circumstances. The camera was obviously held at a slight tilt, and it was the kind of box camera that had a very primitive viewer for framing the shots. The print is somewhat damaged, and no negative survived. But we can clearly see that the garage was in poor condition. Also, knowing that the attic belonged to pigeons, we can recognize openings under the peak that they used for exit and entry. Pictures are taken for specific reasons, and they document something about the photographer’s thinking, as well as simply recording an image of the scene. I knew that the barn was about to be torn down, and wanted to document it for the childish

27www.ebay.com/bhp/pigeon-clock. 1.3 Connections to Nature 15

Fig. 1.2 A garage and pigeon loft, immediately before its demolition equivalent of a family history. I also took a picture of two workmen, ripping it apart. The family moved away from the home on January 10, 1950, and demolition of the garage may have been preparation for selling it. This deduction and the fact there are no leaves on the trees suggests but does not prove that the date may have been late in the year 1949, near the photographer’s 9th birthday. Just as history memorializes primarily famous people, photographic documentation of architecture tends to favor grand buildings. Yet for comprehensive family histories, all signiﬁcant structures in the environment may deserve documentation. 16 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings

Fig. 1.3 A readily identiﬁable family artifact, of signiﬁcance in their lives

Since the theme of this chapter is connections, it is worth noting the obvious way a garage is connected to everything else of meaning for a family: through the driveway. As it happens, a photograph has survived depicting the family car sitting on the driveway at the side of the house, here Fig. 1.3. The garage is outside the picture to the right, and the road, to the left. We don’t know the date of the picture, but the car lasted until 1949 when it was replaced by an Oldsmobile, and may have been purchased some time after the couple married November 6, 1937, in New York City. Barbara later that month sent a letter to her mother about their trip to Detroit, where William had just been hired for the main company he worked for thereafter, and it described getting there by train via Canada and temporarily renting a car at one point, thus not driving this car that month, implying they did not yet own it. All valid forms of historical research require close attention to details, but we should not expect to achieve perfect accuracy in these efforts. I recall riding in the car, and know it was a Buick, but exactly what model and year remained questions. Searching online confidently identified it as a 1936 or 1937 Buick Roadmaster, given that there were visible changes for 1938.28 Like the Newhouse traps, this car illustrates how information defining a mass-produced artifact may be located online today. The fact that the spare tire is on the side and near the front reminds us how important wheels are in human lives. The letter that began this section was written less than three months before the United States entered

28en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buick_Roadmaster. 1.3 Connections to Nature 17 the Second World War. One response of this family, related to their Buick, was to buy many worn tires and store them, presumably in the right side of the garage, in case it became difficult as the war progressed to buy new ones. The result became an oft-told family story, because some time afterward the government confiscated the tires under a wartime anti-hoarding statute. That anecdote about the tires suggests what happened to the pigeons. Once the US was at war, the hobby of pigeon racing lost priority, and for many people became impossible. William was drafted into the army, but not until March 30, 1944. He served as an instructor in the First Cavalry at Fort Riley Kansas, training men and horses, because he was an expert rider, apparently having skills with trainable animals, whether tiny like pigeons, or large like horses. As the war ended, he was discharged with a rank of staff sergeant on August 1, 1945, and I remember several details of the train trip to Kansas to escort him home. A standard joke in the family was that the US Army sent 20,000 men and horses to New Guinea, but the horses promptly died of tropical diseases. This may oversimplify an actually ironic fact, that despite all the equestrian training, the cavalry abandoned horses during this period.29 As Fort Riley’s page in Wikipedia reports, “The Cavalry School ceased operation in November 1946, and the last tactical horse unit inactivated the following March.”30 Human relationships with animals change over history, yet remain important in many contexts. Pigeon racing may seem among the most trivial of pastimes, yet hobbies are among the variables that define us as individual persons. Once an anecdote like this one has been shared with family members, some may want to learn more, or even begin experiencing pigeon racing themselves. The American Racing Pigeon Union has a website, aptly named pigeon.org, that posts extensive data on race results of the competing “lofts” and proclaims: “We find that this hobby has a great appeal to those who enjoy working with animals, to those who appreciate athleticism, to those who like friendly, wholesome competition. If you find yourself in one or more of these descriptions… be careful, you may discover that the allure of these amazingly athletic birds is overpowering.”31 Today, some pigeon breeders and racers belong to Facebook groups, and whatever they or their friends post online in these groups might deserve preservation in their family archive. For example, an especially active group is Pigeon Central, where we can imagine having posted a photo of a pigeon that won a race, along with our thoughts about this triumph.32 Using the Microsoft Edge browser it is easy to save a webpage as a PDF file, and the most recent day of posts in mid-October 2017 generated a 4.5 MB file including many color pictures and all the comments. A key theme of this chapter, and indeed of the entire book, is how we can usefully connect one historical record with others. In the Digital Age, networks of meaning can

29en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112th_Cavalry_Regiment; www.avalanchepress.com/First_Cav.php; hglanham.tripod.com/uscavalry/uscavalry3.html. 30en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Riley. 31www.pigeon.org. 32www.facebook.com/groups/346060098814670. 18 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings

Table 1.3 Facebook groups linked by 12,340 pigeon enthusiasts Open Facebook groups Closed Facebook groups Pigeon central For sale American Pigeon Pigeon chat Pigeons Pigeons addicts Pigeon central 2,119 1.6% 21.8% 8.1% 3.4% For sale 34 2,006 1.1% 3.1% 5.7% Pigeons American 589 30 3,742 17.9% 3.4% Pigeons Pigeon 212 78 644 3,458 11.5% addicts Pigeon chat 85 137 114 366 2,967 be expressed through hypertext links, but ﬁrst the connections must be recognized. In Facebook, some people list close family members, and others can be found by looking at speciﬁc posts in their Facebook timeline. Many people list their friends and the public groups they belong to. The Pigeon Central page lists six “admins” (administrators) who are responsible for managing this very active communication hub, so it was trivially easy to look at the lists of other public groups they belonged to, identify some that concerned pigeons, and to use the Facebook search utility to discover other groups. Purely as an example, Table 1.3 gives information about member interlocks connecting 5 groups, but such data can be valuable for serious analysis by social scientists, as well as simply guiding explorations by newcomers to pigeondom. Only 34 of the 2,199 members of Pigeon Central also belong to For Sale Pigeons, which is about 1.6045%, and 34 is 1.6949% of the 2,006 members of For Sale Pigeons. The average of these two fractions is 1.6497%, which rounds down to the 1.6% in the table. The strongest interlock in the table is the 21.8% between Pigeon Central and American Pigeons. Two others are noteworthy, the 17.9% interlock between Amer- ican Pigeons and Pigeon Addicts, and the 11.5% interlock between Pigeon Addicts and Pigeon Chat. None of the four other groups have strong connections with the more commercial group, For Sale Pigeons. As is true throughout the social sciences, historical research requires healthy skepticism. Most of the members of these groups appear to be ordinary people, sharing many aspects of their times through their personal Facebook pages. But some are in violation of the Facebook user agreement, because they are not individual people at all. Of the “people” who belong to Pigeon Central, 120 have a name that includes “Loft,” and thus represent teams of pigeons rather than individual human beings! 1.4 A Professional Genealogist 19

1.4 A Professional Genealogist

The main point of this section is to contemplate the possibility that family history digital libraries of the future will create job opportunities for specialists who become expert in all the methods described in this book. We shall do so by using Internet to consider a genealogist of decades past, to learn from both his accomplishments and his limitations. He is comparable to Sewell Newhouse, because he diligently employed the technologies of the past, but on an intellectual journey in the archives, rather than a physical journey in the wilderness, currently obscure but really worth considering. His name was Louis Effingham de Forest, born October 26, 1891 in New Haven, Connecticut, and died in Paris, France, May 20, 1952, according to his death certificate posted on Ancestry.com. Among his earliest projects was editing The Society of Colonial Wars in the State of New York: Year Book for 1915–1916, that documents this fraternal organization for men who were descended from ancestors who fought to defend the original colonies in wars “from the settlement of Jamestown, May 13, 1607, to the battle of Lexington, April 19, 1775” or who held significant political office during that period (de Forest 1916). This 123–page book gives the bylaws and membership lists of this specialized family history organization, which includes memorial biographical paragraphs about the lives of deceased members, plus a bibliography. It is currently available online.33 Oddly, his middle name is given as Everit, but we know it is he rather than some relative, because he lists it among his accomplishments in genealogy books he began writing in 1924, for example at the beginning of his 1936 book, The Hayden Ancestry of Warren Sherman Hayden, where he identifies himself as “Louis Effingham de Forest, M. A., Jur. D., Fellow of the Institute of American Genealogy, Fellow of the Society of Genealogists (England),” a book that is also currently online (de Forest 1936). According to the online US census from 1900, his father was a physician, born in 1857 in Connecticut, apparently prosperous enough to send his son to Yale, from which Louis Effingham de Forest graduated in 1912. In 1939, he ensured the survival of his own family’s history by donating a huge trove of papers and publications to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, which currently has a rather detailed web page for this collection. In addition to describing the documents and listing a family tree, it says: “The De Forest family was a prominent New England family largely based in Connecticut. John Hancock De Forest owned the Humphreysville Manufacturing Company, a cotton textile mill, in Humphreysville (now Seymour), Connecticut. John Hancock De Forest and Dotha Woodward had four sons: George Frederick De Forest, who managed the Humphreysville Manu- facturing Company following his father’s death; Henry Alfred De Forest, a medical missionary and graduate of Yale University (B.A., 1832 and M.D., 1835); Andrew Woodward De Forest, a lumber businessman in New Haven; and John William De Forest, an author. John William De Forest wrote essays, poetry, short stories, and novels (including Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty). De For-

33archive.org/details/ldpd_11333077_002, accessed October 2017. 20 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings est’s article ‘The Great American Novel,’ published in The Nation, is believed to be the first use of the expression.”34 It should be obvious that traditionally some educated middle class people liked to think of themselves as members of the elite, and joined status clubs like the Society of Colonial Wars or published and archived material about their family histories, often idealized. But in so doing they paved the way for more diverse segments of the public today to use more efficient information technologies, perhaps to enhance their sense of status, but more honorably to preserve the true histories of their families for future generations and members of their wider community. Yet some of the more extreme examples from the past also illuminate a wider range of possibilities, notably Louis Effingham de Forest’s grandfather, the author John William de Forest. Also available online is an M.A. thesis by Elizabeth Maxwell Bright, “An Analysis of the Methods Used by John William De Forest in Translating His Personal War Experiences into Realistic Fiction as Shown in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion.” She explained that he had initially tried and failed to publish his own personal experiences in the US Civil War, before fictionalizing them, beginning with his 1867 novel, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. His grandson donated the original non-fiction materials to Yale, and must have been pleased when Yale University Press published them in the 1940s. However, fictionalized versions of autobiographies and family histories can be entirely valid works of literature, that explore wider meanings of real lives without being factually precise. Indeed, labeling somewhat fanciful or speculative narratives as such can encourage family historians to be more accurate in their non-fiction writings. We shall see other examples in later chapters. By carefully comparing the novel with the documents, Elizabeth Maxwell Bright achieved a goal which can guide authors today in fictionalizing real events: to show exactly the methods which De Forest used in translating his war experiences into fiction. The methods were catalogued and it was found that he used the following devices: letters, paraphrasing of letters, report of events by the observant author, conversation, combination of conversation and report by the observant author, reconstruction of events, reconstruction of scenes, use of actual place names and personal names, and the use of figures of speech and images first used in his letters and articles (Bright 1949). She submitted her thesis in 1949, and its online version has “1923–2010” after her name, implying she is deceased. It has been downloaded about once a week since being posted July 9, 2015 at the University of Louisville’s Institutional Repository. It is indexed in and linked from a section of the Digital Commons Network, along with 3,647 articles by 2,347 authors, as of early November 2017, who wrote about North American literature in English.35 Elizabeth Maxwell Bright’s thesis, and many of the other online articles, are models of how a family historian might occasionally take on the challenging but rewarding task of deeply exploring the mind of a deceased person, even as the thesis records her own mortal thought processes.

34http://drs.library.yale.edu/HLTransformer/HLTransServlet?stylename=yul.ead2002.xhtml.xsl& pid=beinecke:deforestjw&clear-stylesheet-cache=yes. 35network.bepress.com/arts-and-humanities/english-language-and-literature/literature-in-english- north-america. 1.4 A Professional Genealogist 21

Louis Effingham de Forest had no children, so in a narrow sense “family” existed in his past, but not his future. His interest in family histories, both his own and those of other people, harmonized with his main occupation, which was attorney. To be a lawyer, one must be literate, pay close attention to those historical documents known as laws, and take some kind of interest in human social relations. A very brief obituary published in a Minnesota newspaper provided a good summary: “Mr. de Forest, in addition to being a prominent lawyer, was also a fellow of the Society of American Genealogists, president of the Society of the Cincinnati of Connecticut, an honorary fellow of the Society of Genealogists in London, a member of The Pilgrims and of many other historical and genealogical organizations. He carried on much research and writing on our early American families, and helped many to establish a proper background for themselves.”36 To understand his historical work, and see how today more might be accomplished given our new technologies, we must look at a specific episode reported in one of his genealogical books. As it happens, one of his very last projects was Ancestry of William Seaman Bainbridge, a book commissioned by the father of the pigeon- owning William in the previous section of this chapter, who however died before the book was published. I do not know the financial arrangement, but believe that de Forest was paid by the families he wrote about, and he even self-published some of these books and sold them in quantity to the families. I have found brief mention in my grandfather’s extensive documents suggesting that one of his medical patients did some genealogical work for him. The following is a very unusual example, but one that indicates the serious questions that arise whenever a family seeks to discover its history very far back, going a great distance from the driveway depicted in Figs. 1.2 and 1.3, to my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Edmund Bainbridge. See the uncertainties in de Forest’s introduction to Edmund’s brief section of the book: “Edmund Bainbridge, according to a family record, was born in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, in 1702 and died on February 9, 1771. The year of his death, however, was probably 1770, as his will was proved that year in April. He married one Abigail, of whom nothing further is known, except that the family record states she died in 1770 (de Forest 1950, p. 17).” Edmund had a substantial farm, but ran into complicated legal difficulties over who actually owned what, which later generations interpreted as an early rebellion against the British, but seems also to have been a dispute within the family, between Edmund and his brother John. As de Forest reports, a rather remarkable episode ensued:

His son, John, was active with him in his protests and early in 1747, probably in May, father and son were leaders of a mob of rioters which broke open the jail at Somerset and rescued some men accused with high treason. John was caught and placed in jail at Perth Amboy being ‘indicted for a Riot in Somerset County and presented at Hunterdon County Sessions’. On July 17, 1747, Edmund led a mob, variously estimated as between seventy and two hundred persons, to the Perth Amboy Jail and rescued his son. The Sheriff had a writ for Edmund on a charge of high treason and arrested him but he was taken out of the hands of the law and the rescuing party got away. A spectator wrote to Chief Justice Morris that

36The Winona Republican-Herald, June 13, 1952, p. 5. 22 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings

‘Bainbridge the Father and his Son had (afterwards) the Impudence Attended by a few more to ride through the town’. (de Forest 1950, p. 18) Given the tradition of reusing first names throughout a family, in this case Edmund having both a brother and a son named John, it is easy to get confused about who is who, let alone how we should describe each individual. The term high treason may give modern readers the impression that this wild adventure was a premature wave of the American Revolution that really got going only three decades later. De Forest refers to Edmund’s farm as a plantation, which conveys an impression of great size and possibly several employees. He reports that, somewhat mysteriously, the dispute was settled peacefully on August 18, 1748, and nothing more is known about the family until Edmund wrote his will on July 16, 1763. The brief biography includes a list of Edmund’s and Abigail’s children—Abigail, Sarah, Peter, Edmund, John, and Absalom—followed by a list of 11 references, mostly legal documents, that had been de Forest’s information sources. Notably he cites the Gardner Manuscript Collection, New Jersey Historical Society, and the traditional research methodology of historians has been physically visiting archives, spending many hours and even days going through paper records that may or may not have been catalogued. What does de Forest’s career suggest about the possible role of professionals in family history today and in the coming years? For the phases of the work devoted to documenting the lives of earlier generations, it is still necessary to visit physical archives, and that is true as well for some aspects of our own lives, even as legal documents and other formal records like those held by churches are being digitized only very slowly. But much of this book will concern how to assemble family records in computers, combine information from a diversity of online sources, and share the complex, multi-modal results online and in durable forms. Therefore, there may be the opportunity to develop a new profession, family history consultant, that requires far more technical expertise and familiarity with data sources than most families could themselves possess. As we shall clearly see in later chapters, current online commercial data services like Ancestry.com are valuable, but far from sufficient. Since we cannot be sure how this new profession might emerge, the fact that de Forest did his excellent genealogy work only part-time suggests that innovators today could begin with that same strategy, going full-time only when they and the marketplace were entirely ready. Could we do a better job today than de Forest was able to do in the first half of the previous century? Yes, and a remarkable example follows. A few years ago I googled “Edmund Bainbridge,” and one of the first hits was to a facsimile reprint of a legal decision dated September 1782, titled The State against Edmund Bainbridge, referring to one of the sons of the Edmund we had focused on, and subtitled On Habeas Corpus of Negro Nelly. It begins: It appearing to the Court, and the said Edmund Bainbridge conceding, that the said Negro Nelly was formerly the Property of Edmund Bainbridge, the elder, of Maidenhead, deceased, who let his Daughter Abigail, late the Wife of Thomas Biles, of Bucks County in Pennsyl- vania, deceased, gave her when very young; that many Years afterwards he made his Will and bequeathed her to his said Daughter Abigail, during the Life of his said Daughter, and to her Issue, and did further order, that he if she should die childless, then the said Negro 1.4 A Professional Genealogist 23

Nelly should be sold, and the Money appropriated as mentioned in his said Will; that the said Abigail Biles who survived her Husband and her Father, did by her Will dated 30th April 1779, set forth and declare, that the said Negro Nelly had by her said Father been presented to her on a New-Year’s Day, when she was a Child, and therefore, both from that Gift and from bringing her up, she had a better Right to dispose of her than any other Person, and did therein order and direct, that the said Negro Nelly should be manumitted and set free, a thing which she had very much at Heart… (Finkelman 2007) This case was considered one of a few that were central to the legal ending of slavery in the northern states, and there had been a temporary time when slave owners in New Jersey could register slaves as their personal property, which had not been done in Nelly’s case. Therefore, the court decided she should go free, despite the objections of Abigail’s brother. I was able to find this case online, because Google had scanned in some pages from this printed 2007 volume, and indexed the book. We might wonder if de Forest was aware of this case and chose to hide it for sake of family honor, but probably not, because he wrote one-paragraph biographies for four of the five siblings, including the young Edmund, but nothing for Abigail except her first name, notably not mentioning her marriage. Searching Ancestry.com for “Negro Nelly” does not turn up any information about her, but she might have used a different name once she was free. To this point, I have not been able to learn anything about Negro Nelly’s later life. Controversially, some well-known popular culture in multiple media, notably the 1936 novel and 1939 movie Gone with the Wind, suggested that there might have been positive emotional bonds between some domestic slaves and their owners.37 Subsequently, popular culture may have changed, influenced perhaps by the 1976 novel and 1977 television miniseries Roots: The Saga of an American Family,to realize that African Americans themselves are best prepared to explore their own family histories and determine how their part of our collective past should be interpreted.38 So, how do we judge the Edmund who lead treasonous uprisings in 1747 and later purchased Negro Nelly when she was a little girl? Or, put in more neutral ethical terms, what are we to learn from such episodes when they appear in our own family histories? Thus, one open question about the future profession of family history consultant is how to reconcile the always fragmentary and sometimes disturbing facts that are discovered with the values and wishes of living family members. Another open question repeatedly encountered in this book is the extent to which much of the family historian’s work involves interviewing and recording the memories and experiences of living people, for the benefit of future generations, activities also fraught with ethical and conceptual difficulties. One reason the early chapters of this book contain a good deal of information about the author’s own family, is that the ethical issues are limited, primarily because the author owns the rights to the historical material, and living family members are serene about this project. We could imagine some future revolution that accomplishes manumission of intellectual

37en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(novel), en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_ Wind_(ﬁlm). 38en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roots:_The_Saga_of_an_American_Family, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Roots_(1977_miniseries). 24 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings property, but at present we must be careful to avoid violating the rights of living people by revealing what they wish kept private. As later chapters move progressively further away from Bethel, Connecticut, information obtained online about many people will become anonymous or abstract. The early chapters must be much more concrete, employing very speciﬁc cases to illustrate technical procedures as well as human issues. For example, the second chapter concerns how to document, preserve, and connect photographic images to other forms of data. The author’s ownership of the particular examples is not in question, and the particular collection of photographs happens to be remarkably appropriate, diverse and dating all the way back to 1847. The following section will begin with a prelude for the second chapter, using one image to make very general points.

1.5 Applying Technology to Human History

Photographs are a very good starting point, because most families already have many of them, but usually documented rather poorly, and not organized in terms of common meanings, yet everybody has some experience assembling somewhat similar pictures into a photo album. Figure 1.4 is an assembly of ﬁve images, that provide a basis for discussing several fairly simple technical issues. The upper two thirds is a picture taken by a professional photographer in a studio, showing William Seaman Bainbridge, behind his three living children, another named Elizabeth having died soon after birth before the others were born. The boy on the left is William, who later ﬂew pigeons as described above; the boy on the right is his younger brother John, and the girl in the middle is the youngest child, Barbara Bainbridge. For two years, from William’s marriage to a different Barbara, there were two Barbara Bainbridges of the same generation, until this Barbara married Angus McIntosh and in their culture’s tradition was renamed Barbara Bainbridge McIntosh. We have already seen cases in which multiple members of a family have similar or identical names, but usually across generations. The four pictures at the bottom of Fig. 1.4 were small areas of a large professional photograph taken outside the country home of the family, at the time of Barbara’s marriage, arranged to show the same people in the same order. The upper two thirds of the image existed for over a decade at a family memorial website, on the page for father Bainbridge, whose children called him “Dr. Dad” out of respect for his medical professionalism; his friends called him Will, so for this book I have coined the convenient nickname, Dr. Will. I decided to update the site, and began assembling components like this composite image, when the company hosting personal websites unexpectedly said it was getting out of that business, and urged its customers to move over to a service that did not permit uploading personally created web pages, but merely pasting words and pictures into a template. This was actually the second time the Internet service provider I was using became unusable. The general point is that family historians cannot count on any of the commercial services to persist 1.5 Applying Technology to Human History 25

Fig. 1.4 A doctor and his three children, at two points in their lives indefinitely, and many of them move to more restrictive systems that might not be suitable for the material the historian had laboriously assembled. As white numbers added to the image state, the pictures were taken about 17 years apart, perhaps about 1922 on the basis of how old the children appear, and in 1939 because the marriage date is well authenticated. The two commercial photographic prints were transformed into computer files through a standard scanner, a method used throughout this book. The faces from the 1939 picture of the entire wedding party were copied out as separate files, pasted at the bottom of the earlier image, and then set off by very slight black borders. That kind of work can be done with simple graphics software, as well as more sophisticated programs, with some calculation of the number of pixels in each part, although doing the assembly work by eye works pretty well, too. 26 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings

The theme of this chapter is connection, the goal of placing each historical datum in a meaningful context by linking it to others. More relevant for and comparable to Fig. 1.4, is Table 1.4, which shows the main data about the same people from five United States census records. For purposes of this “illustration,” I used the commercial online service Ancestry.com, searching for the name William Bainbridge, entering the fact he lived in New York City and was born in 1870. Such searches produce several false hits, and it is necessary to look through lists to identify which are most likely to be the correct information. This process located the family on the records of the 1910 and 1920 censuses, but not the other three. I knew that the family had lived at 34 Gramercy Park, in Manhattan, recalling many visits to that historic apartment building in the 1940s, and indeed the census forms marked that exact address very clearly. However, Ancestry.com does not facilitate searching by residential address, only by personal name. So, I searched for fellow residents by their names, locating the 1900, 1930 and 1940 records by that means. Indeed, the person who helped me find the first two records was rather famous in her day, popular singer Emma Thursby (1845–1931), and an equally famous resident helped me find 1940, a real estate broker named Joseph P. Day (1874–1944), both of whom have Wikipedia pages today.39 In 1900, Dr. Will and his mother, Lucy, seemed to have separate apartments, and were on different pages of the census record, although I speculate that Dr. Will’s apparent residence was actually his first-floor medical office. Helen was Lucy’s adopted daughter, as we shall see in the following chapter. In 1910, we see a slight but revealing anomaly after they had moved together into one large apartment: Helen is still listed as “daughter,” and yet the head of the family to which each census-record relationship is supposed to connect had become her brother, not her mother. We also see two employees: a domestic servant, and a nurse whose birthplace was probably English-speaking Canada. Lucy had been the head of the Woman’s Branch of the New York City Mission Society, where she had directed nearly 50 social workers and nurses, but Charlotte Hall was probably a private nurse paid to take care of Lucy. The 1920 census shows the three children of Fig. 1.4, along with their mother, June, who got this name because she was born June 1, 1879. Note that she is listed as “daughter in law,” again treating Lucy as the head of household. The census record actually shows that the census-taker later crossed this phrase out, replacing it with “daughter,” which does not really correct the data. The lack of servants in the household in 1930 may or may not reflect the fact that Lucy died in 1928, because the census record appears to be structured differently, listing several individuals apart from the regular households, whose occupations included nurse, servant, and cook. A significant anomaly in the records is the wrong ages listed for June and William in the later years. The 1920 census-taker visited Gramercy Park on January 8, when June was 40 years old, not 35 as recorded. Over the following decade, the census claims that she aged just 7 years, and William, only 2. In 1940, the census says he is 61 years old, when he was really 71. Are these errors meaningful, or just bad luck? Subsequent generations of the family had wondered why William had waited so long

39en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Cecilia_Thursby; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Day. 1.5 Applying Technology to Human History 27

Table 1.4 A Gramercy Park family in the US census, 1900–1940 Name Relation Sex Age Birthplace Occupation 1900 census Bainbridge, Wm Seaman Head M 30 Rhode Island Physician Bainbridge, Lucy S Head F 57 Ohio Missionary • Helen A Daughter F 26 Rhode Island Teacher 1910 census Bainbridge, Wm S Head M 40 Rhode Island Physician •LucyS Mother F 67 Ohio Own income • Helen A Daughter F 35 Rhode Island Teacher Burt, Nellie C Servant F 24 Ohio Servant Hall, Charlotte A Nurse F 42 Can English Nurse 1920 census Bainbridge, Wm S Head M 49 Rhode Island Physician •LucyS Mother F 77 Ohio None • June Wheeler Daughter in F 35 Massachusetts None Law • William Son M 5 New York None • John Son M 4 New York None •Barbara Daughter F 2 New York None 6/12 Bellacci, Octavia Friend F 54 Italy Attendant Moran, Catherine Maid F 22 Ireland Maid Browne, Mary Maid F 21 Ireland Cook 1930 census Bainbridge, Wm S Head M 51 Rhode Island Surgeon • June W Wife F 42 Massachusetts None • William W Son M 16 New York None • John S Son M 14 New York None •Barbara Daughter F 13 New York None 1940 census Bainbridge, William Head M 61 Rhode Island Physician Seaman • June W Wife F 56 Massachusetts • John Seaman Son M 24 New York Bensen, Anna Servant F 64 Sweden Servant 28 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings to marry, being already 41 at the time of his wedding, usually attributing this delay to the fact that his mother had a dominant personality and made many demands upon him, perhaps being hyper-critical of any young woman who came into his life. One theory about why Lucy made many long trips, notably circling the globe in 1908, was that William wanted her away so he could focus on his courtship of June. Is it conceivable that the age discrepancies express not how old the couple really was, but how old they wanted to be? How seriously can we take such theories about the meaning of odd facts found in historical records? As we assemble historical records and try to make sense of them, many wild ideas may come to mind. We might want to keep a list of them, clearly marked as untrustworthy, neither accepting nor rejecting them, and cautious lest they became ﬁrmly entrenched family legends. They are part of the cultural context in which solid facts must be contemplated. The same is true for the totally-solid physical environment, and in Chap. 7, we will return to Gramercy park, where we can consider the real estate these people lived in. Already, we have employed Emma Thursby and Joseph P. Day, to locate the census records, using a playful metaphor about their posthumous help. The ﬁnal chapter of this book connects family history to community history, beginning with a classic example of an online community history digital library, The Valley of the Shadow, created 1993–2007 by Edward Ayers and colleagues at the University of Virginia, that offers vast data comparing communities on both sides of the US Civil War, over the period 1859–1870. In an essay published early in the process of creating this archive, Ayers made a crucial distinction between two different approaches to the doing of history, that can provide a general perspective for this book:

Fixed narratives “tend to be organized in a linear way, either chronologically or in the form of an argument, seeking balance and authority. Though history writing is not as formalized as, say, sociology or political science, historians do rely on introductions, chapter summaries, and conclusions, do expect arguments to be clearly labeled as such, and do ask that works be positioned in relation to other studies.” Open narratives “challenge various parts of that formula. In some open histories the authors let the reader in on the way the argument is being constructed; rather than presenting history as a self-contained and authoritative argument, these historians openly grapple with problematic sources and presentation… Other open histories ask storytelling and language to do more work. Instead of using the narrative as a means to an analytical end outside the story, these histories attempt to fold the analysis into the story itself. They do not simply relate facts or lay out a chronicle they analyze their topics and make arguments, but not in ways that obviously segregate judgment from storytelling. These open histories may intentionally leave ambiguities unresolved or seek tension and resolution less in professional debate than in evidence, characters, and situations.” It might seem obvious that family histories, especially if written by a member of the family rather than a professional historian hired by the family, would of necessity be open narratives. But the goal of this book is to outline the ways in which family histories can become rich instruments for understanding the lives of related human beings, which not only exploits the newest information technologies, but also draws upon principles from scientific fields like sociology and political science. A history 1.5 Applying Technology to Human History 29 of the Newhouse family would not only include paragraphs about Sewell Newhouse, with links to his book and pictures of some traps, but would also seek to understand his connection with the idealistic Oneida Community. Louis Effingham de Forest would not consider his job done after writing two pages about Edmund Bainbridge, but would do his best to leverage online information sources to place that man’s life in the context of the community and the conflicts surrounding him, and would not rest until he had tracked down everything that can possibly be known about the life of Negro Nelly.

1.6 Conclusion

Professional family historians will have a complex and respected occupation in future years, but the most important component will be mentoring non-professionals so they can become competent and inspired students of their own family history. How many hours each week does the average citizen waste watching television dramas about the lives of people who never even existed? Far more valuable would be investment of those hours in discovering and sharing the lives of real people directly connected to oneself. Yes, the life history of pigeons may not seem terribly signiﬁcant, yet whatever our families of the past have cared about deserves to be understood. To achieve that understanding, we need to look for connections, such as through a ruin of a garage that once contained pigeon-timing information technology, to an antique car that would have seemed amazing technology a century earlier, to the transfer of an ability for training animals that ironically taught traditional skills for a modern war that no longer needed them. The conditions of human life change, and learning about lives very different from our own, yet intimately connected to us, can provide the deepest of insights.

References

Bainbridge WS (1982) Shaker demographics: an example of the use of U.S. census enumeration schedules. J Sci Study Relig 21:352–365 Bainbridge WS (1984a) The decline of the Shakers: evidence from the United States census. Com- munal Soc 4:19–34 Bainbridge WS (1984b) Religious insanity in America: the ofﬁcial nineteenth-century theory. Sociol Anal 45:223–240 Botticelli P, Fulton B, Pearce-Moses R, Szuter C, Watters P (2011) Educating digital curators: challenges and opportunities. Int J Digit Curation 6(2):146–164 Bright EM (1949) An analysis of the methods used by John William De Forest in translating his personal war experiences into realistic ﬁction as shown in Miss Ravenel’s conversion. Master of arts thesis, Department of English, University of Louisville, p 72. ir.library.louisville.edu/etd/ 1921/ Carden ML (1969) Oneida: Utopian community to modern corporation. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York, pp 41, 42, 104, 115 30 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings

Christel MG, Pendyala K (1996) Informedia goes to school: early findings from the digital video library project. D-Lib Magazine, September 1996. www.dlib.org/dlib/september96/informedia/ 09christel.html de Forest LE (ed) (1916) The society of Colonial Wars in the State of New York: year book for 1915–1916. Society of Colonial Wars, New York, p 6. de Forest LE (1936) The Hayden ancestry of Warren Sherman Hayden. The de Forest Publishing Company, New York. babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?idwu.89080569189;view 1up;seq7 de Forest LE (1950) Ancestry of William Seaman Bainbridge. The Scrivener Press, Oxford, pp 17, 18 Finkelman P (ed) (2007) Abolitionists in northern courts: the pamphlet literature. The Lawbook Exchange, Clark, New Jersey, pp 54–55 Griffiths J-M (2004) Digital libraries. In: Bainbridge WS (ed) Encyclopedia of human-computer interaction. Berkshire, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, pp 181–187 Harding AR (1907) Steel traps. A. R. Harding Publishing Company, Columbus, Ohio, pp 21–23 Lesk M (2012) The Digital library initiative. In: Bainbridge WS (ed) Leadership in science and technology. Sage, Thousand Oaks, California, pp 703–711 Newhouse S (1869) The trapper’s guide. Oakley, Mason, New York Nordhoff C (1875) The communistic societies of the United States. Harper, New York, pp 261–286, 429 Noyes JH (1870) History of American socialisms. Lippincott, Philadelphia, p 642 Ogle V, Wilensky R (1996) Testbed development for the Berkeley digital library project. D-Lib Magazine, July/August 1996. www.dlib.org/dlib/july96/berkeley/07ogle.html Page L, Brin S, Motwani R, Winograd T (1999) The PageRank citation ranking: bringing order to the web. Technical report 1999–66, Stanford Digital Libraries. dbpubs.stanford.edu/pub/2003-17 Seefeldt D, Thomas III WG (2009) What is digital history? A look at some exemplar projects. Faculty Publications, Department of History, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, p 5. https:// digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/98 Smith TR (1996) A brief update on the Alexandria digital library project: constructing a digital library for geographically-referenced materials. D-Lib Magazine, March 1996. www.dlib.org/ dlib/march96/briefings/smith/03smith.html Sturluson S (1916) The Prose Edda. Oxford University Press, New York Zhu B, Ramsey M, Ng TD, Chen H, Schatz B (1999) Creating a large-scale digital library for georeferenced information. D-Lib Magazine, July/August 1999. www.dlib.org/dlib/july99/zhu/ 07zhu.html Chapter 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs

Abstract Old photographs are common family relics, frequently revered but too seldom documented with complete metadata. Beginning with an example of false identiﬁcation, this chapter considers the challenge of identifying photos dating from the nineteenth century, and suggests that very common software today can be adapted as virtual albums, placing high priorities on ease of use and on durability of ﬁles. A glass-based portrait dating from 1847, and a gem tintype dating probably from 1864, remind us how photographic technology has evolved over the decades, and illustrate how easily a modern scanner can capture high quality images. Sections of a two-decade-old website support the argument that family historians may need to use simple and durable systems such as text-based HTML code rather than elaborate but potentially ephemeral software that feeds the online Cloud, when they assemble pictures with text. Another example of the classical hacker culture is to use Power- Point not merely as a modern substitute for physical photo albums, but even as a tool for assembling fragments of information and images into a narrative that provides the wider meaning of historical photos. The chapter concludes with the poignant examples of two girls who died as children, in 1865 and 1870, establishing the wider meaning for their families, by connecting pictures of them to a diversity of online information sources.

A good starting point in considering how to create valuable and durable family history digital records is photographs, simply because the typical family has many that are poorly documented, fragile, and disconnected from their larger universe of meanings. A photo album is a rudimentary step toward a full library, especially if each picture is accompanied by a label, and the book as a whole has a deﬁnite theme. Therefore, we already have in our minds much of the necessary conceptual framework, and can work our way upward to more complete expertise in a series of comprehensible steps. We also can readily recognize some of the problems that must be overcome, such as the fact that a traditional paper-paged photo album exists at one location, and cannot easily be shared by all members of a geographically dispersed family. Paper records are perishable, and photos can easily be damaged, so having multiple copies at multiple locations offers a kind of insurance policy against destruction. However,

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 31 W. S. Bainbridge, Family History Digital Libraries, Human–Computer Interaction Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01063-8_2 32 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs electronic copies are also perishable, with the added vulnerability that we may still dwell in a period of history when digital media companies and their technologies lack permanence, so the photos’ data formats may become obsolete.

2.1 Accuracy and Completeness

The past is the pragmatic basis of life today, and yet it is largely a mystery. Much effort and good judgement is required to map the vast questions we have in our minds onto the limited realities we see in our photo albums. It is too easy to get “carried away,” or to “abandon hope.” Consider the popular mystery about the disappearance of celebrity aviator Amelia Earhart over the Paciﬁc on July 2, 1937, that has been the subject of a vast array of popular theories and unsubstantiated claims. On July 9, 2017, near the 80th anniversary of her disappearance, the History Channel broadcast a two-hour television “documentary,” that claimed to have discovered her image in a photograph that suggested—and by the end of the program the verb seemed to be “proved” despite the lack of solid additional evidence—that she had been captured by the Japanese and died in one of their colonial prisons.1 The supposed image of Earhart was tiny, blurred, and to my eyes did not look like anybody in particular. The scene was a dock with sailboats and a ship in the background, including images of perhaps a half dozen other people, whom we might imagine were other celebrities of the day. Within days, news media had presented evidence that the photo did not represent Amelia Earhart at all, thus rendering this a good example with which to begin this chapter. CNN reported, “The blurry photo, used in a History Channel documentary, was alleged to show the groundbreaking pilot and her navigator Fred Noonan alive and well on a dock in the Marshall Islands in 1937. But two bloggers say they have found the photo in a Japanese coffee-table book from 1935—when Earhart was safely in the United States.”2 Before long, a Wikipedia page devoted to the episode reported: “In response, The History Channel cancelled rebroadcasts of the show, announced it would not be available on streaming or on-demand platforms, and stopped scheduled airings of the show in Canada and the United Kingdom. It wrote in a press release that ‘HISTORY has a team of investigators exploring the latest developments about Amelia Earhart, and we will be transparent in our ﬁndings … Ultimately, historical accuracy is most important to us and our viewers.’”3 Clearly, this is an example of how important corroborative evidence can be, especially when the original picture is not well documented. But it also illustrates the almost obsessive human search for personal meaning. Unless they invest considerable time studying the records and alternative analyses, people generally have a rather poor understanding of history. They tend to think in terms of simplistic stories

1www.history.com/specials/amelia-earhart-the-lost-evidence. 2www.cnn.com/2017/07/12/asia/amelia-earhart-photo-japan. 3en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Earhart:_The_Lost_Evidence. 2.1 Accuracy and Completeness 33 about single individuals, and don’t ask questions about the larger forces at work. Did George Washington really chop down a cherry tree, or was that a metaphor for revolutionary assertion of independence by the English settlers of America who were largely disconnected from English society by a vast ocean? Was the Second World War the result of wicked behavior by an Austrian pretending to be a German, with a tiny mustache and resembling movie comedian Charlie Chaplain, or was it really Act II of the First World War? I am not suggesting that we abandon the search for meaning, but that we impose discipline upon it, even while we seek with great energy. As is true for other early chapters of this book, the examples here will tend to be somewhat antique. Questions can often but not always be resolved by assembling evidence from the past, as is apparently the case for the supposed photo of Earhart under Japanese captivity. Today, the emphasis may shift to proper documentation of pictures the moment they are created, using the much more flexible and powerful technology we now possess. However, that requires a good deal of self-discipline, and future generations of our families may wonder if we really told them the truth about the images of our lives we preserved for them to see. Here is another example, involving people who were alive until very recently, and beginning with a young academic who is very much alive, James J. Kimble, Associate Professor of Communication at Seaton Hall University. His website says, “Most of my scholarship involves domestic propaganda and the way it helps to construct a rhetorical community even as it fosters depictions of an enemy or Other. The discourse of the World War II home front draws most of my attention, although I have also published research on the Civil War era and the Cold War.”4 In early 2018, his work received considerable publicity because he had reported a new identification of a woman depicted in one of the most durable propaganda images of the Second World War, “Rosie the Riveter.” Wikipedia describes its significance: “Rosie the Riveter is a cultural icon of World War II, representing the women who worked in factories and shipyards during World War II, many of whom produced munitions and war supplies. These women sometimes took entirely new jobs replacing the male workers who joined the military. Rosie the Riveter is used as a symbol of American feminism and women’s economic power. Similar images of women war workers appeared in other countries such as Britain and Australia. Images of women workers were widespread in the media as government posters, and commercial advertising was heavily used by the government to encourage women to volunteer for wartime service in factories. Rosie the Riveter became the subject and title of a song and a Hollywood movie during WWII.”5 The poster was based on a painting that itself may have been based on photographs of an actual woman worker. A few years ago, one elderly woman was identified as the ultimate subject of the image, and apparently she had every reason to believe that was correct. But in 2015, guided by additional evidence, Kimble identified a different woman as the subject, Naomi Parker Fraley, and his research gained much publicity

4www.shu.edu/profiles/jameskimble.cfm. 5en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter. 34 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs upon reports of her death in January 2018 at age 96.6 This anecdote suggests that history should not be monopolized by celebrities like Amelia Earhart, but belongs equally to everybody. Yes, the poster may have indirectly represented Naomi Parker Fraley, but Rosie the Riveter was also an archetype for all the women who adapted for new work roles during a time of world-wide crisis. The insights expressed in this chapter can be used to prepare photos for preservation, well-documented at many levels of application, yet they can best be communicated through examples from the past, chiefly more than a century old, including one picture dating from seventeen decades before publication in this book. When this chapter asks a question, it will not always be able to find an answer. Indeed, one major theme is the issue of how to handle uncertainties in documenting the scene in a picture. In some examples, we may not be able to determine with absolute certainty whose face is looking up at us from the page. In others, the name and date are well documented, and our exploration shifts to the question of what the particular person meant to the people who created the image and repeatedly gazed at it over the years. This connects to the roles people play in their family, which shape the way they are presented in pictures, and help define what other kinds of information need to be connected to the visual experience.

2.2 Identifying the Subject

To illustrate the challenges of data documentation, we shall begin with three mysteries, that arise when photographs are not well documented with respect to their subjects and the wider context. The photos analyzed here all date from the nineteenth century, but similar problems arise concerning much more recent photographs. Also, these three cases remind us how important it can be to document images today, as they are created, not merely with terse metadata giving the date, place and name of the subject, but also recording some of the human context. First, we can connect back to the previous chapter. Figure 1.4 was based on a studio portrait of a father standing behind his three children, to which I had added face shots of the same four people from the much later outdoor professional photograph of the wedding party of the daughter. We have extensive information that could have been added, such as the fact that the location was the family’s summer home in Bethel, Connecticut, which they called Maple Hill Farm. We could even provide the URL of the street view of that location in Google Maps, which as of September 2012 revealed that the vegetation was rather heavier along the road than back in 1939, hiding much of the house, which however

6www.cnn.com/2018/01/23/us/fraley-rosie-the-riveter-dies; www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2018/01/ naomi_parker_fraley_death_how_nj_professor_solved_rosie_the_riveter_mystery.html. 2.2 Identifying the Subject 35 can clearly be seen in the aerial view.7 We could have reported that the minister who presided over the ceremony was Norman Vincent Peale, author of the best-seller, The Power of Positive Thinking (Peale 1952). Given just that fact, an obsessive scholar might scan through all of Peale’s publications, discovering in a 1976 book the context in which he came to preside over the wedding:

In my early years in New York when I was constantly gearing up to an ever increasing schedule and experiencing the tension that often accompanies such driving activity, I became a friend of the late Dr. William Seaman Bainbridge, who practiced medicine on Gramercy Park in Manhattan. He was an extraordinarily busy man, not only in his own profession but in many societies and organizations, in which he was inevitably a leader. One day I gave a vigorous talk to the New York Rotary Club, of which he was president and I a member… (Peale 1976)

The paragraphs that followed these words express their friendship through an anecdote that took place at the doctor’s ofﬁce. Of course few people’s friendships are documented today in bound paper books. But similar anecdotes might be extracted from emails, or intentionally written down to provide context for the pictures in an album. Another one of Peale’s books even quotes the last words his friend spoke as he was dying in 1947 (Peale and Blanton 1950). Peale’s Wikipedia page complains: “One major criticism of The Power of Positive Thinking is that the book is full of anecdotes that are hard to substantiate. Almost all of the experts and many of the testimonials that Peale quotes as supporting his philosophy are unnamed, unknown and unsourced.”8 At the cost of considerable effort, it would be possible, however, to check many of these anecdotes, because fully 400 linear feet of documents are stored at Syracuse University, as the Norman Vincent Peale Papers.9 A composite picture like Fig. 1.4 is really only suited for very conventional circumstances, such as a traditional publication or a modest online page such as part of a website, where a vivid and frankly simple representation of a readily comprehended reality is suitable. At the same time that it considers several technical dimensions of historical photographs and the methods for digitizing them, this chapter will outline ways to assemble them into virtual albums, in which computers facilitate viewing them in a dynamic range of ways. Metadata far richer than “~1922 1939” need to be connected to the individual pictures, which must be connected to text documents and each other in complex ways. In fact, the large picture of the people attending the 1939 wedding had all their names written clearly on the back, which serves to identify the close friends of the wedding couple who had joined the family for this wonderful event. As everyone already knows, the ﬁrst and most essential step is to record for each picture the answers to four questions: Who? What? When? Where?

7www.google.com/maps/@41.3722959,-73.3846671,3a,75y,292.31h,87.52t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4! 1sKvbW_-k6hxAFUeOzwN_iSA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656; www.google.com/maps/place/Codﬁsh+ Hill+Rd,+Bethel,+CT+06801/@41.3734074,-73.38501,127a,35y,166.96h,45t/data=!3m1!1e3! 4m5!3m4!1s0x89e7fe804c8de0e5:0x653405ac4eef74a2!8m2!3d41.3723197!4d-73.373222, accessed January 2018. 8en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Vincent_Peale. 9library.syr.edu/digital/guides/print/peale_nv_prt.htm. 36 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs

In the late 1960s, the Barbara McIntosh included in Fig. 1.4 visited, and I asked her to look at the oldest photographs in the collection I had inherited from her mother, to see if she could recall any information about them. They were original images, essentially daguerreotypes or collodion images on glass, presumed to date from the 1850s. Some were wrapped up with little slips of paper, clearly many decades old, on which identifying information had been written, but in some cases these notes had been separated from the images. Barbara carefully looked through the set, writing comments on envelopes into which the pictures were then placed. Some of her comments were quite confident, such as: “Ann Hyde who died at 17. Her picture (this one much enlarged) hung in Grandma Nell’s room all her life.” “Grandma Nell” was what Barbara called her maternal grandmother, Ellen Elizabeth (Hyde) Wheeler, and Ann was Nell’s sister. In one case, a picture of a couple, Barbara got very excited, but did not let her enthusiasm rush to a hasty judgment: “Is this Sarah Pullen Wheeler and Heber Wheeler? If so, it is a great family treasure.” A 1914 genealogy of the Wheeler family indicates that the latest date a photo of Heber Wheeler could have been taken was 1857: “HEBER WHEELER, son of David and Martha (Brooks) Wheeler. Born at Concord, Mass., April 13, 1798; died Nov. 14, 1857. Married at Winthrop, Me., Sarah Barrows Pullen, who was born 1800, and died 1870, dau. of Jonathan Pullen and Lucy (Barrows) Pullen” (Wheeler 1914). Half a century after Barbara last saw that picture, we still cannot be sure, but the face of the woman does look rather similar to the face in the oldest dated photograph in the collection, reproduced here as Fig. 2.1, which is a portrait of Sarah Barrows (Pullen) Wheeler, but even given the label, Barbara McIntosh was not entirely sure of the identity of this woman. The mystery concerning this particular image is a very simple misconception. By the mid-twentieth century, Sarah’s name was recalled as Sarah Pullen Wheeler. But the label says Sarah B. Wheeler, B not P. Not having seen the reference in the genealogy book, Barbara wondered if this could be one of the numerous Wheeler cousins. Sarah’s granddaughter, June Ellen Wheeler, had a fond feeling about her, and yet their lifetimes did not overlap, and in recounting stories to her daughter Barbara, she used only the Pullen name. A very common practice was for marriage to transform a woman’s name such that she kept her first name, dropped her middle name, used her “maiden” last name as her middle name, and added her husband’s last name as her own. Family naming practice is a classic topic in cultural anthropology, because cultures do differ in how they trace lineage, patrilineal, matrilineal, bilineal, or whatever. Yet there often can be special circumstances, such as a separation or idiosyncratic personal preference that violates or at least adjusts the standard naming practice. We cannot be sure why Sarah Barrows Pullen Wheeler is often remembered as Sarah Barrows Wheeler rather than Sarah Pullen Wheeler, but a theoretically interesting hypothesis does exist. The name Sarah Barrows Wheeler emphasizes the fact that her descendants trace their lineage through the Barrows family to Degory Priest, one of the small number of people who immigrated to New England in 1620 on the Mayflower. The story is actually complicated, but instructive. His Wikipedia page explains: “Degory Priest (c.1579–c.1621) was a member of the Leiden contingent on the historic 1620 voyage 2.2 Identifying the Subject 37

Fig. 2.1 A simple scan of an ancestor portrait photograph of the ship Mayflower. He was a hat maker from London who married Sarah, sister of Pilgrim Isaac Allerton in Leiden. He was a signatory to the Mayflower Compact in November 1620 and died less than two months later … Degory Priest came alone on the Mayflower, with his family remaining in Leiden. He intended to send for his wife Sarah and daughters Mary and Sarah once the colony was established.”10 Both Sarahs did not come to America until 1623, and Sarah Barrows Wheeler was descended from the daughter, Sarah Priest. The family tree diagram for the Wheeler family in Louis Effingham de Forest’s genealogy begins with Degory Priest, rather

10en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degory_Priest. 38 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs than with the earliest known ancestor actually named Wheeler (de Forest 1950). Given that Sarah Priest herself did not come over on the Mayflower, and was not born in New England after her father died, the Mayflower connection is weakened, yet remained tremendously influential in the family’s image of itself. The lineage is: Degory Priest, Sarah Priest Coombs, Francis Coombs, Mercy Coombs Barrows, Ebenezar Barrows, John Barrows, Sarah Barrows Wheeler. The woman in the picture may have chosen that form of her name, or other family members may have imposed it on her, because both her first and middle names connect back to the glorious Mayflower. There are several ways a family historian can copy antique photographs, including taking them to a professional who can assess which method or combination of methods to use. Earlier copies I myself made used a Nikon 35-mm film camera attached to the bottom of a short tripod, facing downward on a tabletop. Figure 2.1 used a contemporary document scanner, set to capture the full color of the frame, although the photo itself is grayscale. The portrait and slip of paper were scanned separately, then combined in the graphics software, which was simply the common Paint program. The slip of paper was narrower than the picture, so its color was added either side of it, but this was an aesthetic decision, not necessarily correct for pure historical documentation. When making digital records of physical objects, it can be important to record their size. Including the frame, this one was about 3 and 1/4 in. wide, by 3 and 3/4 in. high. Traditional archaeologists would often place a distinctive yardstick in their pictures of dig sites, from which the dimensions could be inferred. In the case of modern document scanners, a more digital alternative is to record how many pixels per inch the machine was momentarily set to produce. The portion of Fig. 2.1 depicting just the picture was originally 2,128 by 2,309 pixels, and the machine had been set at 600 pixels per inch. In Chap. 6, when discussing an artist’s engraving, we will consider how to set a scanner’s color command. Until late in the nineteenth century, photographs were taken by professionals or by very talented amateurs, not by ordinary people. New Englanders that they were, the Wheelers often visited Boston, where a very active photo industry flourished. The home page of the early photo collection of The Massachusetts Historical Society reports that this began around 1840.11 Early photographs present a number of special challenges. People unfamiliar with them are surprised to discover that holding one at an angle turns the image negative, but copying straight on does not encounter this challenge. In my collection of roughly two dozen family photos on glass, the frames of some had disintegrated, making it easier to scan the image without the flaws in the covering piece of glass, but exposing the very fragile glass and the easily scratched image it carried. As photographic technology advanced, a very different system became popular, the so-called tintypes, in which the photo emulsion was much more normal, by later standards, but it was on a thin plate of metal. Figure 2.2 shows a tiny one, originally

11www.masshist.org/collections/photographs. 2.2 Identifying the Subject 39

Fig. 2.2 A gem tintype dating from about the time of the Civil War

only about one inch high, of the distinctive type called a gem.12 Wikipedia explains: “One unusual piece of tintype equipment was a twelve-lensed camera that could make a dozen 3/4-by-1-in. (19 mm× 25 mm) ‘gem’ portraits with one exposure, developed in 1858.”13 In a very detailed blog post, Marcel Safier reports that gems continued to be produced well past 1880, but I tend to suspect that Fig. 2.2 dates from 1864.14 Physically, it is a rusting, flaking piece of metal, but the image is quite high resolution, and the photographer touched it up with two spots of pink, one on the rose in the hair of the lady on the left, and one on the cheek of the lady on the right. The lady on the right in Fig. 2.2 is definitely Lucy Seaman Bainbridge, my great- grandmother, whose face is well known to me from many other photos. My unsubstantiated guess about the 1864 date concerns the fact that she left her native Cleveland, Ohio, in that year and served as a nurse tending wounded Union soldiers in Virginia

12americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1325530; www.phototree.com/case_ 100812.htm; whowerethey.wordpress.com/tag/victorian-civil-war-gem-tintype-album/. 13en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintype. 14members.ozemail.com.au/~msafier/photos/tintypes.html. 40 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs during the Civil War. She was born January 18, 1842, which would make her 22 in 1864, which looks plausible. The only well-dated photograph of her from that period, published along with some of her Civil War reminiscences in The Outlook magazine in 1919, is dated “winter of 1863–1864,” and is a more direct image of her face (Bainbridge 1919). In it, she is wearing a heavy coat including a bonnet with ear coverings. She volunteered to serve as a nurse when she and her mother were visiting Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1864. Her mother gave her a shawl that could also serve as a sleeping blanket, and I imagine that is the garment shown in Fig. 2.2. Conceivably, the other woman in the figure is a fellow nurse. However plausible, that is conjecture! In principle, it might be possible to find another copy of this gem tintype having better documentation, given that perhaps 11 others were made in the same shot. Or, once all nineteenth-century photographs are online, and really advanced facial recognition software exists, we could find another photo of the other woman, learn her life story, and determine when it intersected that of Lucy. But today those ideas are fanciful. Maybe the other woman is a cousin of Lucy, and rather more modest communications developing a family history digital library would provide the necessary confirmation or disproval of my theory about Fig. 2.2. Yet it can stand for now as a good example of the issue of how to handle conjectures when documenting old family photos and other archival materials. A professional historian might argue that no conjectures should be allowed. A poet might argue that strongly felt conjectures should be accepted. Here we can suggest that conjectures can be labeled as such, with whatever logic gives them meaning, trusting that future users of the materials will have their own good judgment. Our third example is intended to show how one’s imagination can get out of hand. Figure 2.3 is a composite, combining two studio-posed pictures and adding a face shot of a man who might possibly be the same one pretending to be a cowboy in them. The big picture on the left has the hand-written inscription, “for my brother John.” It was a print made at the Weitz photography studio in San Francisco, while the other one was printed in the Partridge studio, which may have been in Boston. While the props are different, both depict a man who wishes to be perceived as a Wild West guy, perhaps a brave hunter or explorer. The pants and belt look the same, and given the different lighting the shirt and hat may be as well. That alerts us to the problem that the photo studio that copies a portrait was not necessarily the same one that originally photographed it, unless this man enjoyed playing his cowboy role before multiple audiences. Often a family will remember one ancestor in terms of a particular popular stereotype, notably in the case of Grandma Nell Wheeler’s husband. According to family legend, Thomas Heber Wheeler (1838–1908), a son of Heber and Sarah, wanted to marry Ellen Elizabeth Hyde (1843–1933), but she was a mere child, and her father would not consider the proposition until Thomas had proven his ability to support her in prosperity. So he went west with the Gold Rush in 1852 at age 14, where he not only struck it rich but watched a bandit murder his partner and led a lynch mob to punish the killer when the courts proved too slow. So the mature face added at the top of Fig. 2.3 is from a portrait definitely of Thomas Heber Wheeler, to see if the 2.2 Identifying the Subject 41

Fig. 2.3 Comparing photographs to identify a cowboy gunman cowboy was him at a younger age. There are clear similarities, for example the shape of the ear and how the hair is cut around it, perhaps the nose and the brows. Portraits of Thomas late in life are quite different from the one inserted here, much heavier in form, so it seems possible that any differences in Fig. 2.2 are simply the result of a decade or two of aging, and heavy diet given that he was executive of meat-packing companies at the height of his career (Anonymous 1908). There are problems with this analysis, one hinted at above and the other requiring placing the pictures in their historical context. Problem #1 concerns the inscription, “for my brother John.” Yes, Thomas did have a brother named John, but so did many other people, and indeed his name is often recorded as Jonathan. Given that Thomas is one of my direct ancestors, why did I inherit a picture he gave to his brother, when that brother had children of his own? When assembling family documents into coherent structures, we need constantly to be aware of the fact that there always exist alternate ways of doing so, and no one analysis is conclusive without direct documentation. The second problem is one of history. As Wikipedia documents, the California Gold Rush is generally dated 1848–1855, but one part of it continued through 1858.15 Thomas and Nell were married November 27, 1858, when he was 20 years old, and

15en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_rush. 42 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs she was a month short of her 15th birthday (Wheeler 1914). So, the cowboy pictures would logically have been taken around then, perhaps in San Francisco in 1858, and then extra prints produced in Boston after his triumphant return. The problem is that their style is rather later than that, and online evidence about the photographic services suggests they date from much later, perhaps the late 1880s.16 The Hugo Weitz Art Studio in San Francisco seems to have opened about 1885, and a variety of pictures from it currently online have slightly later dates.17 By 1888, Thomas was already 50 years old, and he had been married to Nell for three decades. How could that be him in the cowboy pictures? It isn’t. The cowboy is Louis Frederick Foster, born September 29, 1861, who belonged to a very different branch of the family mentioned later in this chapter. A third well-documented photo I have of him in different Wild West garb was taken January 24, 1887, in the Needham studio at 22 Tremont Row, Boston. Searching for his name online discovered a website called Mayﬂower Faces that posted an outdoor picture of him sitting backward on a horse with this comment: “Don’t you just want to be descended from this guy? The picture is not a joke; this Bostonian craved excitement and so headed west and by his early 20s was giving exhibitions of his cowboy riding and shooting skills, which were apparently extraordinary.”18 The three examples in this section demonstrate two primary points. First, it can be useful to develop theories about the subjects of an old photograph, but they should not be conﬁdently accepted without solid supporting evidence. Second, we must attach good metadata documentation to the images we create of our families today, in a form that will not easily perish. What we imagine about the past is inescapably simplistic. But it is also true that what seems obvious to us today, may be obscure to future generations.

2.3 The HTML Approach to Documentation and Connection

On January 9, 2018, the computer security company, Norton, sent an email advertisement to its retail customers, urging: “Protect your data and precious memories with these backup tips … Whether it’s an electrical surge, a fire, or maybe just old age, all hard drives will fail at some point. And which is easier to do, recreating that once-in-a-lifetime photo you managed to snap on vacation or setting up automatic backups? Rest easier at night by backing up your files today.” It offered three specific pieces of advice: Back up your data onto a minimum of two physical external hard drives. Store your data online to protect against theft, fire, and other local disasters.

16truewestmagazine.com/100-best-historical-photos-of-the-american-west/. 17orthodoxhistory.org/2014/06/11/photo-of-unidentiﬁed-san-francisco-priest/. 18www.mayﬂowerfaces.com/mysteryfun-photos.html. 2.3 The HTML Approach to Documentation and Connection 43

Set automatic daily backups to make things easier for you. Each of these tips suggests an issue. Yes, backing up computerized data on hard drives is a good plan, and the word “external” reminds us that having two internal hard drives as many desktop computers do today—often one solid-state and the other a traditional rotating drive—does not protect against all hazards. In the case of family history archives, copies should also be saved on other media such as DVDs. However, over the past century quite a large number of data formats have been popular for a time. Phonograph records rotated at many different speeds, not merely 33 1/3, 45 and 78, but 16 2/3 and others. Around 1960 I made two 1/4-in. tape copies of the only existing disk recordings of radio speeches Dr. Will in Fig. 1.4 had recorded in the late 1930s, only to have one destroyed by a fire, and the other, by a flood. At the time, there were 4 popular tape speeds (1 7/8, 3 3/4, 7 1/2, and 15 in./s) and 3 popular track alternatives (full, half, and quarter which was often used for stereo using tracks 1 and 3 in one direction, and 2 and 4 in the opposite direction). Educational software I produced in the period 1983–1992 was sold on floppy disks, and one was especially cute because it had an Apple-II version on one side, and a pre-Windows IBM version on the other. For many years, it will be feasible to pay professionals having the right hardware to copy photos, videos, and sound recordings from old to new formats. Much more difficult is using operating system emulators to run old software on new computers. Storing data online is a fad of the moment, often called The Cloud. The old model in which users buy hardware and software products, then use them autonomously, is not what the big companies are selling today. As I write these words, a message glares from the lower-right corner of the screen: “We’ve got an update for you. Windows is a service and updates are a normal part of keeping it running securely. We need your help installing this one.” Windows used to be a product, but is morphing into a service. Indeed, there are advantages to storing data online, but we cannot really be sure which formats and companies will have the greatest longevity, and it may be necessary to pay rent forever for use of their services. The current Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct of the influential professional organization, the Association for Computing Machinery, admonishes its members: 3.6. Use care when modifying or retiring systems: Interface changes, the removal of features, and even software updates have an impact on the productivity of users and the quality of their work. Leaders should take care when changing or discontinuing support for system features on which people still depend. Leaders should thoroughly investigate viable alternatives to removing support for a legacy system. If these alternatives are unacceptably risky or impractical, the developer should assist stakeholders’ graceful migration from the system to an alternative. Users should be notified of the risks of continued use of the unsupported system long before support ends. Computing professionals should assist system users in monitoring the operational viability of their computing systems, and help them understand that timely replacement of inappropriate or outdated features or entire systems may be needed.19 All well and good, but in the history of a family there may be periods where information is stored but there is no official user who is in communication with the

19www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-code-of-ethics-and-professional-conduct. 44 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs company that is about to render some of that information technically inaccessible. The concluding chapter of the book will consider whether non-profit digital community libraries will be a better repository for family histories, but we really cannot be confident that any one technical or economic system will be eternal. Yes, daily backups may make things easier, but certainly family historians must not become lazy. Most importantly, in the case of photographs and other kinds of pictures, it is essential to preserve metadata that document the subject and context of the image. Figure 2.1 illustrates the simplest method: adding text to the image. When I discovered the online picture of Louis Frederick Foster sitting backward on a horse, I naturally downloaded it to our family archive, saving it in the original version but also expanded to provide space where I could copy the text from the website, the URL of the website, and the date I did the download. Unfortunately, the most popular graphics formats do not have any standard place to add metadata, except in the image. A common workaround is to put that data in the name of the file. For example, the three pictures I already had of Louis Frederick Foster came from a loose and disintegrating album of Foster photographs that also included Fig. 2.6, so each photo file name began with the letter F to specify Foster and a sequential number. The dated picture that is not included in this chapter was named “f15_l_f_foster_jan_24_1887” and already had the information about the photographer at the bottom of the image. It is a JPG file, set to avoid loss of detail and 299,008 bytes in size, originally scanned in July 10, 2004, as the file’s properties state. The picture of Louis riding a horse backward lost any title and scanning data when it was downloaded from the website, although looking at the HTML in the Web browser revealed that the file had been saved as 3062782.png. More generally, embedding pictures in software like Word or PowerPoint tends to strip or at least hide their file names. We naturally think of PNG as a higher resolution file format than JPG, with BMP definitely high resolution, but actually it depends upon how the software that creates them is set. The online picture downloaded as 114,688 bytes but was only 250× 274 pixels, compared with 1,254 × 1,902 pixels for the well-compressed 1887 portrait. Giving a photo file an ID like 3062782.png implies there should be a list somewhere, providing metadata for all the shots. However, 3062782.png seems meaningless in itself, and thus of no value if the list is lost. The technology behind websites is excellent for connecting many files together, and a fundamental principle of this book is that family historians will usually want to adapt very familiar systems like HTML for their own special purposes. Even readers who are quite expert in the use of HTML will want to pay attention here, and remind themselves how wonderful it really is. Figure 2.4 is a screenshot of a section of a webpage that was uploaded as one of a set of memorials for deceased family members in the late 1990s, and downloaded again November 16, 2002. It includes two photos of Lucy Seaman Bainbridge (1842–1928), the mother of Dr. Will and seen in Fig. 2.2. The top image show her sitting at her desk around the year 1900, when she was director of the Woman’s Branch of the New York City 2.3 The HTML Approach to Documentation and Connection 45

Mission Society, a religious social work organization whose current website rejoices in over two centuries of service to disadvantaged residents of New York City.20 When she became director in 1891, the most substantial resource of the Woman’s Branch was its corps of thirty-seven full-time missionaries and nurses, which would swiftly grow to fifty. Its official aim was “to promote the interests of evangelical religion and sound morality by the circulation of tracts, missionary labor, and the establishment of Mothers’ and Children’s Meetings and Helping Hands, or other auxiliaries deemed helpful in the elevation and salvation of women and children.”21 The lower half of the screenshot from the memorial website includes a portrait of her after retirement, and links to two publications that span much of her career—published in 1886 and 1921—and express her international interests, given that she, her husband, and their son circled the world for the two full years 1879–1880, and she did so again more quickly in 1908. Given how MTML functions, we are looking actually at three files, the result of the main file consisting entirely of HTML code plus the text we can read, and two pictures that are separate files. There are also links to two other files we cannot see, but could access by clicking on the associated hyperlink, each consisting of one of her publications. The obvious but crucially important point is that HTML manages a collection of files, while retaining their distinctive characters. The web page begins and ends with a little code needed to start and stop its display, and happens to include 9 other portraits of Lucy, plus considerable text and other links to additional pages. Here is the code for the portion of the page shown in Fig. 2.4:

In Her Office at the New York City Mission Society

Selected Publications by
Lucy Seaman Bainbridge:

Woman’s Medical Work in Foreign Missions: Women’s Board of Foreign Missions,; The Presbyterian Church,; New York, 1886.

20www.nycmissionsociety.org/. 21New York City Mission Society Monthly, February 1892 (Vol. V, No. 4), p. 159. 46 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs

Fig. 2.4 A section of a two-decade-old website 2.3 The HTML Approach to Documentation and Connection 47

“The Work as Seen in Foreign Lands”: Missions: A Baptist Monthly Magazine; Vol. 12, No. 6, June 1921, pp. 349-350.

The many abbreviations in angle brackets are called tags, and instruct the browser to take particular actions. The ﬁrst example, “,” tells it to start printing the text in bold, and “” tells it to stop using bold. The second line of code tells the browser to display an image named “lsb5.jpg” at a width of 625 pixels and a height of 463 pixels. Most of the code describes a table, starting with “

” in line 4, with a gray background color and a thin border. The table is a simple one, with only one row from “” to “” near the end, but with two table data areas, each marked by “.” The tags ““ and “” put the text between them in italics. Although slightly complicated in form, the first of the two links to Lucy’s publications is easy to spot: “ Woman’s Medical Work
in Foreign Missions .” Clicking on the visible italicized title, Woman’s Medical Work in Foreign Missions, would take the user to a page that offers that entire essay for reading. The name of that page, medical.htm, is not visible in the image above. That is a simple example of the hypertext links that give HyperText Markup Language (HTML) its name. Readers who happen to be experts in HTML may sense that this code is somewhat archaic, perhaps even obsolete. This raises again the key point that historians must be very conscious of their decisions concerning the extent to which their tools should be classic or modern, simple and durable or complex and unstable. As soon as websites became popular, software engineers and corporations began urging developers to use increasingly versatile methods, notably JavaScript and cascading style sheets, even discouraging use of some of the original HTML tags, rendering them deprecated.22 As website creation became a profession, its methods naturally became more complicated, but some of its complexities may be of no value to family historians, because the professionals among them will primarily need to develop expertise in history, perhaps in family-related branches of social science, and in the practical use of a range of information technology tools rather than perfection with any one of them. Indeed, there is no reason to assume that family historians will be creating public websites, because classic forms of HTML are perfectly fine for organizing text, images, and other kinds of files offline. One more example will provide all the additional background required, aside from whatever special opportunities and issues that family historian will want to check online in the future. It is the title page for the admittedly small memorial website, after it had been expanded from 6 to 7 pages

22en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets; en.wikipedia. org/wiki/HTML. 48 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs after the death in 2006 of John Seaman Bainbridge, the same John shown in Fig. 1.4. The top line simply tells the browser this is the right kind of file for a webpage, and displays the title. The two META lines are actually somewhat obsolete versions of special formatting information that are often not necessary, and just now I checked the page with the current Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge and Chrome browsers, and it worked fine either with or without these inscrutable lines of code. When saving a new HTML file from a text processor like Notepad, it sometimes will automatically get saved with a .txt file extension, so then the user needs to change it to .htm.

The Bainbridge Family

and “

Memorials of the
Bainbridge Family

Memorials:
   1. Barbara Constance Bainbridge (1943-1965)
   2. Barbara Sims Bainbridge (1914-1965)
   3. June Wheeler Bainbridge (1879-1967)
   4. Lucy Seaman Bainbridge (1842-1928)
   5. William Seaman Bainbridge (1870-1947)
   6. William Wheeler Bainbridge (1914-1965)
   7. John Seaman Bainbridge (1915-2006)

Relationship to William Sims Bainbridge:
1. sister, 2. mother, 3. grandmother,
4. great-grandmother, 5. grandfather,
6. father, 7. uncle.

Many of the HTML tags in this example are uninteresting, merely formatting the page and the text on it, doing so in this case as a table within a table. While it would not take a family historian long to learn what all the abbreviations mean—such as that inserts a non-braking space that keeps the text on the same line in the display—in doing the real work the historian will take an existing format and merely insert new text and ﬁle names. Shortly after John’s death, I pasted in: 2.3 The HTML Approach to Documentation and Connection 49

7. John Seaman Bainbridge (1915–2006) This was simply the previous two lines for his brother William, with minor edits, illustrating how easy it can be to update an HTML ﬁle. John’s memorial page was named with his initials, jsb.htm, and it was in a new subfolder named “jsb.” There were now 7 subfolders in a main folder that was named “mem” for memorials that contained only one ﬁle outside the subfolders, namely the one above that served as a table of contents. What comes between and is the text the user will see and click on to activate the hyperlink. Clicking on John’s lifespan, (1915–2006) has no effect. Family historians will make their own decisions about which software systems they will use, and I am merely suggesting that a good case can be made for sticking with traditional systems that are both simple and durable. Later chapters will consider a range of alternatives, some of which are very attractive except for the fact that the necessary infrastructure may suddenly go out of existence. As the next sections of this chapter will illustrate, a higher-level alternative is to use multiple systems, each with a different set of advantages and disadvantages. Naturally, this adds some extra labor, but may often be worthwhile.

2.4 Adapting Conventional Software

In a sense, this section is a protracted metaphor: Every electronic historian should be a hacker, unrestrained by conventional notions of what purpose a tool should serve. To avoid excessive obscurity, the example will be the standard Microsoft slide-show software, PowerPoint. An obvious point to make is that PowerPoint can be the form that photo albums take in the future, easy to copy, easy to share, and easy either to project on a screen during a family gathering, or print out on paper to improve the chances of survival after Microsoft and its products cease to exist. But PowerPoint and similar software can also be great tools for assembling the many pieces of an illustrated narrative, before it is ported over to a word processing program. Over the years I have assembled hundreds of PowerPoint presentations, either for academic lectures or as the focus for the orientation at the beginning of each NSF proposal evaluation panel (or committee meeting), and in the latter case I always printed the PowerPoint out, so that each participant could consult any page whenever they wished. Figure 2.5 is one slide of an academic PowerPoint introducing one aspect of my 2013 book, eGods: Faith Versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming. The URL at the top of the slide links to a page about the book on the blogsite of the publisher, Oxford University Press, from which the text and pictures were copied.23 The relevance here, is that a section of the book explores what I called AVAs, or Ancestor Veneration Avatars. The picture on the left of the slide is the only surviving image of my great aunt, Cleora Emily Bainbridge, daughter of Lucy Seaman Bainbridge and William

23blog.oup.com/2013/04/eincarnations-ancestor-veneration-avatars/. 50 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs

Fig. 2.5 Using PowerPoint as a photo album

Folwell Bainbridge. She was born 8 November 8, 1868, and died on April 14, 1870. The image on the right is an avatar representing her in the popular but rather mystical online game, EverQuest II. There are many reasons we might want to role-play deceased relatives, and many forms of information technology that can support such efforts. In the case of Cleora in eGods, her history seemed to give emotional weight to EverQuest’s intense theological narrative. Whenever life got difﬁcult on the imaginary world named Norrath, its gods would retreat into supernatural isolation, leaving mere humans to suffer without their aid. Why on Earth did the god of Cleora’s parents abandon her to such an early death? Thus, creating an AVA of Cleora in EverQuest was an intellectual method for studying “the ambivalent relationship between gods and humans” (Bainbridge 2013a). An article I published in the standard journal, The Information Society, suggested that more generally this method could become:

a medium for both memorializing deceased persons and exploiting the personalities and wisdom those people had possessed to make role-playing games a more productive experience for the user. In a way, this is a form of postmodern social science that does not despair simply because sociology has failed to develop a theoretical or methodological consensus, but rather believes that viewing the world from the perspectives of a diversity of individual human beings has real intellectual value. But more broadly it seeks to develop a new way not only of honoring deceased loved ones, but also of gaining wisdom through the process of experiencing a virtual world as they might have done, were they still alive (Bainbridge 2013b, pp. 196–197).

There will be more about virtual worlds in Chap. 7, but here we must explore the potential of virtual slide-shows. Although PowerPoints are saved as unified computer files, in operation they are highly segmented, each slide separate from the others. In a word processor, continuing to type after the bottom of a page seamlessly takes 2.4 Adapting Conventional Software 51 one to the next page. Not so with PowerPoint. This makes it easy to move slides around, which facilitates creation by assembling fragments. In doing family history, we often find ourselves collecting pieces of information in almost random order, and only late in the process having the over-arching vision required to put them in the correct sequence. Each fragment can go on a separate slide, temporarily at the end of the set, unless it happens to connect very directly with information we already have. Also, PowerPoint naturally combines text with images and can incorporate sound recordings and videos if we happen to be dealing with relatively recent historical records in those forms. The example we shall use to make this clear will be the actual next section of this chapter. Cleora, and another little girl named Agnes from a different branch of the author’s family, both died in childhood, therefore leaving very little information for us to cherish. The following section was collected, assembled, and written in the 2016 version of PowerPoint, pulling together what little we know about their lives and legacies. At least in their current versions, PowerPoints can be saved not only in their native format, but also as PDF files, which can be opened in the Word word processor and converted to other formats. The shape of a PowerPoint slide is wider than it is high, while the typical text page is higher than it is wide, so at some point in this translation the layout must be changed. The general principles are that common software may be used in uncommon ways, and that as our goals shift so also the choice of software should shift. To start, I created a PowerPoint file with a half dozen slides, empty except for each having a title box at the top containing the title of the chapter section, The Death of Children. To facilitate organizing the material, on any one slide that title could be changed to a temporary label identifying the information it contained. I prepared the three pictures I planned to use, putting each on a different slide, in the order I planned to discuss them. As I added other information, if its general location in the sequence was obvious, I would select the existing slide I thought might precede it, and selected the command, New Slide, which added one after it where I would paste the information. In Fig. 2.5, the URL was put in the title box. To add a picture, “picture” was selected from the “insert” menu, which opened up the part of the operating system where files can be selected. The two images had already been edited, mainly selecting the center of the image and removing unnecessary material around the edges. Of course, any editing of historical photos must be done carefully, avoiding the loss of meaningful information, and preserving an unedited version of the image, if a special purpose required editing. The picture of Cleora was a direct scan of a tintype photo, in which the emulsion was gradually pealing off; this is a clear example of electronic preservation, and before many more years the original image will be completely gone, unless some costly preservation process is applied. The picture of Cleora’s avatar in EverQuest was a screenshot, and many games allow the user to capture the current image on the computer monitor, often simply by pressing the PrtScr key or a specified function key. The text between the two pictures in the slide was copied indirectly from the Oxford blog. Often, material grabbed from a web page includes invisible computer 52 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs code or unusual formatting, so if one wants only the text itself, it is often best to paste into a raw text editor such as Notepad, then copy it again from there before pasting into one’s main software. In PowerPoint, the “text box” option on the “insert” menu works fine for this, and the font and shape of the text passage can be adjusted to fit on the slide. It is a matter of choice whether to put several text boxes on a page, for example one for a brief quotation and another for its publication reference that will eventually become a footnote, or to use just one text box. In assembling material for The Death of Children, I occasionally found an online source, such as an image of a handwritten archive record, that needed to be entered by hand. I decided not to rush to completion of any of the paragraphs, so I pasted onto a slide the image of the handwritten text for future use, which typically required some work in Paint or another image editing program, to select the portions of an often large image that were relevant. At the same time, I downloaded every full image, and the text of every relevant book I found online, saving them in appropriately labeled folders of the computer. The result follows, and one might never guess it had been written in PowerPoint, one or more slides per paragraph.

2.5 The Death of Children

The death of a child has many meanings, from a demographic datum in the official mortality statistics to the sadness of the bereaved parents. Two specific cases from the years 1865 and 1870, Agnes Foster and Cleora Bainbridge, richly illustrate the range of ways we can assemble information and make sense of it in ways meaningful to our own lives. In the case of Cleora, my archive contains a good deal of information, although one would always wish for more. The information about the case of Agnes is far more scanty, and in writing the following paragraphs many online sources needed to be consulted, interpreted, and integrated. In 1965, while going through old family archives, I found a picture of a little girl who had died almost exactly one century earlier. Figure 2.6 is a scan of both the front and the back. It was part of the collection that had been in the attic of the family house that burned in May 1965. As implied by the title of Ray Bradbury’s masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451, paper burns at a relatively low temperature, but it does not melt easily, and much of the oxygen in the attic had already been consumed by the flames below (Bradbury 1953). The picture has slight smoke damage, and perhaps some water damage. It had been protected by an album that was in worse shape, so I copied onto the back of the picture this text: “Agnes Foster Auburndale Mass. Died 1865 aged 12 years.” Why did someone affix a postage stamp to the back of this picture, that was obviously not structured to serve as a postcard? Actually, that is not a postage stamp, even though it bears a picture of George Washington and is for the common 3 cent denomination. It carries the words “US Inter. Revenue Proprietary.” The Wikipedia page for “Revenue stamps of the United States” explains, “In August 1862, while the American Civil War was being waged, the United States (Union) government 2.5 The Death of Children 53

Fig. 2.6 A memorial photograph of a deceased child began taxing a variety of goods, services and legal dealings. To confirm that taxes were paid a ‘revenue stamp’ was purchased and appropriately affixed to the taxable item, which would in turn pay the tax duty involved.”24 Searching online quickly located a collector’s blog entirely devoted to historical US revenue stamps, including a huge table of the many different types. A comment at the head of a list of blog postings explains the excitement of finding unexpected relics of the past: “As a collector, for me the fun is not just acquiring scarce or interesting pieces, but also the manner in which they are acquired. Sure, buying a stamp at retail to fill a spot is satisfying, but when you pull something from a bulk lot or collection, or find it unexpectedly, or can ‘cherrypick’ a scarce item, it’s that much more satisfying.”25 The site advertised not only the popular stamp-collector club, the American Philatelic Society, but also a more specialized organization: “The American Revenue Association, otherwise known as the ARA, is devoted to collectors of revenue stamps, documents, paper, tax stamps, and general back-of-the-book material.”

24en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_stamps_of_the_United_States. 25revenue-collector.com/blog. 54 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs

Founded in 1947, the American Revenue Association publishes a journal, The American Revenuer, and offers much historical information on its website.26 When I checked it, the available technical articles included one of great interest for computer processing of photographs. Titled “Digital Image Differencing of High Resolution Stamp Images,” it reported, “A new method for comparing high resolution stamp images allows the direct subtraction of the raw data of one image from another to reveal small differences over the entirety of the stamps. The method corrects for small differences in size, orientation, color, and also spatial distortions resulting from uneven paper shrinkage. Minor printing plate differences, arising from die re- entries or other plate flaws, can be easily visualized over the entirety of the stamp. In addition, the image corrections provide a means to directly compare the intrinsic differences between plate impressions. The intra-sheet differencing of stamp images gives reproducible comparisons which appear to be relatively independent of paper shrinkage. This indicates that these are direct measurements of the differences in the plate impressions created by the transfer roll in the production of the plates” (Mustacich 2016, p. 57).27 This narrow topic may seem very distant from the sorrow of a child’s death, yet it relates directly to the challenges faced in employing computer technologies to preserve and identify tiny images of the past. Looking closely at the scanned stamp on the picture of Agnes revealed faint writing: “A. P. Jan 1866.” A revenue stamp would have been affixed to a photograph print at the photographer’s business, so this dates the print the year after her death. Presumably the parents had paid for a set of prints, each with its own revenue stamp, and distributed them to friends and family. Thus, this picture was not simply one of the pictures taken during the life of Agnes, that happened to descend into my possession, but was an intentional memorial. There exists a rather huge 1899 genealogy of the Foster family, by genealogist and historian Frederick Clifton Pierce, which was available online from Google Books. Searching this electronic version of an old printed book for “Agnes” turned up 31 hits, but one of them was clearly this girl: “AGNES L., b. Sept. 9, 1852; d. at Auburndale, Mass., Aug. 3, 1865.” This source also provided information about her parents: “JAMES FOSTER … b. Boston, Mass., Feb. 14, 1820; m. there May 13, 1851, Elizabeth T. Frederick, b. Sept. 19, 1831; d. Feb. 24, 1895 (Pierce 1899).” Agnes had a sister, Louise, and two brothers, John and Louis. Louis was the subject of the Wild West photos we saw earlier in this chapter, and John was the brother to whom one was apparently dedicated. Family genealogies can often be difficult to comprehend. John’s full name, John Hancock Foster, is the same as his uncle and grandfather, distinguishable by birth- dates: 1855, 1815, 1788. His uncle had no sons, apparently only the daughter Eliza- beth who was one of my maternal grandmother’s grandmothers. Note that Mystery #1 of the Wild West photos is really not yet solved, because they came into possession of a branch of the family that was not in direct descent from the original owner, the John Hancock Foster who was born in 1855. The pictures of Louis served as

26www.revenuer.org/the-american-revenuer-archive.asp. 27www.battleship-revenues.com/articles/imgsub.html. 2.5 The Death of Children 55 publicity for his Wild West career, and thus would have been widely distributed, but that does not explain why one given to his brother wound up in a different line of descent. Had the inscription said, “for my uncle John,” rather than “brother,” there would have been no inheritance mystery. Yet this assumed that the message was written by Louis. Perhaps the particular photographic print belonged to James the father of Louis, who gave it to his brother John. Whether or not this minor mystery has been solved, it illustrates the problem that families constantly reused names. There was no difficulty finding Agnes in several public records indexed on Ances- try.com. The 1855 Massachusetts state census listed her in the household of her 25- year-old father, James Foster, who was a clerk by occupation. It revealed that her 24-year-old mother, Elizabeth, had been born in Brazil. Her age was given as 3 years, and her tiny brother John was only 5 months old. The 1860 US census adds a 26 year old domestic from Ireland, Rose Lanahan, and reports that Agnes can now read, but not Rose. In the 1865 Massachusetts census, her younger brother Louis has appeared, at age 3, and there is also a domestic servant in the household, Margaret “Donivan” (Donovan) from Ireland. The census taker came by on May 1, 1865, which squares with the August 3 date of her death reported by the Foster Genealogy. Why did Agnes die? Tuberculosis. Her death record is on a page listing all 42 deaths in the vicinity of Newton, Massachusetts, from May 7, 1865, to August 18, 1865, available from Ancestry.com. This is the second page of the record for the year, so another 42 deaths had occurred earlier. Of the 42 that included Agnes, fully 9 of the deaths were caused by “consumption,” which today is generally called tuberculosis. I checked some Massachusetts newspapers for that year in Chronicling America, the online historical newspaper archive of the Library of Congress, and did not find any hysteria about a consumption epidemic.28 Google Books offered a free copy of the Massachusetts annual demographic report covering 1865, which provided this obsessively precise summary: “Consumption. The number of deaths in 1865 was 4,661; 2,126 males and 2,533 females, and two not stated; 45.63%, of males and 54.37%, of females, or in the proportion of 100 males to 119 females. The percentage of deaths from consumption to deaths from all causes was 17.69. Large as this seems, it is still less by 2.90%, than the average for twenty four years and eight months (Warner 1867).” However scientific demography may have been, medicine had not yet discovered that tuberculosis was a distinctive bacterial infection, and based on geographic variations the report concluded, “moisture, and particularly soil moisture, was prominent among the causes of consumption in many localities, and that removal from such places to dry and elevated ground was a remedial and preventive measure of the highest importance” (Warner 1867). I have not found an online record giving the cause of death for Cleora Emily Bainbridge in 1870, but I obtained that information over a quarter century ago from records preserved by the Rhode Island Historical Society in Providence. Cleora died of “water on the brain,” or hydrocephalus, a condition that can be treated today but was hopeless then.29 It is not known how early Lucy realized that her daughter

28chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/#tab=tab_advanced_search. 29Providence, Rhode Island, death records, volume 12, page 153. 56 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs was doomed, but William Folwell Bainbridge considered her a “naturally strong and healthy child (Bainbridge 1882a).” Cleora’s brother, my grandfather William Seaman Bainbridge, was born February 17, 1870, and Cleora died April 14, a near coincidence that must have amplified the emotional impacts of both events. Also relevant was the fact that Lucy’s mother had died, also in Providence, the previous July 10, and her name was also Cleora. Names not only have intrinsic meaning, but often suggest the meaningful relationship the parent has to the child. Cleora Emily Bainbridge was born November 8, 1868, in Cleveland, Ohio, the home town of her mother, Lucy Seaman Bainbridge. Lucy had gone there from Erie, Pennsylvania, where her husband was minister of First Baptist Church, because she trusted her mother’s guidance concerning childbirth. Cleora August Seaman was one of the few formally trained women doctors of that era, although her education had been in homeopathic medicine, not considered scientific today, at The Western Homeopathic College, from which she graduated in 1860, but in 1867, the faculty voted to exclude women (King 1905). As the website of the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities of Cleveland State University reports: “In 1867, Dr. [Myra] Merrick and Dr. Cleora Seaman founded the Cleveland Homeopathic College for Women on Prospect Avenue. When the Cleveland Homeopathic School of Medicine stopped admitting women into their medical program, Dr. Merrick and Dr. Seaman felt it was an injustice. Both doctors saw the dire need for women to have a place to learn and gain professional experience. The college produced a number of prominent Cleveland women doctors.”30 Dr. Cleora Seaman’s interest in medicine was actually locked in when she was a tiny child, and very nearly died in an accident. She fell into the hot ashes of an open fire, suffering terrible burns to her back. For months, her mother tended her on a pillow, and she carried deep scars for the rest of her life from her neck to the base of her spine (Bainbridge 1921). The family considers the name Cleora to be a contraction of Cleopatra, and that theory is supported by Nameberry, an online name selection website: “Cleora is a now-extinct name (there were no babies named Cleora recorded in the U.S. in 2012) that achieved some standing in the early 20th century thanks to the craze for all things Egypt-related. A range of Cleopatra diminutives, including Cleo, Cleora, Cleona, and Cleola, made the Top 1000 then as the ancient tombs were opened in Egypt.”31 Given the propensity of families to recycle names, whether to memorialize or just by custom, we can ask how Lucy Elizabeth Seaman got that name, intervening in the lineage between two Cleoras. Her grandmothers were Lucy Stevens and Elizabeth Seaman. Other information useful for understanding naming practices would be to consider Lucy Elizabeth Seaman’s siblings. A biography of her mother she published in 1921 speaks of the years following Cleora Seaman’s marriage: “One after another there came to their home seven children, of which the writer was the only daughter” (Bainbridge 1921, p. 76). So, Lucy was one of seven children, the only daughter, which implies that she had six brothers. This is clear, well-documented, and … false.

30Kimberly Cole, “Pioneering Women Doctors,” clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/589. 31nameberry.com/babyname/Cleora. 2.5 The Death of Children 57

By 1921, Lucy was about 78 years old, nearly blind and deaf, and her final writings were dictated to a secretary. She may have said, “the only daughter to live until adulthood,” because that is the truth. Her two sisters died in early childhood. The 1860 US census lists three brothers living with Lucy and her parents: George W. Seaman, Henry S. Seaman, and Charles J. Seaman. The online grave memorial service, Find A. Grave, reports that George died October 11, 1861, and is interred at Cleveland’s Erie Street Cemetery. We know from one of Lucy’s unpublished memoirs that he died of typhoid fever, which can take many days to kill a person, during which she prayed with him, sang to him, and shared with him his final thoughts about losing his life.32 Find A Grave also lists a Cleora A. Seaman, not Lucy’s mother, but her sister, Cleora Augusta Seaman, who had the identical name as her mother, and helped inspire Lucy to name her daughter Cleora. The family actually called this middle Cleora, “Cora Gussie,” but she lived only from 1854 to 1859. Wikipedia reports that Erie Street Cemetery is Cleveland’s oldest existing cemetery, but I doubt that either George or Gussie is buried there.33 Rather, they are in Woodland Cemetery, about which Wikipedia reports: “Established in 1853, it became Cleveland’s main public cemetery after its founding and remained so for the next half-century. It fell into extreme disrepair, and most of its outstanding architectural features dismantled or demolished. In 1986, Woodland Cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The cemetery has since undergone moderate restoration.”34 Old records indicated that the family had moved other deceased members of the family to Woodland, after George was buried there, so this is one more indication of the fact that historical records must be “taken with a grain of salt,” valuable but not always precisely accurate. Gussie may indeed have been initially buried there, perhaps George also for a few days, but Woodland’s website says he was buried there November 5, 1861. Lot 47 in section 13 of Woodland Cemetery seems to hold the bodies of 13 members of the Seaman family, and for 8 of them dates of internment are given, including July 15, 1869, for Lucy’s mother, just two days after her death. But for 5 members of the family, no date is given, despite the fact that much earlier dates are given for members of other families. We may infer that these 5 plus George may have been the ones transferred from other cemeteries. The names given for them are: Frances, George, Gussie, J (child), and Walter. Gussie is of course Lucy’s little sister. From private family records, we understand that Walter was born early in the 1850s, but died at age two. Frances was named after Dr. Cleora Seaman’s sister, and was killed when she fell down stairs at an early age. So Lucy’s list of six siblings would now be two sisters (Gussie and Francis) and four brothers (George, Henry, Charles and Walter). Who are the other George and the “J (child)? It is worth having hypotheses, that might be verified or disproven by later data. Given that Woodland did not list a burial date for Gussie, yet did for George, it is conceivable that George was listed twice, once undated as part of the bodies transferred from Erie Street and

32Lucy Seaman Bainbridge, “A Remembrance of my Father and Mother,” unpublished manuscript. 33en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Street_Cemetery. 34en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodland_Cemetery_(Cleveland). 58 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs once dated because of his so-recent death. One of the unpublished family records gives the impression that Lucy’s mother may have had eight children, not seven. If so, then one of them may have died too young to possess a full name, and be the “J (child)” buried with his or her mother. How did Lucy respond to the death of her daughter, Cleora? A copy has survived of a story Lucy published in a newspaper, “Mrs. Dana’s Christmas Day,” which tells the sad but religiously inspiring story of a mother whose child died.35 The copy lacks a date and the name of the publication, and searching online for some of its text has failed to identify it more precisely, but the early 1870s is a plausible publication date. Online newspaper archives often exist in the proverbial “deep web,” each with its own search tool that effectively prevents Google from accessing the materials. I did search for the story in Chronicling America and Newspapers.com, but to no avail. Another family response to Cleora’s death was that as soon as little William was a toddler, their parents adopted a girl they named Helen (Nellie) Augusta Bainbridge. She was born November 23, 1872, in Providence, Rhode Island, the same city where the family then lived, and where her step-father had been pastor of Central Baptist Church, then counted as the second-largest Baptist church in New England, since March 11, 1869. I have physically looked through records at the church, and corresponded with Rhode Island state agencies, but do not know anything about Helen’s birth parents. Lucy took the ﬁrst name from her deceased friend and cousin, Nel- lie, and the second, from her mother. When the neighboring Reynolds girl taunted young William that his sister was adopted, he thrashed her.36 In later years, he would say, “Adopted children are more important than natural children, for they have been specially chosen.”37 Figure 2.7 is a picture of Helen with her brother, taken in 1878. On January 1, 1879, Lucy, her husband William Folwell Bainbridge, and their son, William Seaman Bainbridge began a two-year tour of Asian Protestant missions, starting in Japan, then visiting the ministry of John Nevius in China, an extremely inﬂuential missionary who was a cousin of Lucy, then trekked through India, the Middle East and back home late in 1880. Because she was so young, they did not take Helen with them, but deposited her in Cleveland with her one surviving step- grandparent who by then had assembled the remarkable name, Mary Price Folwell Bainbridge Seaman. Yes, after the deaths of their original spouses, Lucy’s father had married her husband’s mother. This was not unheard of in those bygone days, where families were important but medicine impotent, and a similar thing happened on my mother’s side of my family. In Table 2.1 we see that at the time of the 1880 census Mary Seaman is living with her daughter, son-in-law and their baby, but where is Helen? The table includes two other households of the extended family, headed by Lucy’s surviving brothers, but no Helen anywhere. Perhaps the census-taker made an error, or perhaps Helen was at a boarding school, or there was some other simple answer. Yet when I asked her then sole-surviving

35Lucy Seaman Bainbridge, “Mrs. Dana’s Christmas Day,” date uncertain but apparently in the early 1870s, published in an unidentiﬁed newspaper. 36William Seaman Bainbridge, travel diary, 1917. 37Barbara Bainbridge McIntosh, “Legacy,” unpublished typescript, p. 1. 2.5 The Death of Children 59 nephew, the John in Fig.1.4, if he had any idea where she had been, he dredged up the only thing he could remember she had said, before her death in 1919 when he was a very small boy: “I hate grandmothers!” That exclamation had perplexed him then, and unless it is a totally fanciful childhood memory, it can perplex us now. In addition to reminding us that the past holds mysteries that will never be solved, it illustrates the fact that family relationships are sometimes painful. In 1916 Helen married an army captain named Consuelo Seoane, who liked to be called “Con,” and on August 14, 1919, he memorialized Helen in a letter that made no mention of her adoption or made any distinction between blood relatives and in-laws:

Mrs. Lucy S. Bainbridge - Dear “Mother B:” Helen died today. As her husband I should like to tell you, her mother, that I considered her as near the perfect type of “companion to man” as it is possible for me to conceive. You are aware of the general qualities that endeared her to her many friends and therefore these need no mention from me. I would rather speak of our own intimate life that only she and I knew. Our thoughts and plans always agreed and we lived in a communion of happiness. She enjoyed all pleasures; was comforting in distress and ever working to push our common end. Her ability and intellect coupled with

Fig. 2.7 A studio portrait of adoption-connected siblings 60 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs

an ever-blossoming smile brought friends and admirers wherever she went. It made me very proud of her. In picturesque language she could have brought the world almost to her feet. But had such a thing come to be she would, I know, have passed it right over to me. Can I say anything more to describe so unselfish and perfect a sweetheart? Her longing and prayers for children were never answered but she was a friend of the little ones and children never failed to flock around her. I wish you might keep this as coming from me who has lost something that can never be replaced. Your loving son, Con. Cleora Emily Bainbridge was memorialized in a very different way, remarkable and complex, in the form of a novel written by her father, Self -Giving: A Story of Christian Missions, currently available online at Google Books.38 This work is a second example of fact-based fiction, comparable to Miss Ravenel’s Conversion,

Table 2.1 Three related Seaman households in Cleveland, Ohio, from the 1880 US census Location Name Sex Age Relationship Occupation Birthplace Olive street Samuel H. M 31 Jeweler England Cowell Mary E. F 24 Wife Keeping New York Cowell house Dana E. F 6/12 Daughter At home Ohio Cowell Mary F 63 Mother in Boarding New York Seaman law illegible F 20 Servant Servant Ireland 974 Charles M 32 Boot and Ohio Kennard Seaman shoe store street Carrie A. F 37 Wife Keeping Ohio Seaman house Charles M 4 Son Indiana Seaman Lovina D. F 49 Mother Visitor Ohio Athan Cornelia F 48 Servant Servant Virginia Savage 923 Henry S. M 41 Keeping Ohio Streator Seaman books avenue Louise W. F 37 Wife Keeping Pennsylvania Seaman house Augusta L. F 15 Daughter At school Pennsylvania Seaman Laura A. F 13 Daughter At school Pennsylvania Seaman Walter L. M 9 Son At school Pennsylvania Seaman

38Bainbridge (1883); books.google.com/books?id=EU0XAAAAYAAJ. 2.5 The Death of Children 61 mentioned in Chap. 1, in which John William De Forest translated his personal experience of the Civil War, after failing to publish them as an entirely factual documentary. Actually, William Folwell Bainbridge had already been able to publish two factual accounts of the world tour of Christian missions he understood with his wife and son, 1979–1880. Around the World Tour of Christian Missions was a combination travelogue and anthropological observation report of the course of the entire trip, published in 1882 by Christopher Rubey Blackall, a minister who had worked for the Baptist Publication Society.39 Along the Lines at the Front, published the same year explicitly by the American Baptist Publication Society, had some of the qualities of a modern sociological study of the effectiveness of various religious conversion strategies, based on reasonably rigorous theories (WF Bainbridge 1882b). In his introduction, William Folwell Bainbridge offered one explanation for why his third book needed to be fiction: But the thoughts of the writer were restless over a growing conviction of incomplete work upon Missions. The duty and privilege of direct recital had been discharged, but there remained much untold of interest and profit to the public, and helpful to the cause, that would require, however, a veil of fiction to the extent of concealing many names and locations, and of disassociating many home references. With great timidity the task of authorship in this direction was undertaken. Every incident linked into the following story, is substantially a fact. The writer has drawn upon his imagination only to relieve embarrassment on the part of a large number of missionaries and executive officers, and of mission friends and enemies, who will recognize many scenes and incidents in their own lives, often related con- fidentially, and many questions of mission policy, which are either kept from the public, or very unsatisfactorily considered, because of various personal susceptibilities and ambitions (Bainbridge 1883). There are actually two characters named Cleora in Self -Giving, one the daughter of the other. The primary male character is named Llewellyn Litchfield, and given that the author was an exceedingly erudite scholar, it is conceivable he had the ancient word for cemetery, lichfield or lychfield, in the back of his mind. On a more conscious level, Litchfield represents the author, and the hero’s wife, Cleora Lyddell, represents Lucy Seaman Bainbridge, as they undertake a mission to convert India to Christianity. Their daughter, Cleora Litchfield, directly represents the author’s deceased daughter, Cleora Bainbridge. However, on another symbolic level, Cleora Lyddell may also represent Cleora Bainbridge. The novel was published in 1883, and it begins when Cleora Litchfield was 15 years old, the age Cleora Bainbridge would have been in that year. The relevance for a chapter on photographs is that the frontispiece of the book was a fictional photograph—an artist’s line drawing, showing Cleora and a friend at a girls’ boarding school her Fig. 2.8. We do not know which of the girls represents Cleora in the drawing, just as we do not know which real-life person the fictional Cleora primarily represented in the author’s mind. But here is how the 15-year-old Cleora is described in the novel: Cleora, an only child, was a beautiful girl of fifteen. Her beauty, however, was not of that superficial kind which dazzles the frivolous, and comes and goes with the bloom of youth, and

39Bainbridge (1882b); The Publisher’s Weekly, April 5, 1879, 377: 420; hymnary.org/person/ Blackall_CR. 62 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs

Fig. 2.8 An engraving from an 1883 novel that memorializes a deceased daughter

which fashion-plates reproduce to recommend new styles of dress. Her features and form were pleasing, though not classic; her eyes were full of expression, though neither black nor blue; and though a little over height, it seemed to be needed to carry that thoughtful countenance and digniﬁed earnestness and wealth of affection. Had she been made more beautiful, she would have been less beautiful. Her hair was golden, her teeth perfect, and her emotions, as with those of her complexion, played over her features like sunbeams upon the clouds of the morning. “What an intelligent and interesting daughter you have,” was frequently said to the fond parents. She was a real mother’s child, already showing the same common sense and personal magnetism. Life being spared, she was sure to make her mark with both head-work and heart-work, and to become more and more attractive, while others were losing their charms (Bainbridge 1883).

Note that phrase, “life being spared.” In the novel, both Cleoras die as martyrs. In particular, the younger one dies at a very precise location that had been highlighted in her mother’s book about their real-life religious mission to India. In the 1990s I wrote a biography of Lucy, titled Sister Ohio, published only electronically, by The Association of Religion Data Archives, and emphasizing her currently unfashionable 2.5 The Death of Children 63 feminist belief that Protestantism must vanquish all other religions, if women are to gain social equality.40 Here is her 1880 act of defiance in the Taj Mahal: In Agra, Lucy was drawn to the Moslem Taj, dedicated to the memory of Mumtaz Mahal, a mere woman. “The most exquisitely beautiful tomb in all the world, and built by the emperor of a people who despise women, and whose holy book does not recognize that they possess souls” (LS Bainbridge 1882). Four times Lucy saw the Taj: once at dawn, once at midday, once in the night when blue lights transformed the interior into sapphire, and finally at sunset when it appeared from the distance like pearl. Standing alone inside that resonant dome, Lucy sang out a defiant hymn: “In the cross of Christ I glory towering o’er the wrecks of time!” Half a world from home, she stood proud in her faith. “It was a simple air, sung by an untrained voice, but as the sounds were caught up, and repeated by the unseen choir, the impurity seemed to be lost, and, from the dim heights of the vast marble space above, it returned in an echo, soft and sweet and clear” (LS Bainbridge 1882). In the novel, Llewellyn and the elder Cleora establish a Protestant mission in Agra, where daughter Cleora is born and lives just long enough to learn to speak and profess her Christianity. She dies inside the Taj Mahal, where the echoes resonate her last words: “Angels of Jesus” (Bainbridge 1883). This is not quite the end of the story of the real-life baby Cleora. Find-a-grave reports that both Cleora Emily Bainbridge and William Folwell Bainbridge are buried at Swan Point Cemetery at Providence, Rhode Island. Yes, they were buried there, but are not buried there now. William’s record includes this telling note: “Removed 11/1/17—Interment In Woodlawn Cemetery, NYC., NY.”Cleora’s says just “Removed 11/1/17” but we must assume she travelled with her father to the burial plot acquired that year for Lucy, who lived another eleven years before being buried there.

2.6 Conclusion

This chapter has focused on photographs from the nineteenth century, and how Inter- net and modern computers can help us assemble them into coherent and hopefully accurate narratives. The following chapter will work its way through the twentieth century, by considering how to add metadata to home movies, into the early twenty- ﬁrst century when video technology is not only well-established but experiencing rapid innovations. In 2012, Robert Hopkins argued that traditional photographs are in some important ways superior to artists’ illustrations, both because their accuracy is more trustworthy, and because they give us a more direct emotional connection to their subject. However, he cautioned, today’s digital images are far easier to edit and thus may often misrepresent reality (Hopkins 2012). In 2017, Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan observed, “The extensive posting of pictures online, including instant selﬁes from real-time social activities, provides new forms of evidence about family life. However, their apparent informality, compared with photographs of the

40www.thearda.com/rrh/papers/sisterohio.asp. 64 2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs past, does not imply they are totally spontaneous and unscripted, because the participants operate within a new but somewhat solidified cultural context” (Miller and Sinanan 2017). A century earlier in a law journal, Lyle Repiton Buskey wrote: “To one who is familiar with the mysteries of the art, and has spent much time in making pictures or observing others in the process, nothing can be more absurd than the oft-repeated statement that photographs, like figures, cannot lie” (Buskey 1915, p. 181). All forms of visual representation may be misused or in all innocence be misinterpreted. In addition, as our goals and the surrounding culture change, the concepts we use to organize collections of pictures will also change, as has happened for example in cultural anthropology. Computer technology makes it possible for a collection of historical photographs to be organized in multiple ways simultaneously, as for example several different HTML systems can have hyperlinks to the same graphics files, parallel versions of an index can offer varying perspectives, and the members of a family can respectfully preserve their debates about the meaning of the albums they inherited from people who are no longer alive to express their viewpoints.

References

Anonymous (1908) Death takes pioneer in dressed beef trade. Nat Prov 39(19):19 Bainbridge WF (1882a) Around the world tour of Christian missions. C. R. Blackall, New York, p 343 Bainbridge WF (1882b) Along the lines at the front: a general survey of Baptist home and foreign missions. American Baptist Publication Society, Philadelphia Bainbridge LS (1882) Round the world letters. Lothrop, Boston, pp 304, 306, 307 Bainbridge WF (1883) Self-giving: a story of Christian missions. D. Lothrup, Boston, pp 5, 34–35, 402 Bainbridge WS (2013a) eGods: faith versus fantasy in computer gaming. Oxford University Press, New York, p 59 Bainbridge WS (2013b) Perspectives on virtual veneration. Inf Soc 29(3):196–202 Bainbridge LS (1919) “Sister Ohio,” The Outlook, 122(4):155–157 Bainbridge LS (1921) One of the pioneer women in medicine. Med Woman’s J 28(3):75–79 Bradbury R (1953) Fahrenheit 451. Ballantine Books, New York Buskey LR (1915) The photograph as evidence. Virginia Law Register 1(3):181–187 de Forest LE (1950) Ancestry of William Seaman Bainbridge. The Scrivener Press, Oxford, pp 164–165 Hopkins R (2012) Factive pictorial experience: what’s special about photographs? Noûs 46(4):709–731 King WH (ed) (1905) History of homeopathy and its institutions in America. Lewis, New York, pp 24–26 Miller D, Sinanan J (2017) The English school pupil. In: Visualising facebook. UCL Press, London, pp 11–30 Mustacich RV (2016) Digital image differencing of high resolution stamp images. In: Barwis JH, Lera T (eds) Proceedings of the second international symposium on analytical methods in philately. Wilcox Printing and Publishing, Madrid, Iowa, pp 57–72. Peale NV (1952) The power of positive thinking. Prentice-Hall, New York Peale NV (1976) The positive principle today. Fireside, New York, p 180 References 65

Peale NV, Blanton S (1950) The art of real happiness. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, pp 200–202 Pierce FC (1899) Foster genealogy, part 2. W. B. Conkey, Chicago, p 604 Warner O (1867) Twenty-fourth report to the legislature of Massachusetts, relating to the births, marriages, and deaths, in the commonwealth, for the year ending December 31, 1865. Weight & Potter, Boston, pp 53–54, 56 Wheeler AG Jr (1914) The genealogical and encyclopedic history of the Wheeler family in America. American College of Genealogy, Boston, Massachusetts, pp 171, 183 Chapter 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

Abstract The range of motion-picture technologies available to families over the past century was exceedingly great, from silent black-and-white 16 mm films, to color, and now a great diversity of forms of sound-and-color videos readily captured in reasonably high resolution by common mobile devices. Examples of screenshots from silent family-filmed travelogues, dating from 1929–1957, begin the process of categorizing topics, highlighting personally meaningful places, people, and events. Dating from 2013–2018, a series of screenshots from videos demonstrates how instruction, performance, and exploration can today expand the ways by which the abilities and interests of family members can be documented. The chapter also documents the use of YouTube, Twitch, and online games to embed motion-picture records in social media. While recognizing the potential of computationally supported dynamic means of preservation, this chapter primarily considers the combination of screenshot non-motion pictures with text and links to external information sources as a reliable means for documenting motion pictures, that can readily be adapted to new hardware and software systems as they emerge over the coming decades. Traditionally, home movies documented special events, like the 1929 Thanksgiving meeting that is the oldest example here, and the 1932 high school graduation also included. However, intentional documentations of everyday activities, such as demonstrations of work activities, artistic skills and game playing, can be of great cultural significance for future generations, and will re-appear in later chapters.

This chapter will explore opportunities and problems concerning old home movies and modern videos, as already suggested here by Fig. 1.1 in the first chapter. Very few families currently own classic 16 mm or even 8 mm home movies, so this chapter will use them to provide a conceptual background for contemporary videos. A central problem for films and videos is that the technology for creating and documenting them is still evolving, in some technical areas rather fast, with the unintended consequence that the format a family historian decides to use may become obsolete. For a while, systems for translating the files into new formats may exist, but this may require some loss of information such as frame-by-frame metadata, and those translation

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 67 W. S. Bainbridge, Family History Digital Libraries, Human–Computer Interaction Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01063-8_3 68 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media systems may themselves vanish. This chapter advocates a dual approach: (1) Yes, after careful consideration do invest some time and resources to incorporate a film or video in a flexible preservation system, ideally one that permits connection of the original to additional information, but (2) Also create a version that is likely to be accessible for a very long period of time, even if that means forgoing some of the dynamic features of more complex systems. The concluding sections of this chapter will introduce a range of computer-assisted technologies that expanded the definition of movie or video, yet may have significant connection to families.

3.1 Documenting Old Home Movie Travelogues

In Chap. 1 we connected a brief home movie of a pigeon coop to its physical sur- roundings, family activities, and wider historical developments. In Chap. 6,anold home movie of toy animals will connect to the actual futures of the children who played with them. Here, home movie travelogues will provide a basis for consideration of the multi-dimensional meanings of today’s videos. Given the high cost and brevity of old home movie films, even enthusiasts tended to record only very small segments of their lives, prioritizing unusual moments that might never be repeated but deserved to be remembered. That often meant that the subjects were distant places that were visited only once, special events such as life transitions, and reunions with old friends and family members. Preserving old home movies, usually captured on 16 mm or 8 mm film or various obsolete videotape systems, is only one of the challenges. Documenting what they depict is also challenging. Doing so for the two examples in this section is unusually easy, because during the same period of the 1950s, my father sent many letters to his mother, incidentally mentioning the trips and thus documenting their dates and other aspects. He was then living in a suburb of New York City, and she in Edinburgh, Scotland. In the 1950s, it was possible to telephone from the Eastern US to Britain at a cost of about $12.00 for the first three minutes, but in today’s money that would be about $110.00 (Goldfield 1964). In a letter dated December 6, 1954, he wrote: “It was wonderful to hear your voice on Saturday. The connection was such that I could hear you very well but I am afraid that you and Sister had trouble in hearing me.” Had voice communications been much cheaper and better, he might not have written the many letters that are used to document this section of the chapter, and emails today would present their own preservation challenges, for example the issue of whether I would have the password to access his account after his death. To stress the documentation issue, I will not refer immediately to what the letters say about the first example. We begin with a home movie I myself filmed, of a family tour in Canada, perhaps in 1957, but not having an explicit date. Classified advertisements in 1957 issues of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics suggest that a 100-foot roll of color 3.1 Documenting Old Home Movie Travelogues 69

16 mm movie film could be bought then for as little as $3.00.1 That is not the kind of detail one tends to recall over the span of half a century, but before searching online I had guessed $5.00, which may have been the cost from a local store, and/or adding the cost of developing the film. As an approximation, $4.00 in 1957 money was nearly $35 in 2017 money, according to the online converter of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.2 Like many families, we had a film splicing device, as well as a camera and projector, and would edit and assemble home movies onto larger reels. Thus making home movies had the quality of a technological hobby, that required the development of some specialized skills. A 100-foot silent 16 mm film, projected at the then common 16-frames per second, would last only a little over 4 minutes. Modern video players differ in how or even whether they allow the user to adjust the frame rate, given that today’s standards are higher than 16-frames per second. In the period 2002–2004, after the family’s home movies had been digitized, I placed each video file in a separate labeled folder, then added to that folder a number of screenshot frames from the video, typically clear pictures of the people in the particular film, using their names as the title of the image files. Today, video software often permits adding subtitles and bookmarks, but I suggest using a mixture of these old and new methods, because the software system may limit the text, and we cannot be sure that the video system in which the subtitles or bookmarks were added will continue to be viable. For old home movies, that are very limited in duration and subject matter, I suggest that very extensive documentation be written out in text, connected in some way to images of individual frames. An example that actually began with 35 mm color still pictures rather than an old movie is brief field research I performed at the headquarters of two different Rosicrucian groups in California, that I had been studying long distance through their printed materials, which included a correspondence course. On August 24–26, 1972, I extensively photographed the public areas and museum of Rosicrucian Park in San Jose, the headquarters of The Ancient and Mystical Order Rosæ Crucis (AMORC), selecting a subset of 96 color prints for documentation in a single copy of a paper album. Here for example are the brief descriptions of pictures 9 through 15, plus the two references cited: 9. Detail of the face of the Horus statue. 10. A statue of the god Horus wearing the royal crown of Egypt. (Posener, page 281.) 11. Imitation ancient Egyptian low incised relief from the left side of the door of the administration building. The female figure in the center is Isis. 12. A similar panel from the right side. The central figure is Horus (Ions, page 53.) 13. Detail of the hieroglyphics immediately below #12. 14. Detail of the winged solar disc over the door of the administration building. 15. Silhouette of the eaves of the Francis Bacon Auditorium; this detail of the building has an ancient Egyptian flavor, while the rest of it shows various influences, including period English, appropriate for a building named after Bacon.

1books.google.com/books?id=UCEDAAAAMBAJ; books.google.com/books?id=x- EDAAAAMBAJ. 2data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl. 70 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

Posener, Georges: Dictionary of Egyptian Civilization, Tudor, New York, 1959. Ions, Veronica: Egyptian Mythology, Hamlyn, Feltham, Middlesex, England, 1968.

On August 28, 1972, I documented the external appearance of the buildings of the rival Rosicrucian Fellowship, in Oceanside, California, that was far less public but did welcome interested visitors. Its summary photos became items 97 through 120 in the album, and here are the ﬁrst ﬁve:

97. The gate to The Rosicrucian Fellowship at Oceanside, California. Like AMORC, this group was founded just before World War I, and according to the woman who runs the office of The Fellowship, there are currently five significant, rival Rosicrucian orders in the United States. 98. One of the two lawn ornament lions flanking the gate. 99. The side of the Office building. Most Rosicrucian Fellowship large buildings are in more-or-less this austere style, and there is none of the Ancient Egyptian symbolism of AMORC in San Jose. 100. A green cross emblem from a corner of the Office. 101. A Rosicrucian rosy cross standing in the middle of a pentagram (five-pointed star). The Rosicrucian Fellowship seems to use a pentagram in ways similar to those in which the AMORC Rosicrucians use the hexagram.

Note that the AMORC metadata connected this modern social movement to ancient Egypt, while the metadata for the Fellowship compared the two Rosicru- cian cultures, as well as describing how the images recorded specific aspects of the physical environment. The album containing pictures of the sites of the two Rosicru- cian groups was part of a rather extensive study of the array of similar esoteric groups, so the few days of effort involved were certainly worthwhile on scholarly grounds. However, similar effort would be worthwhile for old home movies of locations and subjects that were significant for a family. Frankly, it also can be fun, and rather more satisfying than watching television as a proverbial couch potato. The example from my Canada movie deserves some effort. Figure 3.1 combines two frames at the same location, even looking in the same direction, but at two very different scales. Many of the movies in the collection were carefully edited, back when they were made, even splicing in a few frames of text filmed separately but immediately after the original film returned from the developer, using a titler set in which white physical letters were temporarily affixed to a black background. But that was not done in this case. The first frames, however, were of the sign at the customs entry point to Canada, followed by a scene of the family car driving forward. Nothing in this brief film identifies the exact date, although tantalizingly the car’s license plate is visible at one point, but not clearly enough to see the expiration date sticker. A still photo in the collection showed the family’s car clearly enough to see a sticker expiration date in 1960, which set the approximate date for the batch of pictures it belonged to. But that car was a later model than the one in the movie of the trip to Canada. Both cars were Cadillacs of the same type, and I recall that the family’s frugal plan at that period was to buy a good condition Cadillac that was two years old, and thus cheap but reliable, repeating the process every couple of years. Cadillacs matching the one 3.1 Documenting Old Home Movie Travelogues 71

Fig. 3.1 Two frames of a home movie travelogue from Canada

in the movie were made 1954–1956, which is consistent with a date around 1957 for the movie.3 Late in the trip, as I recall, the family saw the new popular movie, Around the Worldin80Days, which Wikipedia says was released October 17, 1956.4 Usually, one does not trust a memory such as this, but with great excitement the family discussed how it had been on a comparable voyage. No Canadian snow appears in the movie, but the people are wearing jackets or sweaters, which suggests that soon after October 17, or the following spring of 1957, would be the correct date. Details like the apparent weather conditions, the vintage of the car, and a popular movie may seem both tedious and unreliable, but some such facts may set a possible date range for a home movie, and when several are consistent with each other we can have a degree of conﬁdence in placing an event in time.

3en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Series_62. 4en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_80_Days_(1956_ﬁlm). 72 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

How do my father’s letters to his mother improve the documentation of this old home movie? A letter dated May 29, 1957, describes the car: “I forgot to mention to you some weeks ago about something which has been giving us a great deal of pleasure. I got myself a second-hand 1955 Cadillac, in excellent condition, at a very ﬁne price. With all the driving we have been doing, it certainly is a wonderful thing for us to have.” The phrase “some weeks ago” is consistent with a trip driving it to Canada in the spring of 1957, but not late 1956. On July 15, 1957, he wrote: “Over the fourth of July weekend the four of us drove up to Bethel and just spent about half the day driving around and reminiscing.” Then, on August 29, 1957, he wrote:

To say the least, I have been a terrible son in not writing for such a long time. Certainly a lot of miles have been traveled since I last wrote. We had a simply wonderful vacation - driving up to Maine, then to Quebec and across Canada to Toronto, then to Niagara Falls and home. It does not seem possible that this was the same trip that Barbara and I took twenty years ago on our honeymoon. We endeavored to relive our honeymoon but with a 17 year old and a 14 year old and we had a lot of fun kidding them as to what they were doing on our second honeymoon. I was very impressed with Canada. Everyone seems to be doing extremely well and the growth of Canada is fascinating.

Actually, the 17 year old had not yet quite reached his 17th birthday, but the letters definitely date the movie to after July 15 but before August 29, 1957. The screenshots printed in this book were made recently using contemporary systems, but equivalent screenshots were made in November 2002 after the movie had been digitized, and one comparable to the bottom half of Fig. 3.1 was labelled BSB_WWB_BCB_StAnne_de_Beaupre, giving the initials of Barbara Sims Bain- bridge, William Wheeler Bainbridge and Barbara Constance Bainbridge their daughter, at a location called St. Anne de Beaupre. Had I not recalled the location, today it would be relatively easy to search websites of major Canadian religious institutions, but indeed the Wikipedia page for Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré has a picture showing the same building as seen in the top of Fig. 2.1.5 Lacking any other information, we might guess that this family was Roman Catholic, with religious motives in visiting this site rather then mere tourism, but that was not the case, and the August 29 letter stated a very family-oriented motive, “to relive our honeymoon.” When I visited the website of the Basilica itself, I encountered a brief puzzle.6 I could not find a location exactly like the one in the bottom of Fig. 3.1. Was this at some secondary building, or even a different location later in the tour? The Basilica’s website linked to a special display of the Google Maps streetview that definitely answered this question. The three people were standing exactly to the left of the main entrance to the Basilica, seen at the top of Fig. 3.1, but the setting has changed slightly over the years. Today there are stone columns immediately behind where Constance was standing, but the highly detailed sculptural frieze has remained the same. This makes the obvious but interesting point, that even apparently very stable features of the physical world may change after a movie has been taken.

5en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré. 6www.sanctuairesainteanne.org/index.php?lang=en. 3.1 Documenting Old Home Movie Travelogues 73

Fig. 3.2 Two home movie shots a year apart at the same location

Travel movies are not merely about the places people visit, but also the people who visit and are visited. Figure 3.2 combines shots from two different home movies, taken about a year apart, at exactly the same location, the back garden of the McIntosh home at 32 Blacket Place in Edinburgh, Scotland, of different people except that the Barbara McIntosh from Fig. 1.4 is in both. The person at the left in the upper image is Constance, also seen in Fig. 3.1, behind whom stands Angus McIntosh, Barbara’s husband, and we also see the two sons of Barbara and Angus, David and Christopher at the right. The photographer is the mother of Constance, and sister- in-law of Barbara, also seen in Figs. 1.1 and 3.1. In the lower image, from right to left we see Barbara, her brother William also seen in Figs. 1.4 and 3.1, their mother June Wheeler Bainbridge, and then the author of this book. The photographer was probably Angus, using my movie camera because I had taken the other shots in that film. There are many reasons why members of the same family may become geographically separated, and some of them result from new human relationships people develop. Grandmother June had married the father of the two people to the right of 74 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media her in the lower image of Fig. 3.1 in 1911, and they primarily lived at 34 Gramercy Park in New YorkCity until his death in 1947. Both of her sons for a while in the early 1950s lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, so she bought a house there to be near them. While visiting her daughter Barbara in Edinburgh, she suffered a health problem that discouraged travel, so she lived the remainder of her life at Blacket Place, and letters that survived from the 1950s concern the process of selling her Greenwich house. Barbara had moved to England with her new husband Angus after their 1939 wedding, then to Scotland when he became a professor at the University of Edinburgh. A brief online biography states his background, and implies the period 1936–1938 was when he met his future wife, Barbara: Angus was born to Scottish parents near Sunderland, County Durham. He was educated at Ryhope Grammar School, then at Oriel College Oxford where in 1934 he graduated with First Class Honours in English Language and Literature. As Harmsworth scholar he went on to a diploma in comparative philology at Merton College, where he is said one day to have thrashed JRR Tolkien at tennis, confining him to his rooms with an ankle injury. Thus marooned, with nothing better to do, Tolkien started sketching out ideas for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, works for which Angus would later cheerfully accept blame. Angus spent 1936–1938 at Harvard as a Commonwealth Fellow. A lectureship in the Department of English, University College Swansea, was to follow on his return to Britain.7 Three letters in the collection specify the context for the upper image. November 25, 1955: “A week from today Simsie and Connie will be on their way, flying across the ocean. I just can’t tell you how excited they both are. My, how I wish I could come over this Fall, but here’s to my coming soon.” Note the use of a nickname, one of the details that historians must preserve, not only because they factually identify people, but also because they say something about the culture and social relations of the period. “Simsie” was a long-standing nickname for Barbara Sims Bainbridge, dating from her school days, and all the Barbaras were often called “Bobbie” but that would not work here because the recipient of the letter was living with a different Barbara. December 2, 1955: “I just can’t express in words how happy I am to have Simsie and Connie over in Edinburgh with you. They both love you so much, and Connie has been continuously talking about you ever since you left, and how wonderful it is that she can visit her Grandmother now that she is older. As you probably gathered, Connie is the friendliest type of person possible.” December 19, 1955: “My thoughts have been particularly with you these past few days, hearing all about how you are and the wonderful time which Simsie and Connie had with you and Sister. All at 32 Blacket Place certainly gave the visiting girls a wonderful time, and one which they will never forget.” A letter dated February 28, 1957, exactly dates the visit of my father and myself to Edinburgh as March 20–26, 1957. A letter dated less precisely in April 1957, reports, “We took, as you know a lot of films in Edinburgh and also in London and absolutely all of them came out 100%.” It also reports we “had a terrific time in London, saw three shows and just about everything one should see in London, in addition to having a wonderful father and son association together, which as we all

7Heinz Giegerich, “Angus McIntosh, an Appreciation,” www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/?page_id=238. 3.1 Documenting Old Home Movie Travelogues 75 know, does not happen very often.” Documentation of old home movies may often be best accomplished through a durable video ﬁle, a set of labeled screenshots of particularly clear and meaningful frames, with an overarching text comparable to this section of the chapter, connecting to documents contemporaneous with the movies like personal correspondence, plus links to online sources that help provide the wider context.

3.2 Understanding Home Movies that Did Not Involve Oneself

It is no secret that travelogues span both space and time, and in doing so they trace the boundaries of human lives. The oldest movie in the collection dates from Thanks- giving of 1929, and includes the image in the upper-left corner of Fig. 3.3.Itshows Grandma Nell Wheeler, mentioned in Chap. 2, with her grandson John, also shown in Fig. 1.4. They are at Nell’s home named Glenheim in Yonkers, New York, a short trip from John’s home at Gramercy Park in Manhattan. A large fraction of the ﬁlm was taken indoors at the Thanksgiving dinner table, which may have seemed an excellent choice to the photographer, but because of technical limitations the scene is so dark that hardly anything can be seen. The family has assembled for this special holiday, at one of three distinct homes they owned in the same general geographic area, the third being a farm in Bethel, Connecticut, that included the house in Fig. 1.3 as well as the larger house near which Barbara and Angus were married a decade after the image of Nell. Searching online for “Glenheim Yonkers” turned up a website on a page devoted to Leo Bakeland, inventor of Bakelite, an early and widely used plastic material. It noted that his home was a short distance north of Glenheim, and described an illustration on the site: “The photo below is of the drive heading in to Glenheim. Note the map shows a garden to the left of the entrance. The garden can be seen in the extreme left of the photograph. At the time the photograph was taken (circa 1900) the property was owned by Frank Seaman a prominent advertising agency executive. It was sold to Thomas H. Wheeler who was in the meat business circa 1905.”8 The website shows a detailed map of the area from a Yonkers atlas printed in 1907, that clearly labels Glenheim as the property of Thomas H. Wheeler.9 He died October 31, 1908, so Nell had been a widow living there for 21 years when the movie was made, and she had more than three years to live. The property was lost by the family about then, apparently because of tax problems in the Great Depression, although the details are not currently known. The image at the top right of Fig. 3.3 shows Nell’s daughter June and her husband, Dr. Will, in 1932, standing at the edge of Mohegan Lake, not many miles north of Yonkers in New York state. We know the date was 1932 because they are attending

8www.victoriansource.com/id34.html. 9Atlas of the City of Yonkers, New York (Philadelphia: A. H. Mueller, 1907), plate 12. 76 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

Fig. 3.3 Home movies of short and long distance travel 1929–1947 the graduation of their son William from a boarding school, and in one scene he is even wearing a shirt with the date “1932” prominently displayed across the chest. His father, in the photo, is wearing a naval officer’s uniform, yet he was not then on active duty. The reason is complex and reveals much about how many people conceptualize social status. The school his son was graduating from was a military academy, and much of the movie shows boys in uniform marching around with rifles on their shoulders. In fact, the father had attended the same school, in 1886–1888.10 We know that the younger William had been at this demanding but rather unintellectual school at least since the age of 12, from a letter he wrote January 13, 1927.11 Online histories of the area indicate that the school closed down in 1934.12 By wearing his naval officer’s uniform, the elder William was asserting his position in the military status system, and the family’s photo collection includes one of him standing at attention in the school’s uniform over four decades earlier. The picture at the bottom left in Fig. 3.3 is a screenshot from “Leviathan 1931,” a somewhat long silent movie that is especially well made and has professional title

10Annual Catalogue of Mohegan Lake School (Peekskill, New York: Mohegan, 1886); Mohegan Lake School, “Anniversary Exercises” booklet, June 12–13, 1888. 11William Wheeler Bainbridge, letter to June Wheeler Bainbridge, January 13, 1927, addressed to George Walton Apartments, Augusta, Georgia. 12yorktownhistory.org/wp-content/archives/homepages/march00.htm. 3.2 Understanding Home Movies that Did Not Involve Oneself 77 pages, but may still be classified as a home movie. It begins as June, Dr. Will, and their daughter Barbara sail from New York City toward Europe on the ocean liner, Leviathan. Just as it is worth considering the vintage and character of the family car, a big boat can provide insights about historical context. As Wikipedia correctly reports, “SS Leviathan, originally built as Vaterland, was an ocean liner which regularly crossed the North Atlantic from 1914 to 1934. The second of three sister ships built for Germany’s Hamburg America Line for their transatlantic passenger service, she sailed as Vaterland for less than a year before her early career was halted by the start of World War I. In 1917, she was seized by the U.S. government and renamed Leviathan. She would become known by this name for the majority of her career, both as a troopship during World War I and later as the flagship of the United States Lines.”13 The family would have known all the details of Leviathan’s history, because Dr. Will had served in the US navy on another troopship that had also been confiscated from the Germans. Again, Wikipedia offers enlightenment: “SS George Washington … When George Washington was launched in 1908, she was the largest German-built steamship and the third-largest ship in the world … At the outbreak of World War I, George Washington was interned by the then-neutral United States, until that country entered into the conflict in April 1917. George Washington was seized by the United States and taken over for use as a troop transport by the U.S. Navy. Commissioned as USS George Washington (ID-3018), she sailed with her first load of American troops in December 1917.”14 Indeed, Dr. Will was on that voyage, in charge of medical care for the soldiers.15 The “Leviathan 1931” movie has a definite theme: Dr. Will visiting a number of the colleagues he had met during World War I, and with whom he had developed an enduring social relationship. The image in the lower-left of Fig. 3.3 shows him standing with his right hand on the shoulder of Dr. Henry Souttar, described by Wikipedia as “a British surgeon with a wide breadth of interests.”16 They are standing in Souttar’s garden in Oxford. While much of Souttar’s career was spent in London, he had many ties to Oxford and online sources confirm that for a time he also maintained an Oxford residence.17 In 1915, Dr. Will had visited medical facilities on both sides of the western front in the First World War, then visited many hospitals on the Allied side in 1917–1918, writing up his observations as a 1919 book, Report on Medical and Surgical Developments of the War. Souttar was quite prominent in the book’s pages, including this overview paragraph: Major Souttar has been actively engaged in war surgery since September, 1914. During his nearly two years on the Continent in the thick of the work as surgeon in chief, Belgian field

13en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Leviathan. 14en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_George_Washington. 15The following pages are greatly based on William Seaman Bainbridge, travel diary, November 1917–April 1918. 16en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Souttar. 17www.themitralvalve.org/mitralvalve/sir-henry-sessions-souttar; livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/biogs/ E005565b.htm; heart.bmj.com/content/heartjnl/27/3/453.full.pdf. 78 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

hospital, and in the past two years at Netley, he has learned at first hand the lessons of the war. His book, “A Surgeon in Belgium,” dealing with experiences in the early days of the war, has been widely read and is considered one of the most impressive books that the war has produced. A man of wonderful optimism, his personality permeates the hospital at Netley, which I visited in his company (Bainbridge 1919). The movie also documents a visit with Sir James and Lady Berry. Sir James was a prominent British surgeon, who was especially interested in repairing cleft palates, since he had one himself. Wikipedia reports: “During the First World War he and his wife established six hospitals in Serbia for the treatment of wounded soldiers and refugees.”18 Especially joyous was a visit with the family of a Belgian endocri- nologist, Eugene Hertoghe, who worked in Antwerp, as Will later described, “in the study of the thyroid gland. Hertoghe was working on the question of infection, and experience has shown that the thyroid gland is specially susceptible to infection from many sources—gums, tonsils, teeth, sinuses, blood (including lues), and, particularly, the intestines” (Bainbridge 1934). They were old friends, documented by the fact that Will held a highly publicized dinner for Hertoghe in New York in 1914, and that Hertoghe translated Will’s textbook on cancer into French in 1922.19 Documentation of videos that depict strong relationships with people outside the immediate family, could well include brief biographies of those people. The voyage on the Leviathan was the way that Dr. Will attended the biennial meeting of the International Committee of Military Medicine, held in June 1931 at The Hague in the Netherlands. The organization still exists, and its website reports: “In 1920, after World War One had revealed the importance of a closer cooperation between the Armed Forces Medical Services worldwide, Captain William S. Bain- bridge, MD (US Navy) and General Jules Voncken, MD, Belgium suggested, at the 28th session of the US Military Officers Association (AMSUS), the creation of an international organization of the Armed Forces Medical Services. The first international congress of military medicine and pharmacy was held in July 1921, in Brussels, Belgium.”20 Will wrote book-length reports from the first nine biennial conferences, up through the 1937 one held in Bucharest, Romania, and the 1931 report can be read online at the HathiTrust website.21 Like many other kinds of official document, those reports have a strong autobiographical quality, preserving observations and experiences of the author. The image in the lower-right of Fig. 3.3 shows Dr. Will with his co-founder, Jules Voncken, chatting outside the Hotel Les Trois Roi in Basel, Switzerland, at the 1947 meeting of the Congress, the year of Will’s death.22 It is from a color movie taken by June who accompanied her husband on many of these trips. Note that the two lower images in Fig. 3.3 show men essentially reminiscing about their enduring

18en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Berry_(surgeon). 19“Complimentary Dinner Given by Dr. William Seaman Bainbridge,” American Medicine,April 1914, p. 308; Bainbridge (1922). 20www.cimm-icmm.org/page/anglais/historicTxte.php. 21Bainbridge (1933); babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015070356780;view=1up;seq=9. 22en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Les_Trois_Rois. 3.2 Understanding Home Movies that Did Not Involve Oneself 79 professional relationship and indeed friendship, which one expressed by placing his hand on the shoulder or arm of the other. As Wikipedia summarizes, “Jules Voncken (1887–June 1975) was Surgeon-General of the Belgian Medical Component with the rank Major General (Medical Corps). He was also co-founder and general secretary of the International Committee of Military Medicine (ICMM) located in Liège.”23 Two prizes are given for the two best scientific presentations at each biennial meeting in our own century, one named after each of the men in the 1947 image. The reader may have noticed that many friends of this particular family have pages in Wikipedia. As of early 2018, the English-language version of this online encyclopedia had over five and a half million pages. At some cost, but not requiring new technical innovations, it could be expanded to many times its current size, and have a page for every English-speaking person who had died in the previous decade. However, Wikipedia as it exists today discriminates against people who are not “notable.” It even has a page on that very topic: “On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article. For people, the person who is the topic of a biographical article should be ‘worthy of notice’ or ‘note’—that is, ‘remarkable’ or ‘significant, interesting, or unusual enough to deserve attention or to be recorded’ within Wikipedia as a written account of that person’s life. ‘Notable’ in the sense of being ‘famous’ or ‘popular’—although not irrelevant—is secondary.”24 As a practical matter, many people living as well as dead have Wikipedia pages because a friend, family member, or business associate added the page, and it has some external references to traditional publications that protect it against erasure. Most families do not have home movies dating from as early as 1929, but all can have videos today. Perhaps all can have wiki pages in the near future.

3.3 Contemporary Videos

This book overwhelmingly emphasizes the lives of people who are long deceased, but this section and the following one will consider current video technology through its use by two living members of the featured family. Rich examples of how contemporary videos can document the professional skills and aesthetic orientation of a living family member are offered by the YouTube channel for my daughter, Constance May Bainbridge, who uses the nom-de-plume Mei Ohara in her musical performances, in parallel with a more technical career where she uses the family name. She makes extensive use of information technology in composing and performing her own songs, many of which have philosophical as well as poetic lyrics that she herself wrote. She communicates her music through a variety of socio-technical means, including live performances in a diversity of contexts, and she explores a great diversity of styles and methods of capturing her music and artistic settings in videos.

23en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Voncken. 24en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people). 80 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

In addition to illustrating the technical features of the modern equivalent of home movies, this example provides insights about the dynamic balance between facts and ideals in the cultivation of family histories. A major sociological tradition, sometimes called dramaturgical analysis and exempliﬁed by Erving Goffman’s 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Public Places, views human interaction as if we were characters playing roles in a drama (Goffman 1959). A vast literature employs this general metaphor, but contains many debates, such as the disagreement between Konstantin Stanislavski’s method acting and Jacob Moreno’s psychodrama, the former subor- dinating the person to the role, and the latter liberating the person to play the role as best serves his or her purposes (Stanislavski 1964; Moreno and Toeman 1942; Moreno 1944). Many readers of Goffman’s works come away from the experience with a rather negative impression of human behavior, because he seems to imply that role-playing is a form of deception in order to manipulate other people, rather than being loyal to the norms and values of the society (Goffman 1961, 1963). I prefer to see many forms of role-playing more positively, as enactment of artforms that requires both great skill and honest attention to the needs of the audience. As Goffman himself recognized, a theater has both back-stage and on-stage aspects, but I prefer more technological metaphors that offer ﬁner distinctions. There are at least six major relationships one may have to a racing car: (1) building the vehicle, (2) driving it in competition on a racetrack, (3) driving it on a highway to get to a destination in the ordinary world, (4) passively sitting in it as somebody else drives, (5) watching the car from a distance, (6) being totally unaware of the car. The examples in this section are not racing cars, but similarly high-tech, while also being artistic creations. Indeed, personally created videos are like theater productions that can also involve music, poetry, physical movements of the performer, an aesthetic and meaningful environment, and in some cases computer-assisted special effects. This is not merely dramaturgical, but what grand opera composer Richard Wagner called total works of art (Wagner 1993). He also predicted this would be the artwork of the future, and the example offered here is indeed future-oriented. How old home movies and modern videos can be organized in future family history systems is well suggested by the structure offered by YouTube, which Wikipedia says “allows users to upload, view, rate, share, add to favorites, report, comment on videos, and subscribe to other users.”25 Each active contributor has a set of pages called a channel, and subscribing to one provides alerts when new videos are uploaded by that contributor. As of March 31, 2018, Mei Ohara’s channel offered 42 videos and had 702 subscribers. YouTube automatically sorts the videos by the date each was uploaded and its popularity, measured by how many times it had been seen, called views. Contributors can also label videos by time and connect subsets into playlists, of which she had four: 11 songs, 10 electric violin lessons, 4 live performances, and 2 vlogs. The two vlogs (video blogs) are rather like modern versions of the travelogue home movies discussed earlier in this chapter. One, titled “Solar Flux 2017,” 6 minutes and 36 seconds long, is comparable to the brief movies made in connection with

25en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube. 3.3 Contemporary Videos 81 the professional career of her great-grandfather, Dr. Will, assembling brief scenes of a trip to perform at a special public event. Here is the description on its Facebook events page: “SOLAR FLUX: A Family-Friendly Music and Arts Festival,” held June 9–11, 2017, in Greenbrier, Arkansas, which 607 people attended.26 The other vlog, “West Coast Road Trip 2017,” includes brief shots of her singing and playing violin in public events, but is mainly a tourism record of visits to cities on the US West Coast, like the Canada trip in Fig. 3.1, but a high-definition video with some narrative and chatting, plus background music from recordings of her compositions. The tremendous potential of videos for family history, that shows how the skills and value of one person can connect to a vast cultural heritage, is illustrated by the 10 electric violin lessons listed in Table 3.1. Acoustic violins belong to European folk and classical music traditions, which means they are distinctive technological tools constructed within an already rather scientific framework, for example with four strings usually tuned to natural tones of the western scale, G-D-A-E, that can produce higher tones when pressed against the fingerboard by a finger of the player’s left hand. An online etymological dictionary reports that the world violin entered the English language in the 1570s “from Italian violino, diminutive of viola … The modern form of the smaller, medieval viola da braccio.”27 It is worth pondering the use of the term modern for a type of musical instrument that is nearly five centuries old, but, as I have shown in a book chapter about harpsichords, the technological sophistication required to make these “antiques” was substantial (Bainbridge 2012). Even classical music culture is not entirely static, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art noted: “Although modern performers continue to use seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stringed instruments by great makers, nearly all of the instruments have been modified in order to remain useful as performance spaces grew larger and repertoire pushed instruments to create louder sound over an extended range.”28 Electric violins are a significant departure, usually built with a solid body and employing electronic amplification, which also facilitates recording and acoustic modification, while reducing noise from other sources in the performance space. While the sound from an electric violin can be rather different from European traditions, and more readily modified, the fingering and manual dexterity required are almost identical. The first and most popular of the videos in Table 3.1,a2minute and 55 second demonstration of tremolos and glissandos, is valuable for students using traditional violins, but it also functioned as an entry point to the entire set of performance videos, and indeed served as a bridge to the Mei Ohara professional website and her Facebook page, and through them to upcoming live events, often at musical performance locations spanning from Boston to New York City. Branch points like this will be common in future family history archives, analogous to the branches in a family tree but reflecting people’s activities versus lineage. Individuals interesting in learning what she has to teach about violin playing would continue through the entire set of 10 instructional videos, while other paths were offered to

26www.facebook.com/events/347646228942825. 27www.etymonline.com/word/violin. 28www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/503045. 82 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

Table 3.1 A playlist of electric violin lessons on YouTube Lesson Title YouTube ID Time Upload date Views 1 Tremolos and 8RaCLoOVz44 2:55 July 20, 2013 29,056 Glissandos 2 Google Glass: fDg0i0XiNcc 5:34 Aug 20, 2013 9,824 Articulations 3 Adding Drones fVDETOBXwIo 4:38 Sep 20, 2013 1,873 and Open String Blips 4 Beginning to jA7f_p4_dIk 4:54 Oct 20, 2013 3,447 Improvise 5 Harmonics TnKFjeu-Y-E 3:44 Nov 19, 2013 3,001 6 Google Glass: FXPBqQ_jQvc 8:19 Dec 19, 2013 618 My Gear 7 Performance ZMcHTc6WucE 8:51 Jan 20, 2014 726 Anxiety 8 Warming up T0n3XFpBLoE 7:58 Feb 20, 2014 1,623 9 Tips on gfmxg8wOYUI 7:19 Mar 20, 2014 1,259 Getting Started 10 Moving While Z3DYNPDmggU 4:12 Feb 3, 2016 702 Playing people who wanted to see performance videos or listen to the pure sounds of music recordings. The second and sixth in the set of instruction videos made excellent use of the experimental augmented reality device called Google Glass. As Wikipedia reports: “Google started selling a prototype of Google Glass to qualified ‘Glass Explorers’ in the US on April 15, 2013, for a limited period for $1,500, before it became available to the public on May 15, 2014. It had an integral 5 Megapixel still/720p video camera.”29 For several years, researchers had been developing visual augmented reality glasses that could overlay the real-world scene with text or other supplementary information. Especially notable was the EyeTap device developed by Steve Mann at the University of Toronto, that added a miniaturized video camera for the specific goal of allowing the user to preserve lifetime experiences. One of his 2004 publications was titled, “Continuous Lifelong Capture of Personal Experience with EyeTap,” and the title of a 2005 paper expressed that transcendent goal in similar terms: “Designing EyeTap Digital Eyeglasses for Continuous Lifelong Capture and Sharing of Personal Experiences” (Mann 2004; Mann et al. 2005). An article in the October 2014 issue of GetMobile, a news magazine about mobile computing, expressed confident enthusiasm: “Google Glass, the epitome of wearable displays, seems poised to become the most widely available wearable interaction device for the mass consumer market. Thanks to its compact design, rich sensor equipment,

29en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass. 3.3 Contemporary Videos 83 and growing API support, Glass also represents an exciting platform for researchers in the mobile field” (Nguyen and Gruteser 2014). In response to all the Google Glass publicity, concerns about privacy were raised, that offer cautionary lessons for family history more generally. Writing in the Novem- ber 2013 issue of the central computer news magazine, Communications of the ACM, Jason Hong noted that Google Glass could record the actions of people who had not given their consent, might not even be aware what the device was doing, and might not themselves benefit (Hong 2013). On the ACM blogsite, March 17, 2014, Daniel Reed observed: “It is not surprising that we are struggling to delineate the bounds of privacy and normative behavior in an age of ubiquitous digital devices. Some acceptable and normative issues of wearable technology will be decided by law, some by social consensus, and still others by concurrent technological evolution and generational acceptance. In the meantime, good sense should be applied liberally. Despite all the uncertainties, I remain an optimist. Ok, Glass, send a message to the future …”30 The future for such technology remains uncertain, but decisively on January 15, 2015, Google announced it would stop manufacturing the prototype Google Glass. Like the other 2013 videos in Table 3.1, the two using Google Glass were made in a laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Constance was a member of a team doing research on human memory, providing expertise on hearing-related perception, so exploration of new information technologies was among their key goals. Figure 3.4 shows three shots from video #2, and one from #6, the two at the top depicting her wearing the device as she begins the violin lesson, and the two at the bottom recorded through the device itself. This is an exceedingly innovative use of the technology, allowing a student of the violin to see the actions from the exact perspective of an experienced violinist. For family history, it illustrated a new and still-emerging way through which the experience of a particular life can be recorded for future generations, as seen by the person herself. As shown in the upper-left shot of Fig. 3.4, the “Articulations” video began with a superimposed text balloon, quoting a doll saying, “Head flick wakes the Glass up!” Constance is indeed looking down then quickly up, which turns the device on. She then begins demonstrating while looking across her violin. What she sees is the lower-left shot in the figure. The fingers of her left hand can be seen pressing or sometimes plucking strings, while the right hand moves the bow. The sixth video, “My Gear,” is a demonstration of the complex electronic hardware and computer software that process the signal from the electronic violin, add the pre-composed equivalent of orchestral support, and record the combined results. Public performances are visual as well as auditory, in post-modern settings often involving choreographed movements that add emotional emphasis and drama. The most recent video in the set, “Moving While Playing,” was recorded live in a music performance studio, and is a lecture-demonstration of how to add movement without impeding production of the music itself. Here is a transcription of the beginning of

30Daniel Reed, “Through A Google Glass, Darkly,” BLOG@CACM, March 17, 2014, http://www. cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/173040-through-a-google-glass-darkly/fulltext. 84 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

Fig. 3.4 Images from electric violin lesson videos using Google Glass the planned but spontaneous lecture, with descriptions of some of the movements demonstrated in the video: Today we’re going to talk about how you move while playing an electric violin. For me, I find that the most important thing is to keep my arms as a foundation. So, what I mean is that the relationship between my right arm and my bow stays the same consistently with where my violin is positioned. So that means a kind of diamond shape [displays a diamond shape formed by her two arms]. This is to make sure that the bow doesn’t skit around and get all crooked and make a total mess of everything. So that’s the start. The thing that gets compromised the quickest when you move around is usually your bow. For example, leaning back can look really awesome and really dramatic and feel great, like so [she holds the violin as if playing and leans far back]. But you want to make sure that you keep in mind where your bow contact point is, because when you lean back your bow is much more likely to start sliding down here [moving the bow along the violin strings to the bridge] which is obviously not where you want it. And the same with leaning forward. It can be awesome to go that way [she leans far forward], but it can also make this happen [she moves the bow away from the bridge until it contacts the fingers of her left hand]. The best way to learn how to move, especially to learn how to move in a way that feels right for you, is obviously to move, and then to practice moving on. So I recommend starting off with really easy stuff - scales or stuff like a tremolo or… [she rapidly bows a single tone, leaning forward and rapidly turning from side to side while almost dancing]. It doesn’t have to sound good; you just want to see what you can actually do with your body. Your legs are the most free part of your body. They are not involved with your playing much at all. So feel free to use that to your advantage, especially walking around, putting your foot up, putting the other foot up [she demonstrates these motions while moving around an area on the floor and continuing to play without interruption]. Since the pioneering work of Eadweard Muybridge in the 1880s, cameras have recorded human motions, allowing us to understand as well as preserve the dynamics 3.3 Contemporary Videos 85 of our physical actions (Muybridge 1907). Just over a century ago, cameras were used by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, whom we shall encounter again in Chap. 8, to analyze and improve the efficiency of arm and hand movements in surgery and manufacturing assembly (Corwin 2003; Gainty 2012). In a 2006 publication, I reproduced frames from a home movie in which surgeon Dr. Will demonstrated his skill carving a watermelon in 1932 (Bainbridge 2006). Given the focus of this chapter on movies and videos, we naturally emphasized YouTube here, but many competing services exist today, and we cannot predict the range of options family historians will face in the future. Mei Ohara’s YouTube channel links to her main website, but she also has a professional Facebook page, and one at Bandcamp where visitors may purchase recordings of her music.31 Her website offers this description that describes her favorite artistic metaphors, her technical experience, her aesthetic style, and ends with a brief reference to her family background: Mei Ohara is an electric violinist, singer, and electronic composer who claims to be a Nep- tunian visitor on planet Earth. Though she spent most of her life studying and performing classical music, electronic and experimental music, as well as multiple video game sound- tracks won over her alien heart. She continues to use her classical background and intensive violin training in marriage with distortion, futuristic beats, and spacey soundscapes. She also draws a large amount of her inspiration from astronomy, sci fi, and the comparison of structured science versus fluid art. The emphasis on supposed opposites combining in unity is further evidenced by her binary hair and mixed blood as a half-Japanese, half-American. Note the dichotomy that can be conceptualized as an analytic dimension: “structured science versus fluid art.” Crosscutting it are two other dimensions of variation: (1) classical versus alien and (2) mundane life versus artistic imagination. Figure 3.5 shows images from four videos that cover much of these ranges. The image in the upper-left corner came from a video of a live performance with an audience, Septem- ber 25th, 2014, at ImprovBoston. The venue is an historically significant artistic organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that concentrates in comedy leavened with other performance arts.32 Thus it is a cultural step beyond the usual context of musical performance, yet it very much “alive,” in the sense of being part of the real world inhabited by the audience, as well as in the sense of being improvisational and not a pre-scripted recording. The upper-right image in Fig. 3.5 is from a video that offers less visual information about the real-world environment, and briefly adds the title band at the bottom, but is still realistic and unified, recording the visual performance from start to finish. The music and lyrics are somewhat surrealistic. “Charonshine” is “Electric violin space music! Inspired by the reflected light off of Charon, the moon/binary partner of dwarf planet Pluto.” This transcendent meaning is in the minds of the artist and the knowledgeable audience, and does not yet obscure the so-called real world. The lower-left image from a 2015 video takes one step further into territory of the imagination. While the music plays through from start to finish, the visual images

31www.meiohara.com; www.facebook.com/mei.ohara.music; www.meiohara.bandcamp.com. 32www.improvboston.com/about/history. 86 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

Fig. 3.5 Images from four performance videos, ranging from real to surreal are a collage. This shot apparently shows the violinist meditating on the bow through which she creates tones on her violin, while the background is a blurred version of the nighttime Boston skyline, seen across the river from Cambridge. The song is “Bystanders,” which includes this stanza:

Let me invert this sky tonight Let me restart and release again I will study this new insight To never feel this pain again The lower-right image is far further into the surreal realm, from a video of the song “To Nonexist” from the 2017 album “Cold Blue Sphere,” an apparent reference to her home planet, Neptune. One online introduction to this set of 10 songs says that they “explore the journey of trying to understand and be a part of human life and the things that are complex, often impractical, yet thoroughly valued, such as companionship and love. As the album progresses, the collective protagonists experience waves of inclusion and isolation, until the difference between reality and illusion is unclear.”33 Another explains: “‘Cold Blue Sphere’ travels through the journey of learning what it means to be ‘human’ and consciously participating in existence. Electric violin shredding and ethereal female vocals float over cosmic space to reflect the feelings of ‘otherness,’ like an alien only masquerading as human. The tracks move in and out of playing the game and resistance.”34 Here is the final stanza of “To Nonexist:”

33store.cdbaby.com/cd/meiohara4. 34www.meiohara.com. 3.3 Contemporary Videos 87

Unfeel, unfeel, unfeel, unfeel What is color, what is noise The last thoughts erupt so intangibly Death by apathy, no need for fear Reading these words, one is reminded of the Existentialist movement, described thus by Wikipedia: “the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. While the predominant value of existentialist thought is commonly acknowledged to be freedom, its primary virtue is authenticity. In the view of the existentialist, the individual’s starting point is characterized by what has been called ‘the existential attitude’, or a sense of disorientation, confusion, or dread in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.”35 Among the many classics of this literary genre that resonate with this stanza are the philosophic essays in Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre, the novel The Stranger by Albert Camus, and the drama Endgame by Samuel Beckett (Sartre 1956; Camus 1946; Beckett 1958). Some scholars have continued the Existentialist tradition of “noise” and “apathy (Porter Abbott 2016).” Yet related artworks like “To Nonexist” offer authentic color, a context for perceiving the paradoxes of ordinary life, and transcending conventional stereotypes. In the context of family history, literary criticism of a family member’s productivity helps us understand its unusual characteristics, but does not separate the artist from her family. Indeed, for a culturally sophisticated family, creative exploration is a deeply appreciated gift, enhancing its inherited tradition.

3.4 Innovative Video Technologies

There are several directions future technological innovation related to videos and other sources of family history information may go, most broadly developing new ways to organize the information, or new ways to display it to the human senses. The former is the emphasis of a mobile application called 1 Second Everyday that allows a user to take a one-second-long video of a scene or event every day, connecting them in chronological order.36 The slogan on its website reads: “Life is made of seconds: imagine a movie that includes every day of the rest of your life.”37 Figure 3.6 combines four images from the very-brief videos taken by means of an Android-based device on four consecutive days, July 9–12, 2018, during a tourist trip to Iceland. The dark frames around the images belonged to the PowerMediaPlayer video software that displayed the movie on a wide-screen desktop machine, which I usually removed from the ﬁgures, but preserved here to remind us that information collected on one kind of device can easily migrate to a different kind of device. The photographer was

35en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism. 36en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Second_Everyday. 371se.co. 88 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

Fig. 3.6 Examples of 1 s everyday videos from a tour of Iceland

Wilma Bainbridge, who was accompanied by her sister, Constance, whose videos were featured in the previous section. Working clockwise from upper-left, the four images are in chronological order, but of course they could be classified in several different ways. Date can be connected to locations: July 9 at Reynisfjara Black Sand Beach; July 10 at Jokulsarlon Ice Lagoon; July 11 at Geysir; July 12 at Kirkjufell Mountain. The two images on the left stress the vertical dimension, depicting steep hills overlooking water, while the two on the right are more horizontal. Water is significant in all four, but in different states: the wide ocean with small waves, huge chunks of ice floating in their melted equivalent, a geyser spewing hot steam upward, and a waterfall pouring water downward. All four images depict nature as it was experienced by two family members, rather than showing activities by the family members themselves, as other figures in this chapter have done. Several academics who study apps like 1 Second Everyday have conceptualized them as examples of Technology-Mediated Memory (TMM), that allow us to record and reflect upon our lives. An NSF-funded study by a team headed by leading human- computer-interaction researcher Steve Whittaker had the goal of “Designing and Understanding Technology Mediated Reflection to Improve Well-Being,” and its abstract noted in passing, “Diaries composed with mobile devices can also contribute to more formal accounts of historical events, thereby facilitating the emergence of citizen science in which ordinary users collaborate with each other scholars and social scientists, to complete valuable projects and experience the enrichment of life-long learning.38 A 2016 article by his research team listed 1 Second Everyday among the prominent TMM tools that facilitate personal reflection. Several of the examples

38www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1321102. 3.4 Innovative Video Technologies 89 were research prototypes, and thus not yet widely used, and reference was also made to standard services like Facebook that automatically remind users of past posts they had made or otherwise imply that users should reflect upon their digital past. Six of the cited examples, however, were distinctive and have their own Wikipedia pages, here listed in Table 3.2. The Wikipedia page for 1 Second Everyday has been viewed 9,987 times during the year ending July 22, 2018, suggesting it might be the most popular among the six. However, two of the examples were pioneering efforts that may have had significant indirect impact on the emergence of this application area, MyLifeBits and SenseCam. In an earlier book, I discussed the significant research interest in the first decade of this century over what many called “Capture, Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences.” The acronym of this phrase, CARPE, derives from carpe diem,the Latin proverb for seize the day. I had attended the third CARPE conference of the Association of Computing Machinery in 2006, but by 2014 when I wrote about it, efforts in this area by major corporations had faded (Bainbridge 2014): Among the most influential contributors to the CARPE conferences was Gordon Bell … At the first CARPE workshop in New York in 2004, he and four colleagues had presented a paper about SenseCam, a wearable camera with sensors that could automatically capture pictures of meaningful moments in every day of a person’s life (Gemmell et al. 2004). By the time of the third CARPE workshop, SenseCam and the wider MyLifeBits project Bell led at Microsoft had received considerable attention, and the cover of the November 2005 issue of IEEE Spectrum had proclaimed, “With new database software and a wearable camera, computer pioneer Gordon Bell is helping Microsoft reinvent the PC as a personal mainframe for storing all your daily transactions.”39 YetwhenIaskedBellifMicrosoft planned to market a new kind of software, comparable to a personal digital library, he said that it did not. Since then, many individuals have advanced the technology for capturing personal experiences in realtime, notably Deb Roy at the MIT Media Lab who has been recording the entire childhood of his son.40 A coordinated CARPE movement seems not to exist, but an occasional special issue of a journal or review essay indicates the potential for one (van den Hoven et al. 2012; Whittaker et al. 2012; Kalnikait˙e and Whittaker 2012). On July 10 at Jokulsarlon Ice Lagoon, Constance also took a video of the same scene as in the upper-right of Fig. 3.6, but not limited to one-second shots as was the case for her sister’s video. She took one protracted shot while panning the camera horizontally, adding motion to a static scene, but later edited the result in several ways to transform motion into emotion. One result, called Ice and Flame, is shown here as Fig. 3.7. The first of four horizontal sections was the original image, adjusted in the second section to be out of focus and slightly accentuating the blue color. The two sections below shift the colors to pink, scarlet, and crimson. While family historians typically want to record the objective characteristics of the environment surrounding people, it can also be valuable to support the efforts of the people themselves to express their personal perceptions and feelings, which skilled artists may be especially capable of doing, but all people can attempt. Experimentation continues with new hardware, as well as software, and in some cases like Google Glass members of the family whose data have proved useful for

39The cover introduced this article: Cherry (2005). 40http://www.media.mit.edu/people/dkroy, accessed June 21, 2013. 90 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

Table 3.2 Wikipedia examples of technology-mediated memory systems System name Wikipedia description Launched Views 1 Second Allows the user to record one 2013 9,987 Everyday second of video every day Timehop An application for 2011 8,378 smartphones that collects old photos and posts from facebook, instagram, twitter, and dropbox photos and distributes the past DayOne A personal journaling app … 2012 4,739 weather, date, time, and other automatic metadata MyLifeBits An automated store of the 2001 3,493 documents, pictures (including those taken automatically), and sounds an individual has experienced in his lifetime, to be accessed with speed and ease Narrative Clip A small wearable lifelogging 2013 2,746 camera. Its development began in 2012 by the Swedish company Memoto after a successful crowd funding via Kickstarter. It can automatically take a picture every 30 seconds … uploads the photos and videos it made into the vendor’s cloud service, where they are processed and organized into collections called moments SenseCam A lifelogging camera with 2003 2,579 ﬁsheye lens and trigger sensors, such as accelerometers, heat sensing, and audio… The photos represent almost every experience of its wearer’s day. They are taken via a wide-angle lens in order to capture an image that is likely to contain most of what the wearer can see 3.4 Innovative Video Technologies 91

Fig. 3.7 A range of human perceptions of a natural scene this book have been among the experimenters in public trials. The images in Fig. 3.6 were captured through Wilma Bainbridge’s Samsung Galaxy smartphone, and she also owns a Samsung Gear 360, which the manufacturer advertises thus: “Easily capture a full 360° view of the world around you as video or photo with the Gear 360 … the content you create and moments you record will be just as vivid, years down the road.”41 When viewed through a Samsung Gear VR head-mounted display, the scene appears to surround the user, holding steady as the user turns to look this way or that. Figure 3.8 shows a different view, presenting the image data as a ﬂat screenshot.

41www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/gear-360. 92 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

Fig. 3.8 A video of a geological feature using a 360° lens

The center of Fig. 3.8 shows a magniﬁed image of Wilma Bainbridge’s hand as she holds the 360° lens aloft. Like the images in Figs. 3.6 and 3.7, this one was taken during her trip to Iceland with her sister, Constance, who stands to the right of her. The location is Fjaðrárgljúfur river canyon, and they are standing on a metal platform out over the very obvious canyon itself. An Existentialist might interpret the ﬁgure as a representation of the human condition, fragile individuals precariously poised over the famous abyss popularized by Friedrich Nietzsche (Bainbridge 2010). A surrealist artist might interpret the background as the glorious Planet Earth with all its dynamism. A family historian might more conventionally note that his remarkable location allowed two family members to share an interesting experience, and that the technology has preserved the moment in a way that will revive that interest periodically over the coming years. 3.5 The Game of Life 93

3.5 The Game of Life

However frivolous or unrealistic computer games may seem, for decades they have served as a popular medium for exploring new technological possibilities. The first one I ever owned was a Geniac, way back in 1956, which had been devised specifically as a teaching tool for the emerging discipline that would be called computer science.42 Chapter 7 will explore their modern technology more closely, but here we shall consider two examples that extend the scope of movies and videos. The first example is a player-created episode in the admirable but not very popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Pirates of the Burning Sea, which is set in a somewhat realistic simulation of the Caribbean in 1720. I had explored this complex virtual world originally with an avatar based on the Edmund Bainbridge mentioned in Chap. 1, who was indeed alive in 1720, then later with a second avatar based on my great uncle Consuelo Seoane who will be mentioned in later chapters, and who participated in the Spanish-American War in the Caribbean. To explore the society and technology more closely, I then ran another avatar, based on my deceased sister, Barbara Constance Bainbridge, recalling that she had at least visited the Caribbean, and seeking a series of environments in which to memorialize her (Bainbridge 2017). On January 12, 2014, she joined a fleet of players who in all seriousness sailed across the Burning Sea to honor one of their group who had just died. The next day, a participant using the moniker JCalvin31 posted a YouTube video of the event, titled “A sail from Bartica to Port Royal in honor of the British Player Truuth Bringer who passed away.”43 I had not known Truuth Bringer personally, but my avatar belonged to a guild, Order of the Temple, that was allied to the guild he had been in. Part of the ritual was to make sure that all participants made a “friend” link to him, and when I returned to the game in 2018 that link still existed. Another element of the ritual was that those of us who understood how to do so, should change the color of our vessel’s sails to black. I did not myself take a video of the event, but did something similar and quite complementary, taking 170 screenshot pictures, adjusting the user interface as I did so to capture various kinds of information. Figure 3.9 combines nine of them. The rather messy picture in the upper-left corner of Fig. 3.9 shows the fleet assembling at the seacoast town of Bartica in Guyana, with all features of the user interface visible, and the names of boat owners forming a dark cloud over their ships. Each ship was operated by one player, and each player had a visual perspective anchored on that ship, but with the option to look around and scroll in or out. The picture in the top middle is much clearer, because the user interface has been switched off, showing the fleet beginning its westward commemorative voyage. The upper-right corner picture looks down from a greater height, and was one of a series I took that allowed me to count the ships. The three images across the middle are two close-ups of ships framing a moment when I opened the main social tool of the software, specifically to check which

42en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geniac. 43www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEionA230LQ. 94 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

Fig. 3.9 Serious memorialization of a deceased friend, set in the year 1720 members of Order of the Temple were currently online. It also provided information on their locations and confirmed that most were in the regatta. Important features of all massively multiplayer online games, whether they emphasize role-playing or not, are elaborate communication systems, usually providing separate text chat channels for long-lasting guilds, brief raid or quest teams, and pairs of individuals. Games vary in terms of whether they include voice channels, or expect players to use external voice communication systems. The use of text and video apps on mobile devices to enable communities in the real world to collectively explore historical locations was already a topic of serious research by 2014 (Han et al. 2014). The bottom images in Fig. 3.9 depict the end of the voyage, beginning on the left with one of a series of high-level screenshots with the interface turned on, so that the names of the sea captains could be recorded. At bottom center, we see ships approaching Port Royal, Jamaica, and at lower-right an image of avatars standing on the docks. The shattered building in that last image is a relic of the devastating 1692 earthquake. JCalvin31’s YouTube video is just over 24 minutes long, and ends with a brief prayer in the Port Royal church, a very realistic simulation complete with some non-player characters sitting in the pews, stained glass windows, and dozens of player avatars standing to express respect for their lost comrade. Many significant family events deserve to be preserved by multiple means, and the parallel 3.5 The Game of Life 95 documentations of the Truuth Bringer regatta by JCalvin31 and myself could easily be emulated in the real world. Perhaps the most prominent social medium for the online gamer community is Twitch.tv, which proclaims: “Welcome to a community where millions of people and thousands of interests collide in a beautiful explosion of video games, pop culture, and conversation. With chat built into every stream, you don’t just watch on Twitch, you’re a part of the show. From classic tv show marathons to esports tournaments, if you can imagine it, it’s probably live on Twitch right now.”44 Currently, role- playing games like Pirates of the Burning Sea are vastly overshadowed by so-called e-sports or other simple but intense combat games. At exactly 10:30 in the morning, Eastern US time, on Sunday, July 22, 2018, 120,928 viewers were watching streaming competitions in League of Legends, a set of channels with 12,689,139 followers who are the dedicated viewing audience. The standard method is for one person to stream what they are seeing on their computer screen, often with a small video of the person’s face and their voice as they narrate what is happening, with other people adding text comments on the right side of the screen, or other more complex realtime editing (Hamilton et al. 2014). The videos are often preserved after the live broadcast. In the case of Pirates of the Burning Sea, only one video from four days earlier was available, on a channel with only 194 followers, but its duration was 5 hours, and posted by a player narrating in the French language. Clearly, Twitch.tv is a new kind of mass medium, technically similar to traditional television, but with a vast number of broadcasters, expressing their own personal interests, and thus potentially preserving examples of their favorite activity for future historians of their family. A much less popular category than games is “creative communities,” but the broadcasts in this category would fit especially well into histories of our era and of particular families who are alive today. Table 3.3 summarizes the statistics for the Twitch.tv creative communities that were streaming live, mid-day May 12, 2018, specifically 15 and 36 minutes after one o’clock. In the case of activities like painting and sewing, the video often showed the creator’s hands, broadcast at the exact moment they were working, with the creator’s voice either explaining what they were doing or digressing to topics that happened to come to mind, probably free associating from the activity. Other activities, such as music or dance, would be live performances, somewhat informal but often rather conventional in style. Much of the current research on social behavior in Twitch concerns moderation of disruptive behavior, of the sorts that often happen in online communities where any stranger is allowed to participate in a group communication (Seering et al. 2017). If historians use captured videos of regular Twitch streaming activities as records of the skillful or artistic behavior of family members, that problem may be relevant. However, we can also imagine that technically similar streaming done over a private channel might be an effective interview technique, for example in which the interviewer asks the respondent to show off various actions, such as the knitting techniques exhibited in the last creative community in the table. If playing computer

44www.twitch.tv/p/about. 96 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

Table 3.3 Twitch creative communities streaming at a particular point in time Creative Details from description and Viewers Followers community rules (if any) 1:15 1:36 Music Singers. Songwriters. Guitarists. 3,101 3,169 4,668 Pianists. Drummers. DJs. Composers. Producers. Musicians of every genre! Here will you ﬁnd all of these musical artists honing and sharing their craft with the masses. Every channel is a concerto on your computer screen! Painting The focus of your broadcast must 2,180 2,207 3,565 be on painting (Example: oil, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, etc) Talk shows on painting are also allowed Drawing None 1,055 1,013 3,128 Game This community is aimed at 789 657 7,534 develop- sharing the art and science of ment video game creation with Twitch. Broadcast content generally aimed at developing video games Illustration The focus of your broadcast must 615 571 2,385 be on illustrating. (Example: poster design, comics, concept art, technical drawings, etc) Talk shows on illustration are also allowed Program- Home of the Programming 310 339 933 ming community on Twitch! Come join all the fun :) Food The focus of your broadcast must 304 315 1,692 be on creating food. (Examples: cooking, baking, grilling, frying, etc.) Dance The focus of your broadcast must 211 238 247 be on dance Cosplay Streams in this category should 190 583 1,513 feature creation/design of costumes/cosplay/props! The design process is included and encouraged to be streamed (continued) 3.5 The Game of Life 97

Table 3.3 (continued) Creative Details from description and Viewers Followers community rules (if any) 1:15 1:36 Artstation None 152 85 804 3D Broadcast content generally 98 123 1,676 modeling aimed at creating 3D models through the use of 3D modeling software Sewing Sewing is the craft of fastening or 86 78 311 attaching objects using stitches made with a needle and thread Miniatures We are educators, hosts, and 80 131 1,258 entertainers. Our commitment is to excellence in the ﬁeld of miniature model painting, terrain building, and hobby in general Animation Twitch community for animators! 66 74 868 Chainmaille Chainmaille must be a focus of 59 70 122 your stream. It doesn’t have to be the only one, just part of your stream’s focus Sculpting None 57 101 590 Metal These streamers work with any 49 58 185 working type of metal to create art, tools, devices, vessels and more Leather- We are the rare and talented 6 2 167 work real-life leather workers! From cosplay to handbags, our art is both fun to watch and a rewarding job! Comedy The focus of your broadcast must 53 233 be on comedic content. Talk shows on comedy are also allowed Knitting Blankets, scarves, hats, sweaters, 48 192 socks … if you knit it, show it off! games is important to a particular family, capturing videos of them playing together could be historically valuable, especially as culture changes and their favorite games vanish. 98 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media

3.6 Conclusion

This chapter has primarily used a simple but worthwhile method to document movies and videos, namely the combination of screenshot non-motion pictures with text and links to external information sources. The software I used would have permitted placing bookmarks within a video, and an obvious alternative using today’s popular software would be to place short videos into PowerPoint, on a page offering text and external links. One reason for using tried-and-true old methods, emphasized throughout this book, is that the data files are likely to be useable even many decades into the future. But another reason, that also justifies using antique movies as many of the examples, is that the goal here is to establish general principles, leaving to the family historians of the future to decide exactly which information technology systems will best support those principles. The fact that this chapter considered family movies and video dating from across the span of 89 years illustrates the prioritizing challenge that family historians face: How much time and energy should be invested in chronicling new events versus assembling, connecting and interpreting records of old events? The emphasis of this book is on decades that have already passed into history, but for which the recent development of Internet has greatly facilitated the work. That seemed the right choice for a book that served functions both of developing scientific research methods, considering history to be one of the social sciences, and of serving as a textbook that would prepare both amateur and professional family historians for decades of future accomplishment. Especially in the case of an amateur family historian focused on his or her own family, then the question need not be answered in the abstract, but depends upon the materials already possessed by the family, and the current interests of family members. It may often be the case that members of a family will set up an informal division of labor, for example one person works on visual media such as photos and movies, covered in this chapter and the previous one, while another person emphasizes text narratives and verbal interviews, as in the following two chapters.

References

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Bainbridge WS (2012) Harpsichord makers. In: Bainbridge WS (ed) Leadership in science and technology. Sage, Thousand Oaks, California, pp 746–753 Bainbridge WS (2014) Personality capture and emulation. Springer, London, p 128 Bainbridge WS (2017) Beyond belief: revival in virtual worlds. In: Cusack CM, KosnáˇcP(eds) Fiction, invention, and hyper-reality: from popular culture to religion. Ashgate, Farnham, UK, pp 226–240 Beckett S (1958) Endgame. Grove Press, New York Camus A (1946) The stranger. A. A. Knopf, New York Cherry S (2005) Total recall. IEEE Spect 42(11):24–30 Corwin S (2003) Picturing efficiency: precisionism, scientific management, and the effacement of labor. Representations 84(1):139–165 Gainty C (2012) ‘Going after the high-brows’: Frank Gilbreth and the surgical subject, 1912–1917. Representations 118(1):1–27 Gemmell J, Williams L, Wood K, Lueder R, Bell G (2004) Passive capture and ensuing issues for a personal lifetime store. In: Proceedings of the first ACM workshop on continuous archival and retrieval of personal experiences. ACM, New York, pp 48–55 Goffman E (1959) The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday, Garden City, New York Goffman E (1961) Encounters: two studies in the sociology of interaction. Bobbs-Merrill, Indi- anapolis Goffman E (1963) Stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey Goldfield ED (ed) (1964) Statistical abstract of the United States 1964. US Department of Com- merce, Washington, D.C., p 518 Hamilton WA, Garretson O, Kerne A (2014) Streaming on Twitch: fostering participatory communities of play within live mixed media. In: Proceedings of CHI 2014. ACM, New York, pp 1315–1324 Han K, Shih PC, Rosson MB, Carroll JM (2014) Enhancing community awareness of and participation in local heritage with a mobile application. In: Proceedings of CSCW ’14. ACM, New York, pp 1144–1155 Hong J (2013) Considering privacy issues in the context of Google Glass. Commun ACM 56(11):10–11 Kalnikait˙e V, Whittaker S (2012) Synergistic recollection: how to design lifelogging tools that help locate the right information. In: Zacarias M, de Oliveira J.V. (eds) Human computer interaction: the agency perspective. Springer, London, pp 329–348 Mann S (2004) Continuous lifelong capture of personal experience with Eyetap. In: Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on continuous archival and retrieval of personal experiences. ACM, New York, pp 1–21 Mann S, Fung J, Aimone C, Sehgal A, Chen D (2005) Designing Eyetap digital eyeglasses for continuous lifelong capture and sharing of personal experiences. In: Proceedings of ALT, CHI 2005. ACM, New York Moreno J (1944) Psychodrama and therapeutic motion pictures. Sociometry 7(2):230–244 Moreno JL, Toeman Z (1942) The group approach in psychodrama. Sociometry 5(2):191–195 Muybridge E (1907) The human figure in motion. Chapman and Hall, London Nguyen V, Gruteser M (2014) First experiences with Google Glass in mobile research. GetMobile 18(4):44–47 Sartre J-P (1956) Being and nothingness. Philosophical Library, New York Seering J, Kraut R, Dabbish L (2017) Shaping pro and anti-social behavior on Twitch through moderation and example-setting. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing. ACM, New York, pp 111–125 Stanislavski C (1964) An actor prepares. Routledge, New York 100 3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media van den Hoven E, Sas C, Whittaker S (2012) Designing for personal memories: past, present, and future. Human Comput Interact 27(1–2):1–12 Wagner R (1993) The art-work of the future. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska Whittaker S, Kalnikait˙e V, Petrelli D, Sellen A, Villar N, Bergman O, Clough P, Brockmeier J (2012) Socio-technical lifelogging: deriving design principles for a future proof digital past. Human Comput Interact 27(1–2):37–62 Chapter 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs

Abstract The essential form of literature is narrative, a meaningful and well- organized story about human beings. Yet in the modern world it often is supported by technology, through which history can bridge from the humanities to the social sciences. Family history narratives are perfected forms of memoirs, possessing rigor, incorporating materials from multiple sources, and having some story, plot, theory, or theme. This chapter shows how coherent narratives can be distilled from diaries and letters, with clear examples such as a boy growing up using 23 years of his mother’s diaries during 1915–1938, and courtship letters from his father to his mother during 1909–1911. Examples of retrospective diaries based on episodic memories, and the expansion of a written family memoir into a wiki, illustrate the range of methods available to family historians today. The potential deeper meaning of diary-based narratives is considered in the famous cases of the Robert Falcon Scott expedition to the South Pole in 1911–1912, and the famous flights of Richard E. Byrd in 1926–1927. Byrd illustrates the tension between fame and fact, drama and documentation, because his claim to have flown over the North Pole appears to have been false, and his flight across the Atlantic Ocean was publicized in such a way as to hide the probable reason why his plane crashed, which the diary of his doctor reveals.

Many people have preserved diaries written years before by themselves or by other family members, and a few families own memoirs rather like informal and unpublished biographies. As Wikipedia notes, in rare cases a family may become widely known and even loved through publication of a diary: “The Diary of a Young Girl, also known as The Diary of Anne Frank, is a book of the writings from the Dutch language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. The diary was retrieved by Miep Gies, who gave it to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, the family’s only known survivor, just after the war was over. The diary has since been published in more than 60 languages.”1 Other diaries written during the Holocaust have informed the work of historians and social scientists (Einwohner 2003). At the

1en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_a_Young_Girl. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 101 W. S. Bainbridge, Family History Digital Libraries, Human–Computer Interaction Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01063-8_4 102 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs same time, correspondence in the form of letters or emails can be assembled into the equivalent of diaries, and both can be the basis for memoirs. Narratives, as we shall consider them here, are perfected forms of memoirs, possessing rigor, incorporating materials from multiple sources, and having some story, plot, theory, or theme.

4.1 Expansion of Narratives from Diaries

Until late in the twentieth century, essentially all diaries were handwritten, so the default means of preservation must be capturing images of all the pages, whether with a camera or a scanner. After that, the options proliferate. Most obviously, a text-based index can be created manually and saved in the same set of files as the images, which would need to be given clear labels such as sequential page numbers preceded by the year and the name of the diarist, or in whatever order fits the system for storing the files. Even today, software for automatically translating handwriting into text is unreliable, and tends to be used most widely for realtime data entry on mobile apps, by users familiar with the system who are able immediately to correct errors (Dove 2017). In the rare case of voluminous diaries scribed by careful writers who possess calligraphic skills, we can imagine that in the near future handwriting translation based on machine learning will be well developed. But here and now, we must limit ourselves to human reading and copying. Traditionally, diarists had the option of writing on loose pages and assembling them, on pages of bound but empty books, or in printed formats such as an already- dated page per day or even more restrictive structures. Diaries are personal, but this does not mean they are hopelessly inaccurate. Indeed, for some purposes, social scientists have found that it can be valuable to recruit large numbers of people to record their daily activities in a diary, or otherwise to respond in a manner similar to keeping a diary. For example, studies of family relations may use systematic diary- type records to measure the amount of time fathers spend with their children, and the factors that shape this important human investment (Sayer et al. 2004). For some purposes, diary-like time use surveys can be more valid than ordinary questionnaires. If asked how often they attend religious services, people may respond as if this were a question about how religious they feel they are, while if asked what they did on various specific days they may be more factual in their answers (Brenner 2011). A prominent and constantly expanding dataset is the American Time Use Survey (Abraham et al. 2006). Sponsored by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and conducted by the US Census, it “measures the amount of time people spend doing various activities, such as paid work, childcare, volunteering, and socializing.”2 As one study using this dataset to understand family relations observes: Perhaps one of the most appealing features of the time diary is that respondents are not cued to describe their involvement in particular activities selected by the interviewer. Although time diaries are not free of social desirability bias, studies repeatedly show the merits of

2www.bls.gov/tus/. 4.1 Expansion of Narratives from Diaries 103

using time diaries over direct survey questions, particularly when the behaviors of interest generally occur on a daily basis. Traditional “stylized” questions that ask people to report how much time they spend in activities invariably result in estimates of time use that exceed the 168 hours in the week. Thus, diaries are one of the most cost-effective, efﬁcient, reliable, and valid methodologies currently available to measure time use (Raley et al. 2012).

Our ﬁrst historical example will be a series of calendrical diaries that belonged to June Wheeler Bainbridge, spanning a space of time just short of a quarter century, with very brief entries per day. One way to distill a narrative from the fragmentary material in a diary consisting of brief entries is to scan through in chronological order, copying only those entries that refer to a particular topic. Here the example will be her younger son, John, who died in 2006, material originally assembled in that year to be part of a web-based memorial to him (Saxon 2006). In most cases, but not all, the speciﬁc day could be determined. The list of entries could have been much longer, but this subset of what June wrote about John is a meaningful outline of his childhood and growing personality:

November 1, 1915: At 10 in the evening our second little son arrived, well and strong and weighing 8 lbs.

November 19, 1915: We have decided to name baby John Seaman. His hair is red and his eyes are blue and he’s plump and adorable.

January 19, 1916: John gave Billy the jolliest, sweetest smile today, as if he recognized his brother, and Billy patted and kissed him.

September 29, 1916: John creeps with most amusing energy and rapidity.

June 20, 1917: Took John to Best’s for shoes - his ﬁrst visit to a shop and he wept in the elevator!

November 1, 1918: John’s 3rd birthday ﬁnds him a remarkably sturdy little fellow weighing about 44 lb. We celebrated, had supper tonight. Had a cake with candles and a merry time.

Little John, ﬁve years old and just home from school, comes ﬂying down our long narrow hall on his velocipede with one hand uplifted. “I’m a knight, Mother,” he calls, “and this is a banner I’m carrying. This world is wicked and bad and I’m going to help somebody.”

“I want to go to Heaven,” says John one day. “What for?” we ask anxiously. “I want to see Washington and Lincoln so badly.”

At ﬁve and a half John announced - “My two best friends are God and Uncle Sam.”

November 1, 1923: John at eight is dearer than ever before. This was the afternoon for them to go to the swimming-pool and for the ﬁrst time they came home alone on the trolley!

March 14, 1932: John watched his Dad operate this morning and is intensely interested.

June 19, 1933: John went off with three other boys in Alan Ford’s roadster, early this A.M., bound for Washington and eventually the Chicago fair!

July 1, 1933: John arrived this afternoon ahead of schedule, sun-burned and very happy, traveled over 2000 miles, saw the “Century of Progress” fair at Chicago and had interesting experiences. He read poetry aloud to me this evening. 104 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs

June 25, 1934: A beautiful day for John’s graduation, and we are proud of his diploma from Hotchkiss.

September 4, 1937: John got several medals swimming at Candlewood today.

November 5, 1937: John arrived to be Bill’s best man.

June 22, 1938: John is Class Poet and we were very proud of him when he read his poem. Festivities all day. Very happy. While these diary entries speak for themselves, this example can be used to suggest how to decide which references need to be linked to additional data. The selection of his name was delayed a few days after his birth. The standard tradition of the family’s culture was to give the eldest son the ﬁrst name of his father and a middle name that was the family name of his mother. So John’s older brother was named William Wheeler Bainbridge. As Chap. 1 noted, his paternal grandmother, Lucy, was rather domineering, and her father’s name had been John Seaman, so the “we decided” in “we decided to name baby John Seaman” may have represented capitulation to her demand, rather than a freely-formed decision. The January 1916 smile at Billy was to brother William. Nicknames are variable, and when John’s father had been a small boy, he was called Willie not Billy. “Best’s for shoes” refers to the name of a clothing department store. A rather high quality online blog called The Department Store Museum reports that Best’s Apparel was acquired by Nordstrom in 1963.3 According to Wikipedia, the name Best’s vanished in 1973.4 The reference to “operate” in the 1932 sentence meant that John was only 16 years old when his father, Dr. Will, took him into the operating room to watch him do surgery. The 1933 trip with friends to the world’s fair in Chicago places John’s childhood in the larger historical context. The online Encyclopedia of Chicago article on the fair begins: “Century of Progress Exposition (May 27, 1933–November 12, 1933; May 26, 1934–October 31, 1934) Originally intended to commemorate Chicago’s past, the Century of Progress Exposition came to symbolize hope for Chicago’s and America’s future in the midst of the Great Depression.”5 As its website amply demonstrates, the high school John attended is still very much alive: “The Hotchkiss School is an independent boarding school located in Lakeville, Connecticut. Founded in 1891, the school provides an education of academic distinction to 613 students in grades 9 through 12, and to a small number of postgraduates. Students at Hotchkiss come from across the United States and around the world. Graduates attend many of the most selective universities and colleges.”6 The reference to Candlewood concerns a lake with a rather technological history: “On July 15, 1926, Connecticut Light and Power Company’s board of directors approved a plan to create the ﬁrst large-scale operation of pumped storage facilities in the US. By creating the lake and pumping it full of water from the Housatonic River, then

3www.thedepartmentstoremuseum.org/2012/02/nordstrom-seattle-washington.html. 4en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordstrom. 5www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/225.html. 6www.hotchkiss.org/our-school/about. 4.1 Expansion of Narratives from Diaries 105 letting the water pour down the penstock and into a turbine, the utility could produce electricity.”7 Being “Bill’s best man” meant playing a family-symbolic role in the wedding of his brother. On July 1, 1933, John read poetry to his mother, and on June 22, 1938 he read aloud a poem he himself had written to the graduating class of Harvard. Both June, the mother, and John, the son, were poets, but not proliﬁc and not public enough to be recognized for their creativity. A family would do very well to collect poetry written by members, whether posted on the web or collected into a printed anthology. Both June and John expressed the experience of an individual person within a vast and perplexing world. Here, for example, is the ﬁrst stanza of June Wheeler Bainbridge’s 1945 poem, “Out of the Depths:” This is the time of bitterness

When the mighty fall,

When each man thinks he knows the right

And blames another for it all. The concluding stanza of John Seaman Bainbridge’s Harvard class poem expressed a similar perspective on the world of 1938, but summoning his classmates to face the future that included the Second World War which his mother later called “the time of bitterness:” Now we in the dawn’s mist receive our dream

By which we were born far out in inﬁnite night;

And standing by the older dream’s frustration

Know the earth’s insistent falling and ever rising of the light. Perhaps June and John were not ordinary people, yet any of us can keep a diary of our life, or ﬁnd the connections between the diary entries of our deceased family members and the vast waves of human history.

4.2 Controversy About an Explorer’s Diary

Today, many attention-seekers read their diaries aloud in YouTube videos, yet throughout history only a few diarists really become famous. An example I find relevant in multiple ways is Richard E. Byrd, the famous explorer, who controversially claimed to have been the first pilot to have flown over the North Pole, among other feats. The following section will discover him inside the pages of the diary of June’s husband, yet Byrd’s own diaries have raised important and very public questions about the trustworthiness of personal memoirs, and the distinction between

7en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlewood_Lake. 106 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs archivists and publicists. First, brief consideration of the diary of Robert Falcon Scott will provide a basis for comparison. In 1911–1912, a team of explorers led by Scott competed against a rival team led by Roald Amundsen to be the first human beings to reach the ice-bound south pole of the Earth. This was an incredibly difficult journey, requiring weeks of travel across Antarctica, not merely to cross endless snow, but to place food and other resources at selected locations along the way. Scott’s team used dogs and ponies, as well as two experimental motorized sledges that broke down rather swiftly (Kearns and Britton 1955). In the afternoon of January 16, 1912, Scott and his men neared their goal, dragging the heavy supplies for their long return trek because their last dogs had been left hundreds of miles behind. Lieutenant H. R. Bowers spotted a black speck on the snow ahead, and when they reached it they found a flag on a cairn surrounded by the footprints of dogs. In an instant they realized they had lost their race with Amundsen. The next day they came upon the Pole itself, where a month earlier Amundsen had left them a letter to be returned to civilization in case he himself did not make it back. Scott wrote in his diary, “None of us slept much after the shock of our discovery… Well, we have turned our backs on the goal of our ambition with sore feelings, and must face 800 miles of solid dragging—and goodbye to most of the daydreams! Great God! This is an awful place.”8 The South Pole is more than a mile above sea level, so their lungs fought for every breath as they pulled the sole remaining sledge, and vitamin deficiency may also have sapped their strength. A week after their great disappointment, they were lashed by bone-chilling gale winds. Frostbite caused the fingernails of Petty Officer Edgar Evans to fall off, and his nose was disintegrating into a mass of blisters. Chief scientist and physician Edward Wilson was half blind from the snow’s glare and wind’s bite, and he strained a tendon in his leg. Scott hurt his shoulder, and Cap- tain Lawrence Oates had a lame foot. They struggled down the perilous Beardmore Glacier, frequently losing their way, as their physical condition deteriorated. When they reached a cache of supplies, they discovered that their support team had taken most of the food and stove oil, leaving them precious little for the terrible days ahead. A month after leaving the Pole, Evans became dizzy and started vomiting. Then he lost the use of his legs, so the others added him to the load they must drag. He died that night, and after a two-hour silent vigil, the others buried him in the snow. Nearly a month later, the surviving four could hardly haul themselves further. Oates was in worst shape, able to walk only a short distance before resting, one foot terribly swollen and both legs weak. It was time to consider suicide. Scott told Wilson to give each man thirty opium tablets from the supply that had been brought for this grim purpose. A blizzard struck, and Oates knew what his duty was, because without him the other three might possibly survive. Leaving them in their tent, he staggered out into the snowstorm and was never seen again. For eight days the bitter ice-driving wind ravaged their pathetic little camp. The three men prayed for the weather to clear, because they knew that a substantial depot

8Quoted by Reginald Pound, Scott of the Antarctic (New York: Coward-McCann, 1966), p. 285. 4.2 Controversy About an Explorer’s Diary 107 of supplies was only eleven miles ahead, and so long as they retained an ounce of strength they might be able to reach it. But the cruel snow continued. Struggling against the painful frostbite, Scott wrote, “I do not think human beings ever came through such a month as we have come through… Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale… Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of swirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. For God’s sake look after our people.”9 Indeed, Scott’s “rough notes” did tell the tale, because the following October a team searching for Scott found the top six inches of his tent protruding from the drifted snow. Digging revealed the death scene. Scott lay in the middle, with Bowers and Wilson on either side. Wilson’s hands were clasped across his chest, and he appeared to be at peace. Scott’s opium tablets remained unused. Atkinson’s team removed the diaries, a book of poetry that Scott had carried, and thirty-five pounds of geological specimens the dying men had dragged to fulfill the duty of a scientific expedition. Then they removed the tent poles, and closed the fabric down on the bodies, entombing the three explorers in the ice. According to Wikipedia, “Scott’s journals told the story of the March in terms which had a great public impact, elevating him to the role of iconic hero, with few searching questions asked about the causes of the disaster.”10 Subsequent revisionist histories argued that the disaster was the result of Scott’s incompetence, although it is hard to expect anyone to be competent in doing something that no one has done before. A quarter century later, Richard E. Byrd published a book with the evocative title Alone, about his own months surviving a solo mission in Antarctica. He was already famous for the first flight over the North Pole, and for the trans-Atlantic flight that will be the subject of the next section, so his career depended rather heavily on a reputation as a courageous and resourceful explorer. His main source of information was the diary he diligently kept, although the preface of his book suggests the limitations of any narrative based entirely on a diary: The original intention was to use my diary, which was very detailed and voluminous, as the prime ingredient in the book; but I soon discovered that it was almost impossible to maintain an intelligible sequence and proportion by relying on the diary alone, since it was inescapably full of repetitious matter, cryptic references to things only meaningful to myself, and random jottings; besides, there were many very personal things directed to my family which I did not wish to include. In consequence, though I have used considerable sections and many excerpts, I have used them only where I felt they were illuminating. No particular effort has been made in the text to indicate whether the entry for a particular day is complete or only an excerpt lifted bodily from the diary; I did not want to clutter up the book with

9Quoted by Reginald Pound, Scott of the Antarctic (New York: Coward-McCann, 1966), pp. 302–304. 10en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Robert_Falcon_Scott. 108 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs

bibliographical apparatus. However, the diary, as well as numerous notes which I made on my meteorological forms, the calendar, and loose sheets of paper, have been an excellent means of refreshing my memory (Byrd 1938). Whatever one thinks of Byrd’s literary tactics, this paragraph lists many of the issues related to diaries that family historians must deal with, in particular making greater use of “bibliographical apparatus” than he did. The extreme case of diary disorganization was the one Byrd kept of his May 9, 1926, flight toward the North Pole, that became quite newsworthy when it was unexpectedly discovered in 1996, stored in a box primarily containing clothing or equipment from his expeditions. A sober article by the archivist in charge of the collection, Raimund E. Goerler, observed: “For Byrd, the flight to the North Pole launched a thirty-one-year career as a public hero, prominent aviator, and polar explorer. A Congressional Medal of Honor, promotion in rank in the U.S. Navy even though he was retired, and lucrative lecture tours followed in quick succession. A year after his North Pole adventure, Byrd became the third person to achieve a successful transatlantic flight, following Charles Lindbergh, to whom Byrd loaned his runway and his mechanic, and a flight by Clarence Chamberlin and Charles Levine” (Goerler 1999, p. 308). However, three days after Byrd’s flight, Roald Amundsen flew a dirigible airship named the Norge over the North Pole, and questions began to be asked about whether Byrd had in fact been able to reach that destination, or had turned back early. As Wikipedia summarizes the debates that still rage about Amundsen’s achievement, “The three previous claims to have arrived at the North Pole: Frederick Cook in 1908; Robert Peary in 1909; and Richard E. Byrd in 1926 (just a few days before the Norge) are all disputed, as being either of dubious accuracy or outright fraud. If their claims are false, the crew of the Norge would be the first explorers verified to have reached the North Pole.”11 The controversies intensified after discovery of Byrd’s rather incoherent diary, that contained notes from 1925 through 1927, because navigational information on one page seemed to indicate his plane had turned back early, implying he fraudulently misreported his achievement. An especially nasty article in the New YorkTimes denied he was a pioneer: “In reality, he was a smooth-talking liar, a terrible navigator, a victim of paranoid suspicions of subordinates, an air traveler so frightened of flying that he was frequently drunk while others did the piloting, and a man who never hesitated to take unearned credit. As Byrd himself often said, he was a practitioner of ‘the hero business,’ and that required salesmanship, often to the exclusion of candor” (Browne 1996). Setting aside the fury of the specific debate, archivist Goerler made a more general point: Ultimately, responsibility for the accuracy and fairness of creative productions, including books and articles, as well as documentaries, belongs to the author, not the archivist. The archivist is the facilitator, not the interpreter, of evidence. One can argue, however, that flawed documentaries and docudramas are unusually pernicious, more so than publications. The audience for such productions is much broader and more diverse than for books and academic journals. Many of the casual viewers of these productions may have no historical

11en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Amundsen. 4.2 Controversy About an Explorer’s Diary 109

knowledge of the events, of the sources, or of the totality of interpretations from differing experts. The distortion of historical accuracy and fairness of interpretation displayed in the ﬁrst airing of the production will be compounded repeatedly as the production is broadcast again and again (Goerler 1999, p. 319). Such very public diaries as those of Scott and Byrd highlight points that may also be true for modest families that read obscure diaries to experience and understand their own rather private histories. There is no simple antidote for the vice of self- centered arrogance, yet it is precisely the selves of our deceased family members that we wish to know. It is important to place them in a larger historical context, not only to understand what conditions they coped with, but to understand better the origins of the lives we live today. The following example connects Byrd to Dr. Will, revealing more about Byrd’s hero business, but also suggesting that Dr. Will may have been in the same occupation.

4.3 The Mysterious Plane Crash

Dr. Will went to Europe in 1927 to attend the Fourth International Congress of Military Medicine and Pharmacy at Warsaw, one of a biennial series of scientific conferences he had co-founded to continue international medical cooperation after victory in the First World War (Bainbridge 1927, 1928). In Rome, he presented Mussolini a copy of the Italian translation of one of his books, Il Problema del Cancro, then he headed to Paris to meet his wife, June, for a vacation.12 They lunched with old friend Herbert Adams Gibbons at the Pavilion du Lac. Gibbons was an associate of Rodman Wanamaker who was financing the trans-Atlantic flight being undertaken by Richard E. Byrd. The attempt would be made by a crew of four in a three-engine aircraft designed by Anthony Fokker. Gibbons asked Will to become Byrd’s physician while he was in France.13 Aside from the sight-seeing he was planning to do with June, Dr. Will had come to Paris to establish a local chapter of the Military Order of Foreign Wars. He saw the opportunity to launch the local chapter of the Order with a boost from publicity about the airmen, and he immediately started organizing a dinner at which they would be honored guests. The American naval attaché in Paris was Captain Richard Drace White, upon whose explosion-damaged leg and face Dr. Will had operated in the war, and White obligingly provided official orders calling Dr. Will to temporary duty with the Navy.14

12“U.S. Cancer Specialist Received by Mussolini,” The Daily Mail, June 30,1927; William Seaman Bainbridge, Il Problema del Cancro (Luigi Pozzi, Rome, 1927) was a translation of The Cancer Problem (New York: Macmillan, 1914); notes from a speech, Academy of Physical Medicine, Philadelphia, October 20, 1937. 13“Ofﬁcials to Greet Fliers on Arrival At Bourget Field,” New York Herald, Paris edition, June 30, 1927. 14William Seaman Bainbridge, travel diary, May-August, 1927; Captain Richard Drace White, letter to William Seaman Bainbridge, June 28, 1927. 110 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs

The year before, Byrd and Floyd Bennett had flown over the North Pole—or as doubters say, merely toward it—and many expected that Byrd’s team would win the race to fly directly from the United States to continental Europe. Their plane was grandly named America, and they enjoyed a measure of official support from the U. S. Navy. But the aerodynamically unbalanced America had crashed upon landing from a test flight, injuring Bennett so badly he could not fly and requiring lengthy repairs to the plane. Several teams raced to cross the ocean first. With America grounded, Charles Lindbergh won by reaching Le Bourget airfield near Paris on May 21 in the Spirit of St. Louis. Two weeks later, Clarence Chamberlin and Charles Levine flew directly from New York to Germany. Despite being third in the race, Byrd intended to make the flight. His big, three- engine aircraft would give a more convincing demonstration of the future of passenger travel. He would serve as navigator, and one of the best pilot-mechanics from the polar flight, Lieutenant George O. Noville, would manage the fuel supply. Bernt Balchen, a young Norwegian, would be the relief pilot, while veteran aviator Bert Acosta would fly the plane at take-off. The day after lunching with Gibbons, Dr. Will was standing in bad weather at Le Bourget airfield.15 As he wrote in his May–August 1927 travel diary, “Rain, fog almost like London in November settled down, and then more rain. Lights all about the field, rockets and red lights and a revolving light like a lighthouse trying their best to show the way. We, our party, went over the far side of the field where the French have their stations for their flyers; thus we would be nearby if they came. We received messages telling us that Byrd was over France, then that they were over Le Bourget. We listened as requested and we heard unquestionably Byrd’s machine way up above the fog and rain.” But Byrd was unable to find his way down, and the sound of the engine faded away. “Here was a terrible situation. These four brave men had come 3000 miles against wind and weather and were here and could not come down. They must crash in a short time and we were helpless.” Initially, Byrd had flown toward a revolving light he took to be Le Bourget, but when he approached he saw reflections on water and realized it was a lighthouse on the coast north of Paris. They went in the general direction of Paris, but unable to locate the field they turned back toward the lighthouse with the hope of landing safely in water, despite the daunting facts that the plane lacked pontoons, that their approach in the darkness would be blind, and that no one knew how a three-engine plane would behave when it hit the water. With Balchen at the controls, the America crashed in the sea off Ver-sur-Mer. Despite exhaustion and minor injuries, the men were able to inflate a life-raft stowed in the wing and make it to land. Byrd wrote about the last hours aloft, “I doubt if any one could realize the strain of this part of the flight. We had no assurance that the plane could be landed safely on the water, but there was no chance of a safe landing on the land where we could see nothing” (Byrd 1928, p. 269). His praise for his crew was unlimited. “I don’t believe they thought there was much chance of getting down safely, but still they faced gallantly, with steady courage, whatever fate lay ahead” (Byrd 1928, p. 271).

15“Motley Group Stands in Rain Silently Awaiting News of Byrd,” Paris Herald, June 30, 1927. 4.3 The Mysterious Plane Crash 111

But this was not entirely true. Byrd’s account, Balchen’s autobiography, and all the newspaper reports fail to mention that Acosta, the chief pilot, had gone insane. Quite possibly it was really Acosta’s psychotic break that caused the aircraft to crash, or at the very least compounded the challenge of the bad weather and contributed to the failure to find Le Bourget. In his diary, Will described his arrival on the scene: “There in the continuing rain we found the crashed machine pulled up on the shore. A crowd was all about and many trying and succeeding in getting pieces of the plane for mementos. A lone guard was doing his best to keep things intact. The plane looks done for. We went then to the lighthouse and there found the flyers just getting up after a long sleep. Byrd was contused and shocked. His heart was irregular and now and again there was a beat lost. He was carefully examined as were the other three. Byrd called my special attention to Acosta, and Noville confirmed the statement that Acosta was out of his head.” Figure 4.1 is a scan of the page in Dr. Will’s diary that contains these words, and a later page autographed by three of the four aviators: Noville, Acosta, and Byrd. The pages from the diary of Dr. Will for July 1, 1927, continue: “I was told that the last two hours of the flight Acosta had been off his head. He saw things—said that there was another man by the name of Whalen who must get out of the plane or he would ‘brain him.’ This added greatly to the strain of Byrd and Noville. I found Acosta with contusions, shock and a cracked right clavicle. He still maintained that that he must get at that fifth man in the plane. He had made lots of trouble for them. Noville had water on the right knee and contusions. Balchen was contused and somewhat shocked. I had to keep a constant watch of Byrd’s heart and of Acosta’s mental state. We got away quickly. I insisted that the men be saved at every turn.” The new danger was both physical and reputational, mobs drawn by the adventure of celebrities. “The flyers were crowded on every side by frantic people wanting signatures. One flyer said, ‘Commander, please give me a chance at a toilet. They follow me every minute and break down even the closet door.’ Another said: ‘We crashed, Balchen at the wheel, and got ashore, but our troubles were not over then. We walked almost four miles, cold, exhausted and famished. A boy on a bike passed us, but thinking we were tramps, and we looked the part, rushed away, House after house would have none of us. At last about 4 we got to the light house and they took us in and did everything for our comfort. We cannot say enough.’” Will remained with the flyers until they sailed for America several days later. At first he struggled to protect them from the crowds, and to give them some rest, even countermanding the orders of another military man that they be brought immediately to Paris. “I was on the watch, advising, carefully serving, protecting, treating night and day. Lindbergh had made such a wonderful record we wanted to have no slips.” Newspapers as far as China reported that Byrd’s men were “under the supervision of the eminent New York surgeon, Dr. Bainbridge.”16 Two days after the crash, Will took Byrd and Acosta to the American Hospital. “Had X-rays taken of Byrd’s chest to make sure nothing had been seriously injured.

16“Byrd’s Flight,” Peking and Tientsin Times, Tientsin, China, July 12, 1927. 112 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs

Fig. 4.1 Pages from the 1927 diary of Dr. William Seaman Bainbridge

He had been thrown out at the time of crashing some twenty feet landing on his chest on the surface of the water. Also wanted to get a view of his heart and lungs. No bones broken. Heart apparently sound as pictures can tell us. The action is steadying down. Am having them all massaged with hot bath beforehand every day. Acosta has a cracked right clavicle outer end—no displacement. Put him in a sling—hard to keep it on for he makes light of everything—feels it ‘infra dig’ to complain. His mind is clearer and seems coming around all right. Mighty big job to keep these fellows—Acosta and Noville—sober and out of the hands of the reporters who are seeking for sensations. The reporters would gladly find some differences in the accounts and then start up a discussion.” Each of the aviators was giving his story to a particular newspaper, and Acosta was under contract to the New York Journal. “Acosta had to be watched. I was able to help kill several stories he gave which were far from the truth and if printed in America his mental upset would then have 4.3 The Mysterious Plane Crash 113 to be admitted to cover things up and save Byrd. Of course, this would have ended Acosta’s relations with the other flyers and hurt his future. It was my duty to save the situation, which I did. We got Noville next to the dangers and made him take hold. To cover we had Byrd insist that what Noville wrote must be checked over by Acosta and to make Noville feel right Acosta was to let Noville see his stuff.” This trick helped keep Acosta in line, but there was still his journalist to handle. “I went to the Journal reporter and told him if he printed anything bad not looked over by Noville or Byrd that I should have to disclose the fact that I warned him of Acosta’s nervous mental state and that in spite of this confidence he had printed false material. He made all sorts of promises and pulled—destroyed—some material already to be sent off.” At the same time, Will issued a public statement about the flyers’ conditions, referring to their “almost superhuman endurance under terrific strain” and quashing any rumors that anything serious might be amiss with any of them. Dr. Will sought the aid of the chief physician of the American Hospital in case Acosta acted up. “He agreed that things might be serious at any time. When tired or nervous, Acosta still says he is going ‘to brain that Whalen man.’ He still maintains there were five in the plane and he brought all the trouble.” A room was set aside at the hospital with special nurses in case Acosta had to be confined, and Will sedated the delusional aviator. “This was the only way I could hold him. Gradually he came out of all this. Byrd most anxious and urged me to take no chances as he, Byrd, knew his man. Noville and Acosta likely to drink too much, and they did!” Dr. Will stuck close to Acosta at all times, and many of the newspaper photos of the various ceremonies show him standing nearby, more military ribbons on his chest than on any other, ready to deal with anything that happened. Byrd, Noville and Acosta attended a dinner Dr. Will had organized to kick off the Paris chapter of the Military Order of Foreign Wars, and both Levine and Chamberlin were also in attendance along with many of Will’s medical colleagues. Balchen was off at Chez les Vikings, a Scandinavian restaurant, being celebrated by the city’s small Norwegian community. Both Byrd and Noville spoke, but Acosta kept silent. The three autographed a page of hotel stationery for Dr. Will which he added to his diary, as we see in Fig. 4.1. Byrd wrote, “Best of luck.” In a fine, careful hand, Noville wrote, “Sincere regards to Commander Bainbridge.” In large, black letters that swirled round and round, Acosta wrote, “To my doctor and friend.” Acosta’s temporary madness might seem easy to explain. After all, the crew had been exhausted by their preparations even before starting the flight, and many hours flying at hazard through terrible weather was a great strain. But Lindbergh had not lost his mind. Nor had Chamberlin, Levine, Byrd, Noville or Balchen. It was not that Acosta was a novice. Indeed, Chamberlin wrote that even years before the Paris flights, “Bert was one of the legendary heroes of American aviation; he had taught the instructors of the Army flying fields how to go up to the sky in ships and come down alive, and he was said to have flown in everything but a kite” (Chamberlin 1928). With Chamberlin, Acosta had set a world record by staying aloft over Long Island for more than fifty-one hours without refueling. 114 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs

A possible clue to the cause of Acosta’s breakdown was the name of the fifth man he imagined had joined the Atlantic flight: Whalen. Although Rodman Wanamaker had financed the Byrd flight, he did not supervise it closely, leaving the day-to-day management to Grover Whalen. Before joining Whalen’s team, Acosta had worked in the competing team under Levine, vying with Chamberlin to be the pilot for Levine’s attempt. Purely on a lark, Levine had let his nine-year old daughter, Eloyse, take a short flight with Chamberlin which nearly ended in disaster when the landing gear broke upon take-off. Acosta may have felt that Chamberlin’s perfect emergency landing, returning Eloyse unhurt to her appreciative parents, decided the competition between them. Only the terrible injuries Bennett had received gave Acosta a chance to fly with Byrd. When Chamberlin flew, his boss (Levine) was on board, and Acosta knew that had he flown in Chamberlin’s place his boss would have flown with him. Whalen was Acosta’s later boss, and perhaps the mental strain of the flight and the uncontrollable relations with bosses that had transferred Acosta from one team to another became confused in his mind. The distorted face of one of his real comrades, illuminated only by the flashes from the engine exhausts, may have reminded him either of Levine or Whalen himself, and given rise to the hallucination. Dr. Will had extensive experience dealing with insane patients, and believed that extreme physical stress could precipitate acute madness that might vanish after a time, but he thought that usually there was a pre-existing mental weakness that would explode into full insanity under physical or emotional stress (Bainbridge 1927). Thus he could hope that calming care could restore his aviator-patient to full mental health, but he could not be sure. Afterward, Acosta resumed his flying career but never did fully regain his psychological balance. Wild stunting lost him his license; financial collapse came with the failure of a aircraft company he was involved with, and he sank into poverty and drunkenness. His daughters would briefly rehabilitate him, giving him one more moment of glory in the Spanish Civil War, but tuberculosis would finally kill him (Newton 1977).

4.4 Correspondence

Individuals differ greatly in the form, content and magnitude of the documentary evidence they leave about their lives. That was certainly true in the past when many people were illiterate, and preservation of narrative materials was costly in time and money. Today, large factions of the population communicate daily by email, mobile device text messaging, and other Internet-based means. But the modern media of communication are rather ephemeral, and few people take the effort to copy their more interesting emails into durable form. This section of the chapter will see how pre-Internet forms of correspondence can be assembled into narratives, in connection with other information dating from the same time, hoping that some lessons for cultivation of modern electronic correspondence can be extrapolated. The primary 4.4 Correspondence 115 meaningful connection is that we shall examine different periods in the life of the diarist we just considered. Figure 4.2 is a letter written by William Seaman Bainbridge to his mother, Lucy Seaman Bainbridge, on April 30, 1885, when he was just fifteen years old. A very small set of family correspondence from that period survived, just three letters in that particular season. The other two were written on exactly the same kind of lined paper, one being a one-page note from mother to son on March 9 from Princeton, Kentucky, and a second note from son to mother dated May 24. Most likely, the mother retrieved her note from the son, and preserved them because they expressed their ideals for the relationship between them, and the developing character of the boy. He signed the April 30 note as “from your strong staff,” a biblical reference to Jeremiah 48:17, but also perhaps to Psalm 23, that she used to define the role in life he was supposed to play. In 1917, she dedicated her book about her social work, Helping the Helpless in Lower New York: “To my son who has ever been ‘My Strong Staff’” (Bainbridge 1917). Their home in 1885 was in Brooklyn Heights, at 160 Prospect Place, between Carleton and Vanderbilt avenues (Lain 1889a, b). This was in the independent city of Brooklyn, New York, which was absorbed as a borough of New York City five years later. Life for the family seemed to stabilize, now that Lucy’s husband—Will’s father—had become became superintendent of the Brooklyn City Mission and Tract Society, but Lucy often travelled on speaking tours throughout the 1880s (Rochester Theological Seminary General Catlogue 1900). There were great pressures on Will to become a skilled, hard-working adult, and he had already become a newspaper boy. He earned a penny for every copy of the New York Post he sold, because the retail price was three cents, while the wholesale price was only two cents. In the last week of January, 1885, he earned $10.36, which according to an unofficial online inflation calculator would have been worth $260 in 2018.17 We know about his newspaper work because the family preserved pages of his account notebook, dated December 16, 1884 through April 21, 1885. He printed formal calling cards on his own printing press, “Wm. S. Bainbridge,” their ornate letters prophesying a successful professional career of one kind or another.18 Having enlisted in the Cadet Company of the Thirteenth Regiment of the New York National Guard, in February 1885, he helped capture a prisoner in a simulated battle.19 In May, he served on the reception committee for a cadet drill presided over by mayor Seth Low.20 These activities oriented toward the military prepared him to attend the Mohegan Lake military academy boarding high school the next year, mentioned in the previous chapter. Its 1886 catalogue announced: “free from the distracting and pernicious influences of large towns and railroad centres,” the school intended “to give a thor-

17www.ofﬁcialdata.org/1885-dollars-in-2018?amount=10.36. 18Calling card in my possession. 19“Memo Concerning Dr. William Seaman Bainbridge,” December 1942, “yellow” typescript. 20“Review and Reception of the Cadet Company, 13th Regiment, Infantry, N. G. S. N. Y.” Program, Robert Bruce, Printer, May 9, 1885. 116 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs

Fig. 4.2 A letter from a son to his mother written at age fifteen 4.4 Correspondence 117 ough, Christian, preparatory education to boys from ten to eighteen years of age.”21 It further proclaimed, “We do not aim to reform bad boys, but to train the young and inexperienced, so that they may become good men.”22 Note that this rhetoric contrasts immoral cities with traditional rural and small-town life, and places great pressure on boys to become responsible men. Going to Mohegan ended Will’s newspaper delivery service and separated him from his family, so the 1885 letters marked the zenith of his childhood development. His April letter begins: “Dear Mother, I have received your postal card dated Wed. A. M. Baltimore and am glad to hear from you. Have you received my three postals?” Postcards still exist, of course, yet they seem like a primitive form of Twitter tweets, containing little text but sometimes carrying a picture, for example of the locale a tourist is visiting. So there is a sense in which 1885 communications were modern, just not electronic or instantaneous. The letter discussed a bank check that had come in the mail, as well as a receipt from the school that his adopted sister, “Nellie,” attended. This businesslike letter contained a very domestic detail: “My pants have given out in the seat again but I can get along with my black ones till you get back.” The letter ends with two religious quotations, and searching for the text online revealed that this one was a verse by Reverend John Newton: “To thy saints, while here below, With new years, new mercies come; But the happiest year they know, Is their last, which leads them home” (Newton 1853). The first sentence of the May 24, 1885, letter contrasted serious adult business with the fun we might expect a child of fifteen to experience today: “Dear Mother: I am sitting at Father’s desk and have just finished straightening the accounts, and puss is running around playing with a mouse which she has just caught.” Seemingly an adult already at age fifteen, we might have expected Will to marry in his early twenties, but in fact he did not marry June Wheeler until September 11, 1911, when his age was 41 and hers was 32. They had met late in 1904.23 They saw each other occasionally, and on December 27, 1905, he gave a theater party for his sister Helen, seeing “The Lion and the Mouse” by Charles Klein, and they all dined afterward at the Astor (Klein 1906). On February 22, 1906, Will went to Glenheim for dinner. About this point in the courtship, a terrible argument broke them apart, as June put it, according to her daughter Barbara, “after he’d taken me to hear a shouting threatening evangelist.”24 Barbara Bainbridge McIntosh wrote extensively about her mother’s courtship in a novelized family history she titled Mustard Seed, that we shall see again in Chap. 9.In a letter to me, dated October 22, 1984, she said of this work, “I have called it ‘fiction’ as a sort of personal protection really and also to give myself a free hand to imagine and invent. But it runs very close to the truth so much so that I sometimes no longer know what is fact and what fiction.” According to her manuscript, the evangelist’s sermon was on The Wages of Sin, “a description of hell and its horrors, punishments

21Annual Catalogue of Mohegan Lake School (Peekskill, New York: Mohegan, 1886), p. 6. 22Annual Catalogue of Mohegan Lake School (Peekskill, New York: Mohegan, 1886), p. 8. 23Diary of June Ellen Wheeler for 1901–1905. 24Barbara Bainbridge McIntosh, “Legacy by L. E. Hyde,” unpublished manuscript, 1979, p. 20. 118 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs meted out to the dead and to the living.” The next day, Dr. Will apologized to her and explained that while fascinated by the evangelist he did not agree with him, but June suspended their relationship. On May 18, 1907, June Ellen Wheeler embarked on a grand tour of Europe, informally attached to a fact-finding junket of the United States Commission on Immigration headed by Republican Senator William Paul Dillingham of Vermont25 (Dillingham 1989). Her cousin William R. Wheeler, later to be assistant secretary of commerce and labor, was Theodore Roosevelt’s appointee, and the party was rounded out by Senator Latimer, three congressmen, and sixteen assorted friends and relations. Cousin “Billy” brought his wife Alice, and June shared a cabin with Olive Latimer, “a frivolous, kindhearted, very southern girl of twenty.”26 The official aim of the trip was to learn the emigration policies of various nations, thus to help the United States decide its immigration policy. The six official members of the commission would split into three pairs. One would investigate the situation in Greece, Asia Minor, and Turkey, while another would do the same in Germany, Belgium, Holland, and France. Wheeler and Dillingham would deal with Austria-Hungary and Russia.27 The ladies—called “appendices” by a Washington newspaper28—would travel around with the others, adding beauty to the voyage. June rode a gondola through the canals of Venice with Dillingham.29 They took walks in Vienna, Budapest, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, and London. In St. Petersburg, they marveled at the beauty of St. Isaac’s church, with its ten columns of malachite and two of lapis lazuli.30 June returned from this exotic realm to Glenheim on September sixth, and the next evening Senator Dillingham telephoned. A romance had blossomed, and Dr. Will seemed entirely out of the picture. Two points about the senator deserve mention, and both may have burdened his relationship with June. First, as Wikipedia reports in a page titled The Dillingham Flaw, he was rather ideological: “The Dillingham Flaw is a phenomenon of faulty logic when nativists misinterpret and react negatively to the presence of immigrants in their midst.”31 Second, he was born way back in 1843, thus more than a generation older than June.32 For whatever reason, Dr. Will was able in 1909 to resume his courtship of June. He visited Glenheim for tea the day before June Wheeler’s twenty-ninth birthday. A few days later he sent her orchids, gave her supper at the Waldorf, and took her to Charles Ran Kennedy’s play “The Servant in the House” (Kennedy 1908). On July 1, 1909, he wrote a letter to her from the cultural summer resort at Chautauqua, New York, beginning, “We did have a good time on Tuesday—did we not? We got back

25Dillingham 1989; “‘My Happiest Hour,’ Told by Well-Known Men,” New York Times, March 26, 1911, part 5, p. 10. 26June Ellen Wheeler, letter to parents, May 20, 1907. 27“Discourage Immigration,” New York Times, August 13, 1907, p. 3. 28June Ellen Wheeler, letter to parents, June 4, 1907. 29June Ellen Wheeler, letter to parents, July 8, 1907. 30June Ellen Wheeler, letter to parents, July 24, 1907. 31en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillingham_Flaw. 32en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_P._Dillingham. 4.4 Correspondence 119 home without incident and in good season.” This was the ﬁrst in a series of courtship letters and postcards that June kept and that are currently in my possession: 7 from 1909, 7 from 1910, and fully 40 from 1911. If we were archiving 54 email messages today, or even 54,000, there are several easy ways we could do it. They could be assembled into a single text ﬁle, with standardized date formats, so we could instantly search for the messages sent in a particular day or including particular words. Or each message could be one row of a spreadsheet, perhaps one paragraph per cell, so that family historians could add comments, categorization, and other metadata as they worked on the material. The handwriting in Dr. Will’s messages to June is somewhat hard to read, and he often complains that a very heavy case load of medical patients has exhausted him. He sometimes comments that he had not received a message from her in the past day or two, but her messages to him have not survived so we cannot combine them with his to see both sides of the dialogue. Here, to illustrate the way that a single theme with multiple connections can be extracted from a correspondence, we shall include observations and suggestions he made in 1911 about their preparations for the wedding, in excerpts from these letters:

July 3: Would you like to have eight instead of six ushers and include Gifford? With six and having the “Judge” and Hills I could not ﬁt in Gifford. Of course many may be out of town and then there would be no need of so many, but again there may be a very large number and eight might not seem out of place. What say you?

July 18: June dear… About “at home after Dec. 1st at Gramercy Park,” that would be as you and I wish most certainly, but it would be a very unwise thing from the standpoint of the profession. If that is stated many would take it that I would prolong my stay away and not be at work until that date.

July 23: How are you really feeling these days June? Way down deep! Surely we both have had the stress and strain in life - are there not to be years of peace, of joy, of happy service before us? I believe there are to be.

July 31: Letters from abroad show us clearly that we have acted wisely in keeping all quiet. I will explain later.

August 12: The cards are here - they do look strange. Can that mean us? Yes, it does and it will not be long before it will really be a fact.

August 13: [includes a copy of the proof of a card to be sent with wedding invitations, saying only “Marriage ceremony at four o’clock”] What train? What special electric car for guests? I am carefully going over the cards and invitations - a brown study resulting - the papers, the lettering, ﬁne - could not be better, but how about the train for those who are to be at the ceremony. If they take the 3:40 they would be too late.

August 21: Now dear girl on receipt of this please send out the invites except… [four names] For reasons you know - then hold please until Sept. 1.

August 24: My special four I ﬁgure can safely go out Aug 27 and we need not wait until the ﬁrst, that is - Mr. and Mrs. Bainbridge Colby…

August 28: Miss Hall will send you more names tomorrow. Some are those who will feel it if they are not invited - others can go on the “A list.” 120 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs

August 30: Dearest June: Does seem strange to hear about the wedding presents and they are really ours! … Well, next week! I will write the ushers for Wednesday. The time I will set for them will be as you say 5:30. I fear some cannot get off any earlier. … Of course you are keeping a list and names of presents so I can see later. Wish I could be there as they come in.

The first phrase, quoted from a July 3, 1911 letter, names two of the ushers at the wedding events, a role that served the symbolic goal of representing the social structure of the community, as well as doing limited practical chores. Other evidence indicates that both Hills and Gifford had been suitors who dated June, in competition with Senator Dillingham and Dr. Will. The evidence about Walter Gifford is very clear, because he became a steadfast family friend and a well-documented businessman, serving for a while as president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (Gifford 1928). On April 15, 2011, Hills wrote June a letter that has survived, in response to a letter she wrote him communicating privately that she had decided to marry Dr. Will, but research has not yet identified him exactly. A sociological observation is the fact that within an intensely interacting community, at least under some traditional conditions, people must come to terms with competing courtships of which only one becomes a marriage, but close social ties connect all the participants. The July 18 message concerns what the public notice of the marriage should say, given that the couple planned a long honeymoon, but Dr. Will did not want to lose any customers from his medical practice. June preserved as a souvenir a pre-printed hybrid of tourist book and travel diary, in which she wrote a few details of their trip (Cadigan 1909). They sailed on the SS Rotterdam from Hoboken on September 12, 1911, and travelled through Belgium, France and England until the end of October. The July 23 excerpt is but one of many expressions that the couple had undergone great stress, and certainly on Dr. Will’s side that concerned his desperate effort not only to earn money with which to support his future family, but also terrible social- psychological problems with both of his parents. The July 31 quote about “keeping all quiet” refers to a serious problem never explicitly described in the letters. As will be explained more fully in later chapters, Dr. Will’s parents separated in the early 1890s, and he had been forced essentially to support his father financially ever since then, who wandered in search of religious prestige that he never found. In 1911, William Folwell Bainbridge was in Europe, and it was absolutely necessary to keep the wedding secret from him, or he could have transformed the wedding into a bizarre spectacle of family psychiatric conflict. The August 21 and 24 messages relate to this issue, because the four delayed invitations went to people in communication with Dr. Will’s father, including very prominent Bainbridge Colby who was internationally-oriented and later became Secretary of State (Spargo 1963). They even delayed inviting a pastor, Reverend MacArthur of Calvary Baptist Church, who occasionally corresponded with his wayward col- 4.4 Correspondence 121 league.33 Lucy aggressively developed the invitation list of two thousand names, but there would be two parts to the event, the wedding itself and then a larger reception, as suggested by some of the other letter excerpts. The last message, dated August 30, mentions the wedding gifts, and making a list of the gifts and givers was a standard ritual that preserves information of value to family historians. For example, the gift list for the 1937 wedding of Dr. Will’s son William and Barbara Sims identified 78 items, the first of which was “silver bowl belonging to Helen A. Bainbridge.” Of course by the time of her death two decades earlier, her name was Helen Seoane. “Uncle Con” Seoane had remarried, but he and his second wife also contributed a wedding gift, and I remember meeting him a decade later. Thus a deceased person was among those celebrating the wedding, and an in-law family relationship had survived the end of the legal connection.

4.5 Episodic Memories

As mentioned in the first chapter, significant sources of information about our pasts are autobiographical memories of specific events and their context in space, time and meaning. While recognizing that our memories may distort the past, family historians would do well to encourage living family members to write down careful descriptions of past events that are especially meaningful to them personally. Unless problems arise that require guidance from the historian, each individual should do this writing in private, and discuss the memories only after they have been committed to text. One reason is that discussion might stimulate over-interpretation, and another is that individual styles of memory and description should be allowed to flourish. This section will use two very different examples from my own family, precisely because they illustrate stylistic differences. In May 1979, June’s daughter, Barbara McIntosh completed writing down a very large set of episodic memories concerning verbal interactions with her parents, and shared them with her extended family. Her introduction can be taken as good advice about this activity in general: If you were to write down everything you remember having heard said from your earliest childhood that has influenced your life in some way, whose sayings would you record? Whose comments, admonitions, stories, exclamations, passing remarks remain in your head? Perhaps those of one parent, or both, or a combination of people: a teacher, the policeman on the block, an older sister or brother, a grandmother or an uncle. In any case it is the sayings of my parents that I remember best. And, since they are constantly in my mind, I have given myself the luxury of writing them down - confining myself to spoken words and to some of the images they conjure up, refraining, for the most part, from comments of my own. Apparently, Barbara wrote these memories down as they came to mind, then assigned a topic label to each, consisting or a word or short phrase, then arranged

33William Seaman Bainbridge, letters to June Ellen Wheeler, August 7, 1911; August 9, 1911; August 11, 1911; August 13, 1911; August 15, 1911; August 16, 1911; August 21, 1911; August 23, 1911; August 24, 1911; August 28, 1911. 122 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs them in alphabetical order by topic. The labels were capitalized, and here they will introduce each memory. In some, both of her parents appear, but in most cases only one, identiﬁed by “she said” (June Wheeler Bainbridge) or “he said” (William Sea- man Bainbridge). Here for example are some personal proverbs her mother expressed, possibly on more than one occasion:

ATTACHMENTS: “Do not attach yourself to new people too quickly. It is easier to go forward than to go backward.” She said, “It is hurtful and embarrassing to have to withdraw.”

CROSSING STREETS: “If you have to cross a busy street,” she said, “wait on the sidewalk until you see several others about to go over. Attach yourself to them rather than cross alone.”

HOUSEHOLD MACHINERY: “Don’t let the machinery of your household squeak,” she told me. “Keep it running smoothly.”

IMMITATION: “All you need to put on a series of acts is one hat worn at different angles,” she said.

LANGUAGE: “If you want to learn to speak a foreign language,” she said, “you must have the courage to make a fool of yourself, to talk and make mistakes.”

LIGHT TOUCH: “Don’t be heavy about life,” she said. “Keep the light touch going.”

MANNERS: “The rules of behavior are based on consideration and kindness,” she said.

QUIET: “I like to draw quiet around me sometimes, like a cloak,” she said.

ROOM CARE: “Tidy up the living-room before you go to bed. It will reward you in the morning,” she said.

TALKERS: “One good talker at a dinner party is enough,” she said. “If you have two neither one may have a good time.” In an interview to an historian, she recalled this last memory in different terms: ‘“Never have two lions at the same dinner party,’ my mother warned me. ‘They antagonize each other, and you don’t get the best out of either’” (Kisseloff 1989). All of these personal proverbs express the value of moderation, through quiet gentleness and consideration for other people. Although clear and framed in terms of everyday life, they are abstract, reported in no particular context. In contrast, a few other examples concern very deﬁnite episodes, but ones her mother had experienced, not Barbara herself:

BERNHART: She watched Sarah Bernhart play Hamlet on the opening night of her new theatre in Paris, Saturday, December 16th 1899. She said she listened eagerly for the French translation of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not To Be” speech. “Ay, there’s the rub” became “Ah, voila l’obstacle!”

BLIZZARD OF ‘88: “Of course I didn’t get to school on that day,” she said. “The men couldn’t get to work and the whole city was disrupted. I remember opening the front door to a friend of my brother - he actually had little icicles hanging from his mustache! Someone stuck a pair of boots upside down in the snow - a gruesome sight.”

HARLEM RIVER BRIDGE: “Father took me to the opening of the bridge. I sat up on his shoulders to see above the crowd. Mother didn’t go. When I got home I had ﬂeas in my hair. A terrible fuss was made.” 4.5 Episodic Memories 123

STATUE OF LIBERTY: “It came over from France in a ﬂeet of ships,” she said. “I saw the big boxes that contained it lying about the pier downtown.”

Because these four second-hand memories relate to very public events, it is possible to connect them to other information, perhaps spotting errors in June’s or Bar- bara’s memory. For example, the name of the actress in the first one is misspelled, given as “Bernhart” rather than “Bernhardt.” Sarah Bernhardt was an actress, not an actor, so it was impossible she played the male character Hamlet in 1899, we might quickly suggest. Wikipedia reminds us there are two main female characters in Shakespeare’s play, each revealing interesting tensions in family relations: “In William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Gertrude is Hamlet’s mother and Queen of Denmark. Her relationship with Hamlet is somewhat turbulent, since he resents her marrying her husband’s brother Claudius after he murdered the King (young Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet).”34 “Ophelia is a character in William Shakespeare’s drama Hamlet. She is a young noblewoman of Denmark, the daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes, and potential wife of Prince Hamlet.”35 But wait! Female Bernhardt actually did play the role of male Hamlet, in a newly renovated theater she named after herself. The error in the episodic memory, if there were any beyond the minor misspelling, may concern the date, December 16, as Wikipedia suggests in its analysis of Bern- hardt’s pioneer role-play, first noting that her threater opened January 21, then: “On 20 May, she premiered one of her most famous roles, playing the titular character of Hamlet in a prose adaptation which she had commissioned from Eugène Morand and Marcel Schwob. She played Hamlet in a manner which was direct, natural, and very feminine. Her performance received largely positive reviews in Paris, but mixed reviews in London. The British critic Max Beerbohm wrote, ‘the only compliment one can conscientiously pay her is that her Hamlet was, from first to last, a truly grand dame.’”36 The three other second-hand episodic memories can be placed in the wider context of the history of New York City. The Great Blizzard of 1888 took place around March 11–14, when June was still eight years old (Cable 1988). Her future husband was by then eighteen and living in Brooklyn, and we know a good deal about what June’s future family was doing. Lucy was on a lecture tour and was stuck in Deckerton, New Jersey, where she improvised by holding a series of religious social events for the town, most creatively a “Heathen Frolic” at the Presbyterian parsonage, acting out exotic customs in alien costumes collected during her recent two-year tour of Asia. From Brooklyn, where fifty-mile-per-hour winds had blown two feet of snow into drifts high enough to hide an occasional horse or human corpse, Lucy’s husband wired that neither the ferries nor the street cars were running.37 Writing this paragraph almost exactly thirteen decades after the blizzard, it was stunning to be reminded

34en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_(Hamlet). 35en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophelia. 36en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bernhardt. 37“Deckertown Doings,” Sussex Register, Wednesday, March 21, 1888. 124 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs that our modern obsession with electronic communications is not as modern as we may imagine—“wired” not “emailed” though the communication may have been. The memory of the Harlem River Bridge clearly came from June’s childhood, as she watched while sitting high up on her father’s shoulders. When, exactly? Which bridge, exactly? The current website of New York City’s Department of Transporta- tion lists eight bridges across the Harlem River, but it seems likely that the memory dates from 1884 when the predecessor of the current Madison Avenue Bridge opened.38 Other 19th century bridges across that river opened either too early or too late, for little June to climb on her father’s shoulders. The memory of construction material for the Statue of Liberty could date from around 1884 as well. Given that Barbara McIntosh’s episodic memories all concerned things her parents had said, not events she had witnessed herself that were primarily non-verbal, it seemed that a contrasting example would be needed here. As it happened, a few years ago I had written down some of my own childhood episodic memories, and they are almost entirely non-verbal, rather more spatial and engineering-related than Barbara’s memories. While I wrote them down in the order they came to mind, I clustered them by location, including 82 that happened in Bethel, Connecticut, which I numbered from B1 through B82. Here is a typical subset in the order in which they were recalled: B50. I watch my father hammer together four small boards to make a Fourth of July rocket launcher. Two boards are less than a yard long, maybe five inches wide, and an inch thick. He nails them together along the long edge, to make the trough to hold the rocket. Then he nailed two shorter boards crosswise, to serve as legs holding the launch trough at a forty-five degree angle. B51. In the darkness of July Fourth night, my sister and I stood in our back yard, near the wall facing the field, my sister a few feet to the right of me. My father showed us how to hold a lighted roman candle, out from our bodies, at an angle upward, swirling them very slightly, as they made a hissing sound and shot balls of fire into the field. B52. I watched as my father nailed a July Fourth pinwheel to a tree, a single nail through a hole in the middle. He lit the fuse, and it spun around, spraying sparks in a big disk in the air. B53. My father used kerosene and a torch to destroy huge insect cocoons on trees. B54. Riding in a jeep to Fort Riley in Kansas, someone tells me there are lots of prairie dogs on the land, so I look hard to the right as we ride along. B55. I helped my father take our lawnmower to get the blades sharpened. B56. With my father, I watched a blacksmith shoe a horse. Although the first three are distinct from each other, they probably happened on the same day, or two days in the same year, most likely but not definitely 1949, because we moved away early in 1950. Today’s often strict laws limiting private fireworks did not exist back then, and I seem to recall hearing that one of our favorite stores in Bethel, Mullaney’s, once had an accidental fireworks fire. The emphasis of

38www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/infrastructure/bridges-harlem.shtml. 4.5 Episodic Memories 125 the first three episodes is that careful handling rendered fireworks safe and also made them even more interesting. Memory B53 took place in a different context, but also involved intentional outdoors fire. The connection from B53 to B54 is mysterious living creatures seen from a technical perspective, and the link connecting all seven of these episodes is that they concern my father while highlighting technology. The “someone” in B54 could have been my father, but the “jeep” was definitely a military vehicle. My sister and I had accompanied our mother on a very impressive train trip in 1945 to Fort Riley, Kansas, to bring my father home after the war. Despite having been not yet five years old, I recall many physical details of this trip, presumably because it was the only long journey far away from Bethel, until we moved away for good. A general issue about episodic memories is that they can dissolve into general world knowledge, which is less likely if the event took place outside ordinary daily life. Episodic memories B55 and B56 do not fully communicate a defining feature of all these memories. They are all visual, rather than verbal as in Barbara’s case. I have a sense of exactly what direction I was looking, and about where on the map the event took place. B55 took place west of home, probably on Dodgingtown Road, also known as Route 302 today. B56 took place south or south east, perhaps on Putnam Park Road. More specifically, we drove west on Wolfpits Road to reach the lawnmower shop, and east on the same road to reach the blacksmith. I often check locations in Google Maps, including the street view, and if it really mattered one could combine examination of maps with scanned advertisements in old newspapers, to identify exactly which business we visited. But that might constitute excessive attention to unimportant details, unless the focus of our study were the engineering details of rural life at that point in history, when machines were replacing animals. Often, an episodic memory will include elements that can be experienced again, even now, for example seeing a motion picture: “B36. We drove in an unfamiliar direction to see the movie, Bill and Coo, acted by live birds. B37. In one of a very small number of times I was left off at the Danbury movie theater, I saw one episode of a Dick Tracy serial, which greatly impressed me with its artistic use of black and white photography. The episode ended with Dick unconscious on a conveyor belt toward a fiery furnace.” I did not see the conclusion until I bought the video decades later. As in the proverbs Barbara recalled her mother speaking, sometimes a clear memory is a compilation of several identical events, and here is one that can be experienced virtually today. On the standard route from our home to the town of Bethel, at one point a side road branched at a slight angle to the right, up a hill to provide access to a street on the top, them merged back down again. As a small child, my sister Con- stance loved telling our father, “Up a lill!” That was her instruction for him to drive “up the hill” to take that slight diversion every time we went to town. Remarkably, it can be experienced today by driving in the Google Maps street view, because in 126 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs

September 2012 the Google photographers traveled both ways at the intersection of Greenwood Avenue and Prospect Street.39

4.6 A Family Narrative Example

A very practical method for assembling memories into coherent, interesting, and durable narratives, is using wiki technology. In its most simple form, each piece of correspondence would be represented on one page of the wiki, perhaps in both original and pure text forms if it was handwritten, with links to related items. Struc- tures comparable to a table of contents, an index, and a freshly written descriptive summary of particular sets of documents may also be needed. Chapter 9 will also devote a section to wikis, and they are cited throughout this book. For a decade I operated an academic wiki, and a brief supplement can communicate general ideas about the value of such systems for family history. The wiki launched December 4, 2007, at PBworks, a “free/premium hosted workspace service which allows collaborative editing of pages and files.”40 Called Convergentsys- tems, it was inspired by the Converging Technologies projects I had organized in collaboration with nanotechnology leader Mihail Roco. (Roco and Bainbridge 2003; Bainbridge and Roco 2006a, b, 2016; Roco et al. 2013). Its main project was the May 9–11, 2008, conference held in World of Warcraft (WoW). This is believed to have been the first really large scientific conference held inside a gameworld, with about 120 avatars attending each of the three plenary sessions. The proceedings were published in 2010 as a conventional academic book, titled Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual (Bainbridge 2010). The focus of the conference was the social and information science of virtual worlds, especially massively multiplayer online games like WoW itself. Yet the wiki procedures can readily be adapted for use in family history. A simple example follows. Ernest Edward Wheeler (1875–1955) had no children, but as death neared the son and grandson of his already-deceased brother Walter coaxed him to write a family history memoir, preserving a few of the anecdotes he had told them over the years. His nephew, Walter Heber Wheeler Jr. (1897–1974) was the chief executive of Pitney Bowes, an information technology company that remains successful if not famous today, and he provided the Dictaphone into which Ernest would recite his memories, that others would transcribe. The project was guided, and the memoir edited, by Thomas Chilton Wheeler (1927–2002). In 1975 “Tommy” gave me a copy of an equally fascinating memoir his recently deceased father Walter had written, and that may be the time he gave me the somewhat noisy photocopy of Ernest’s memoir that will be described here. Their physical remains are together with “Grandma Nell” and other close relatives in Mount Hope Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, Westchester

39www.google.com/maps/@41.3715199,-73.4054704,3a,75y,265.54h,97.73t/data=!3m6!1e1! 3m4!1sMN_WOltJuusjvd1A1-URfw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656. 40en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBworks. 4.6 A Family Narrative Example 127

Fig. 4.3 The wiki page introducing an expanded personal memoir

County, New York.41 Ernest’s sister, June, provided a little advice from a distance, living then with her daughter Barbara McIntosh in Edinburgh, Scotland, and both Thomas and Barbara provided brief commentaries that were included in the typescript of Ernest’s dictation. To get a feel of how family historians might use the wiki format, even before the complexities of organizing multiple contributors, I pasted the sections of Ernest’s memoir into nine pages of the Convergent systems wiki, then experimented with various ways of connecting to related materials. The tenth page that introduced this section of the wiki is shown here in Fig. 4.3. On the right is a portrait of Ernest at the height of his career as an attorney, and a blurry image of the typewritten text of the cover page of his memoir is on the left. Below are links to the comments by Thomas (Preface) and Barbara (Introductory), and to the six sections of the memoir itself. The appendix is Ernest’s obituary from the Herald Statesman newspaper in Yonkers, New York, where Glenheim was located.42 The ﬁrst section of Ernest’s memoir was a quick survey of the poorly documented genealogy of the family, and particularly its division into New England, New York, California, and North Dakota branches. A link back to Chap. 2 of this

41www.findagrave.com/cemetery/65345/memorial-search?firstName=&lastName=Wheeler& page=1#sr-155098598. 42Herald Statesman, Yonkers, New York, February 23, 1955, p. 2. 128 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs book is the second section, titled “Heber Wheeler (1798–1857) and His Wife Sarah Pullen (1800–1870),” given that Sarah’s 1847 portrait is Fig. 2.1. Both had died before Ernest was born, but his parents had told him much about them. He summarized his understanding of Sarah thus: Sarah Pullen, Heber’s wife and my grandmother, was a woman of strong convictions, which she often took occasion to express with considerable vigor. Indeed, she seems to have maintained a sort of neighborhood salon, and was often consulted by men of the town and vicinity. That she was an anti-abolitionist may be a shock to some of her descendants. To her, the abolitionist New England orators, as Wendel Phillips, were warmongers forcing Lincoln’s hand to disunion, and making it difficult for him to hold the border states. I repeat here the line of argument she used, as repeated to me by my father and mother. It is a statement of one group of anti-abolitionists. She believed in the gradual freeing of the slaves by purchase or compensation, or by some agreement that wise men should be able to reach and so avoid the horrors of civil war in this late period of civilization. To hold these opinions in New England took courage and her stand excites my admiration. Browser-accessed wikis naturally permit the insertion of hyperlinks, so “Wen- del Phillips” in this paragraph could be linked to the Wikipedia page of “Wendell Phillips” that depicts the same person despite the slight difference in spelling: “Wen- dell Phillips (November 29, 1811–February 2, 1884) was an American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, and attorney,” after whom annual awards to students were named at Tufts and Harvard universities in his native Massachusetts.43 The family wiki page containing this paragraph could also have Sarah’s portrait and links to historical publications about the complex debates of her lifetime about how to end slavery in an effective but also less costly manner than the 600,000 deaths in the Civil War. The concluding chapter of this book examines an extensive archive of that period. Yet a document like Ernest’s memoir deserves to be preserved in pure form as well, whether of a separate wiki page or as a downloadable file. Another paragraph from the memoir provides a starting point for extensive data discovery: Our family story of the Norridgewock period includes the tragic ending of the marriage of Aunt Maria (Heber Wheeler’s sister) to the Reverend Hugh Dempsey, a Baptist minister. It was, for those days, a very unusual “traffic” accident involving the smash-up of so gentle a vehicle as an old-fashioned buggy in which the Dempseys were driving a young and skittish horse. The horse took fright and bolted, and there was a smash-up collision with a tree and the horse became cruelly entangled in the wreckage. Mr. Dempsey apparently moved with consideration for the horse’s plight, freed the horse and immediately died. Aunt Maria had three children - Charles, Carroll and Nina - who grew to maturity in Boston, where Charles and Nina married and spent most of their married lives. The Chases (Nina married Hezekiah Chase) later moved to California. Carroll married late in life, had no offspring, and continued to live in and about Boston until the time of his death. Norridgewock is a small town in Maine, and checking its official web page of March 27, 2018, turned up a remarkable historical tradition. A picture of a fancy walking stick inside a wood and glass display box was accompanied by this announcement: “Norridgewock Searches for Boston Post Cane Nominees. Norridgewock’s 102-year old Boston Post Cane holder, Irene Damren, passed away February 12, 2018. In the

43en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Phillips. 4.6 A Family Narrative Example 129 spirit of tradition, the Town now searches for its oldest resident. If you believe you are, or know of, the Town’s oldest resident, please contact the Town Office. The Town Clerk will review all submissions against current records to determine the Town’s oldest resident and next recipient of the Boston Post Cane. Eligible candidates must have been a resident of the Town of Norridgewock for a minimum of 25 of the previous 40 years.”44 A document that can be downloaded from the site explains, “The Boston Post Cane tradition was established in 1909 by the Boston Post newspaper. A special cane was presented to the Board of Selectmen in 700 towns throughout New England, to be presented as an honor to each town’s oldest citizen. The recipient held the honor as long as s/he lived and upon his or her death, the cane would be awarded to the next oldest citizen.”45 The readers would not be mistaken to conclude that New England communities have a distinctive obsession with their history, and that may explain why so many relics and documents were available for application to this book. Wikis are dynamic records, so for this pilot study I used the page for each section of Ernest’s memoir as a parking place to assemble information before deciding on how to structure it. For example, I looked up the nuclear Wheeler and Dempsey families in the 1850 US census, took screenshots of what I found, and pasted them into the wiki. A few days later, once I was sure I understood the implications, I transferred the data to a table, here Table 4.1. The handwriting was somewhat ornate, so I confirmed and expanded the names of Heber’s and Sarah’s children from the Wheeler Genealogy. I suspect that an error or lack of clarity may have been introduced into Ernest’s memoir in the secretary’s transcript of “Aunt Maria (Heber Wheeler’s sister).” She was the daughter of Heber Wheeler and the sister of Thomas Heber Wheeler (Ernest’s father), which the census also named merely Heber without the Thomas. Looking up baby Heber in the online Geni service, we learn he was the “Son of Hugh Dempsey and Maria Dempsey; Brother of Carroll Sumner Dempsey; Nina Maria Dempsey and Charles Hugh Dempsey.”46 Clearly, Reverend Hugh Dempsey’s terrible accident occurred well after 1850, and indeed a variety of records in Ances- try.com date it to 1859, specifically May 11, as shown in the photograph of his tombstone in Find A Grave.47 I have not been able yet to find a record of the exact date of death of the first child he had with Maria, baby Heber, and Ernest did not seem to recall his existence, reporting that the couple had only three children rather than four. But he is memorialized by a tiny, eroded tombstone that stands beside that of his father. The Geneanet online genealogy service says that the couple’s final child, Nina, was born October 7, 1859, which means her mother was pregnant when her father was killed.48 In 1893, a new building was completed for the Baptist church,

44www.townofnorridgewock.com/index.html. 45www.townofnorridgewock.com/uploads/3/4/0/0/34005671/cane_policy.pdf. 46www.geni.com/people/Heber-Dempsey/6000000007244916654. 47www.ﬁndagrave.com/memorial/122608688/heber-dempsey#view-photo=101119947. 48gw.geneanet.org/frebault?lang=en&pz=henri&nz=frebault&ocz=0&p=nina+maria+wheeler& n=dempsey. 130 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs

Table 4.1 Two connected families in the 1850 US census Name Age Sex Property Birthplace In school Heber Wheeler’s Home Heber Wheeler 52 M $5,000 Massachusetts Sarah Barrows Wheeler 49 F Maine Sarah Sumner Wheeler 22 F Maine Caroline D. Wheeler 17 F Maine Yes Charles Carroll Wheeler 15 M Maine Yes Thomas Heber Wheeler 11 M Maine Yes Elizabeth Sylvester 9 F Maine Yes Wheeler Henry Jonathan Wheeler 6 M Maine Yes Maria Wheeler’s Home Hugh Dempsey 34 M $300 Ireland Maria Dempsey 20 F Maine Heber Dempsey 5/12 M Maine and as a history of the area reports, “A memorial window to the memory of Rev. Hugh Dempsey was placed in the new church by his children” (Lawrence 1912). Throughout his memoir, Ernest repeatedly expressed humorous dismay that the Wheelers were not a more famous family, and regretted the lack of major accomplishments by several members. In this paragraph of the California section of his memoir, he mentions Pearl Chase, the daughter of Maria’s daughter Nina: In numbers and distinction, that is in public recognition of services rendered, the California branch certainly lead. They have, however, been recruited by way of the Dakota and Boston tribes, that is the descendants of Aunt Lizzie (Dakota) and Aunt Maria (Boston). Not yet, however, have any in the male line found a place in Webster’s Biographical Dictionary. Although if we searched long enough we could probably ﬁnd such a progenitor in the female line, but she is unfortunately not named Wheeler. I suspect that Pearl Chase (granddaughter of Maria Wheeler Dempsey, one of Heber Wheeler’s seven children) may make a good run for such distinction. Her services to California in conservation of natural and historical characteristics have been very great. The Reader’s Digest has devoted an article solely describing them (Santa Barbara’s Pearl - Issue of March, 1940). Of course today we might consult Wikipedia rather than Reader’s Digest: “Pearl Chase was a civic leader in Santa Barbara, California. She is best known for her signiﬁcant impact on the historic preservation and conservation of that city.”49 Not infrequently, when searching online genealogical and historical services, one encounters not only information but also questions raised by other users. A Find A Grave page for Nina’s husband, Hezekiah Griggs Chase, has this comment from contributor Harold Whiting: “Hezekiah was my great, great grandfather. Harold Chase was my great grandfather, and Pearl’s brother. Mrs. Chase (their mother) was killed in a freak

49en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Chase. 4.6 A Family Narrative Example 131 automobile accident at home in 1913.” So, both Nina and her father had been killed in freak transportation accidents! What was the nature of hers? I was able to make email contact with Harold Whiting, which led to a long telephone conversation in which we were aware that we were relatives, but fully ten steps apart on the family tree. He reported that Nina had driven their car into their garage, gotten out, went in front of it, then something went wrong in the transmission and the car leapt forward, crushing her against the front wall of the garage. Over the half-century span of history between the deaths of father and daughter, technology had advanced considerably, but the human consequences seem to have remained the same.

4.7 Conclusion

Wiki technology is well adapted for the purpose of assembling and sharing multiple facts of family history, connecting them into multiple narratives in a network of page connections, which future generations may explore in any way they wish. The family historians who assemble the materials may prefer a particular narrative, but as the example of Richard E. Byrd suggests, truth may be ambiguous or even multidimen- sional. The end of Chap. 1 distinguished fixed narratives from open narratives, but a family history wiki can be both. As the years pass, a series of family historians can update a wiki by adding new pages that link existing materials in alternate ways, as well as adding more information. The result may be an ecology of stories, plots, theories, and themes. This diversification process need not contradict the facts, but places truth in a more dynamic human and cultural universe. However, there is good reason to value stability. We can worry that any particular online wiki service may suddenly go out of business, so once a section of the family wiki has been completed, it should be downloaded as a single document in a standard format. At the present time, sections of wikis can readily be downloaded as PDF files, but this particular tradition of formats has several technical problems and could vanish from use any year now despite how well it has become established in the marketplace. An alternative approach that recently has become especially feasible, is traditional publication on paper, as a self-published book, through innovative online services such as Lulu or even Amazon.com, and specific examples are mentioned in this book. Especially in cases when a family owns several short memoirs, they could be published together in anthology form, both online and on paper. Each such stable preservation of family history can be like on step on a spiral stairway, which the family ascends. For example, any memoir can be the stimulus for a vibrant interview with a living family member. 132 4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries and Memoirs

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Abstract Since ancient days, question and answer sessions have been a standard way to assemble and interpret the meanings of events and social relationships. In the middle of the twentieth century social scientists sought to formalize this tradition as scientific interviewing, but quickly found themselves debating how rigorous and pre-planned the set of questions should be, as well as the extent to which the interviewer should adjust the methodology in response to the things said by the person being interviewed. In the abstract, these debates concerned the extent to which human beings could be accurately described in terms of a few well-formed theories, hypotheses and concepts. For a while, Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis dominated family-related interviews, but eventually Carl Rogers and many colleagues promoted a more person-centered approach that did not seek to impose any particular ideology. A pair of interviews done with now-deceased prominent sociologists, George Homans and David Riesman, document the failure of Harvard University’s Social Relations movement to achieve a consensus through some unified theory. There- fore, decades later, family historians must select their interview methods in terms of their own goals and prior experience, but the likely starting point is open-ended interviewing, ideally conducted in multiple sessions, with constant comparison across the inputs from different family members. A major online questionnaire study illustrates how to start such a dialogue, through the examples of two open-ended questions, the first abstract, and the second concrete: (1) What is the future of families in our society? (2) How did you personally experience a residential move?

Whether online across the world, or together at home, members of families can reconstruct their shared histories by exchanging questions and answers. It would be a simple matter to send all living family members a short questionnaire—even a very brief monthly questionnaire—to assemble many factual details, such as a list of the places they have lived and their visits to geographically distant relatives. If the family historian notices that several people had visited a given genealogically distant and now deceased relative, then a series of extensive interviews might be in order, asking each of them to report their memories of the dearly departed. Many other topical themes may emerge in any process of sifting through details, that could

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 135 W. S. Bainbridge, Family History Digital Libraries, Human–Computer Interaction Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01063-8_5 136 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members be suitable for interviews. With an emphasis on open-ended exploration, this chapter will consider the methodologies used by social science interviewers, especially the debates over whether questions must be rigorously determined ahead of time, and whether precise theories can be assumed to explain the results. The fundamental principle is that in both the gathering and interpretation of facts, respectful awareness of the person providing the information is central.

5.1 The History of Interviewing

Since the dawn of our species, humans have always exchanged questions and answers, but in the modern world this form of communication has often become more structured, while still focusing on individual-speciﬁc interrogation. For example, in a job interview the prospective employer often already has the applicant’s resume and may develop questions based on the information contained. In academia, graduate students may need to prepare for oral exams, and in a dissertation defense will respond to questions that arose in the committee members’ minds when they read what the student had written. Since ancient days, family-related court proceedings have often taken the complex form of multi-person interviews, such as when two women went before Solomon, each claiming possession of the same baby:1

16 Then came there two women, that were harlots, unto the king, and stood before him. 17 And the one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house. 18 And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also: and we were together; there was no stranger with us in the house, save we two in the house. 19 And this woman’s child died in the night; because she overlaid it. 20 And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me, while thine handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom. 21 And when I rose in the morning to give my child suck, behold, it was dead: but when I had considered it in the morning, behold, it was not my son, which I did bear. 22 And the other woman said, Nay; but the living is my son, and the dead is thy son. And this said, No; but the dead is thy son, and the living is my son. Thus they spake before the king. 23 Then said the king, The one saith, This is my son that liveth, and thy son is the dead: and the other saith, Nay; but thy son is the dead, and my son is the living. 24 And the king said, Bring me a sword. And they brought a sword before the king. 25 And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other. 26 Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it.

11 Kings 3:16–28 King James Version (KJV). 5.1 The History of Interviewing 137

27 Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof.

There is much to ponder about this famous family-related incident, and Wikipedia notes that Solomon “tricked the parties into revealing their true feelings by using a fallacious appeal to moderation. Some consider it an archetypal example of an impar- tial judge displaying wisdom in making a ruling.”2 In the context of this chapter, it highlights three issues: (1) To what extent will people being interviewed give entirely correct information about their family relations? (2) Which interviewer strategies can best extract the truth from the interviewee? (3) What ethical or practical limitations should constrain the interviewer? A very large number of modern law cases involve family issues. Although few of them are as dramatic as the Judgment of Solomon, to avoid the embarrassment that using one as an example would cause, we shall instead use a case in which a family member was one of the attorneys. Available on Google Books is the full documentation of a real-estate and commission payment dispute that reached the New York State appeals court.3 My maternal grandfather, William E. Sims, had been one of the staff of a New York law firm that lost a case in its initial attempt, which was then appealed. On December 2, 1931, he wrote John Byrne of the Byrne & Bowman real estate brokerage firm: “Mr. Carver, Mr. Chambers and Mr. Birdsall have told me of the aid you have given us in the Barrett case and I wish to express my appreciation of your help. Unfortunately, Mr. Justice Miller left the case to the jury with the result that a verdict was brought in against the Trust Company. I should, therefore, appreciate your keeping the file you loaned us, which I am enclosing herewith, in the event of a reversal and a new trial.” Note that this letter requests that the file of information should be preserved, reminding us that family historians also need to preserve documents, especially in case they may gain importance in later years. Byrne & Bowman had initially lost their case, but in 1934 they won on appeal. During the complex proceedings in December 1933, Daniel F. Cohala interviewed William E. Sims about this letter:

Cohala: Mr. Sims, you are a lawyer? Sims: Yes, sir. Cohala: Have been for how many years about? Sims: Over 20. Cohala: That is a safe answer. Member of the ﬁrm of Zabriskie, Sage, Gray & Todd? Sims: Sage, Gray, Todd and Sims now is the name. It was that ﬁrm before. Cohala: In 1931, on December 2, 1931, it was Zabriskie, Sage, Gray & Todd? Sims: Yes.

2en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Solomon. 3From Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division, JOHN BYRNE and ABRA- HAM M. BOWMAN, co-partners, doing business under the ﬁrm name and style of BYRNE & BOW- MAN, Plaintiffs, against THOMAS F. BARRETT, Defendant, www.books.google.com/books?id= Ny5KZVKfK30C. 138 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members

Cohala: But your name was not among the names of those members; were you at that time amemberofthefirm? Sims: I was. Cohala: I show you a paper which is marked Defendant’s Exhibit B on the letterhead of Zabriskie, Sage, Gray & Todd, dated December 2nd, 1931, purporting to be signed William E. Sims. Did you sign that letter? Sims: I did. Cohala: And sent it? Sims: I did. Cohala: And dictated it? Sims: I did. Cohala: Now, did you know what had been done by Mr. John Byrne, whom you addressed as John Byrne, Esq., care of Byrne & Bowman, with relation to any help in the case of Barrett against the New York Trust Co.? Sims: I did, by hearsay. Cohala: By hearsay? Sims: I never saw Mr. Byrne myself. Cohala: Never had any talk with Mr. Byrne in the case? Sims: Never. Cohala: Well, how did you come to write that letter? Sims: Because I wrote letters to a number of witnesses and persons from whom we had gotten some information, after the trial of the case, thanking them for what they had furnished us. Cohala: Were they all in this form, Mr. Sims? Sims: I should say substantially in that form, varied perhaps according to what each particular one sent us or told us. Cohala: Well, without knowing exactly what had been done by them except as had been told to you, you wrote this letter to Mr. Byrne? Sims: As to Mr. Byrne, yes. As to the other witnesses I perhaps had more information, because they actually testified on the trial. Cohala: I want to learn, if I can, about this; the form of this letter, the language used in it, is that the form you usually used in writing to anybody who has been of assistance to the firm in the preparation of a case? Sims: Yes, I think so. Cohala: Did you follow your usual practice in writing this letter? Sims: Yes.

Note that this brief segment of court testimony is a tightly focused interview that happens to include biographical information about Mr. Sims, and some commentary on the form of communication embodied in the letter he had sent to John Byrne. Indeed, an exchange of correspondence can take the form of a long-distance, long- duration interview. About the time of that court proceeding, and especially soon after World War II, a very different form of multi-session interview became popular, namely Psychoanalysis, that focused closely on family relationships, and indeed recent family history. 5.1 The History of Interviewing 139

Even today, it is difficult to frame a comprehensive and accurate evaluation of Psychoanalysis, but its problems actually are rather instructive for family histories, whatever verdict one reaches on the theories and methods as they existed near the middle of the twentieth century. Certainly, a common definition is that it was a form of verbal psychotherapy or clinical psychology that was based on the premise that standard issues of family relations in the client’s childhood needed to be understood, or perhaps brought up to conscious awareness. However, from fairly early on in its history it operated at some distance from psychiatry. On the one hand, its advocates suggested that every normal person could benefit from it, not merely neurotics. On the other hand, many psychoanalysts were reluctant to claim it could cure psychosis, although occasionally innovators among them would try to adapt it to that difficult purpose. Classically, Psychoanalysis was the invention of one man, Sigmund Freud, in collaboration with disciples, among whom Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler were especially prominent (Jones 1961;Brown1961). However, the diversity of comparable interview-based psychotherapies proliferated over the following decades, based on a wide range of theories about the human mind and the impact of childhood experiences (Maddi 1968;Finkel1976). Although Freud actually explored complex alternatives, for example developing ideas about psychological transference and the relationship between the client and therapist, the popular conception of Psychoanalysis emphasized the Oedipus complex, that involved competition between father and son for the love of the mother (Freud 1913, 1927). Yet as Bronislaw Malinowski and many other anthropologists of the period reported, family structures and father-son relationships varied greatly across the world’s cultures, not to mention from one particular family to another (Malinowski 1927). Critics of Psychoanalysis raised very serious questions about whether Freud and his followers were so ideological as to be careless in their analysis of particular cases (Salter 1952; Wolpe and Rachman 1960). By the beginning of the current century, Psychoanalysis was no longer a significant topic taught in the psychology departments of colleges, although some interest remained within the humanities (Redmond and Shulman 2008). Whatever our personal feelings about Psychoanalysis, its history suggests something about perspectives on the human mind and the family that may apply very widely, even to all current alternatives: We have not yet achieved a comprehensive, scientific, objective understanding, so we must rely to a great extent upon cultural constructions. Psychoanalysis and its competitors may have benefitted many people without being factually “true,” because they provided coherent perspectives on life that could reduce anxiety and encourage reasonably healthy family relationships (Comte 1883; Frank 1961; Frankl 1962; James 1963). The question then becomes whether modern family history projects can adopt singular frameworks of meaning, for example a shared religious faith, or need to balance carefully the perspectives that different family members may have. During the time when Psychoanalysis was popular among academics, it contributed to an important wave of inter-related personal history studies. As I noted in my book, Personality Capture and Emulation: 140 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members

When Psychoanalysis arrived at Harvard University at the beginning of the 1930s, it separated itself from Freud’s authority and sought to incorporate new insights and other perspectives. Renamed personology and often using psychobiography as a central method of research, it sought to establish a new paradigm for personality psychology, more scientific and influential than the somewhat haphazard explorations that had gone before. Central to this effort was Henry Murray, who established a tradition of trying to understand specific individuals through a comprehensive approach, among many other things guiding Langer in his project. Murray is commemorated at Harvard by The Henry A. Murray Research Archive, which today has over 100 terabytes of diverse social science data. Originally hosted at Radcliffe College, the women’s institution historically associated with Harvard and which merged with it in stages ending in 1999, the archive features psychological data about women’s lives in its core, called A Center for the Study of Lives (Bainbridge 2014). Murray was by no means the only Harvard researcher using this approach. His colleague Robert W. White published Lives in Progress in 1952, analyzing the personalities and life histories of three people, and with M. Brewster Smith and Jerome S. Brunner he published a study of ten people in 1956 titled, Opinions and Person- ality (White 1952; Smith et al. 1956). These studies interacted intensely with their research subjects, while the rather controversial study by Walter C. Langer was a psychobiography of a famous person Langer never interviewed, namely Adolf Hitler, done for the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War, and not published until years later (Langer 1972). In the field of criminology, a research tradition involving biographic interviews was already well established, without much if any of the psychoanalytic baggage. The 1930 book, The Jack-Roller, by Clifford Shaw was based on a brief autobiography written by a young delinquent, expanded by extensive interviews (Shaw 1930). The 1937 book The Professional Thief used a similar mixture of methods, primarily written and verbal interviews, as Edwin Sutherland described: This description was secured in two ways: first, the thief wrote approximately two-thirds of it on topics and questions prepared by me; second, he and I discussed for about seven hours a week for twelve weeks what he had written, and immediately after each conference I wrote in verbatim form, as nearly as I could remember, all that he had said in the discussion. I have organized this body of materials, written short connecting passages, and eliminated duplications as much as possible. In this organization I have attempted to preserve the ideas, attitudes, and phraseology of the professional thief. The thief read the manuscript as organized and suggested corrections, which have in all cases been made (Sutherland 1937). As a work of social science, the author of this book is often considered to have been Sutherland, one of the very most influential criminologists of his generation, yet the Library of Congress catalog lists the primary author as Chic Conwell, gives no birthdate but a death date of 1933, and today the publisher says “‘Chic Conwell,’ as the author was known in the underworld, gives a candid and forthright account of the highly organized society in which the professional thief lives.”4 Hopefully, family historians will be able to reveal the full identities of the people whose lives they document, but this research method in criminology, like psychoanalytic studies, has a characteristic that family history interview may seek to emulate: They are collaborative interviews between the researcher and the person under study.

4press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo3613144.html. 5.2 Finding the Appropriate Conceptual Framework 141

5.2 Finding the Appropriate Conceptual Framework

Given the rather chaotic results of the interview methods used in classical Psycho- analysis, we may well wonder whether any of the social or behavioral sciences can provide a precise yet comprehensive way of thinking about the social realities that provide both the topic and the structure for family history interviews. Simply put, the broad array of schools of thought all have some merit, but none reigns supreme, and all have serious limitations. To the extent that the family itself belongs to a shared, coherent culture, then that culture itself can provide the framework, perhaps combined with one or more compatible modes of social science, selected with the substantive topic in mind. In order to consider this challenge somewhat carefully, I will use the example of a metaphorical “family” to which I belonged, namely the Sociology Department of Harvard University, in the episodes 1971–1975 and 1982–1987. The relevance is that when I entered it as a graduate student in 1971 the department had just been “divorced” from the Department of Social Relations, formed at the end of the Second World War to unify social psychology, personality and clinical psychology, cultural anthropology, and sociology. Thus the quarter-century history of Soc Rel, as it was called, offers many insights about uniﬁcation and fragmentation of thinking about families. When I returned to the department as an untenured Associate Professor, in 1982, the disintegration had been completed for a decade and thus tempers had cooled. In March and April 1987, as I was about to leave, I conducted very long interviews with George Homans and David Riesman, two professors who knew the history well, but had very different perspectives on it. I recorded these interviews, then carefully transcribed them immediately afterwards from the recordings. While chieﬂy known for his abstract Behaviorist theories, Homans was an accomplished historian, notably in his early studies of family inheritance in thirteenth-century England (Homans 1937, 1941). In 1983 he had given me an offprint of an essay that expanded two years later into a book-length autobiography, autographed simply “To Bill from George.” One paragraph reports his memory of the founding of Soc Rel:

I came back to Cambridge for only a few days during the War, and I knew almost nothing of what was going on. A conspiracy led by men of somewhat similar intellectual views but still more similar in their desire to escape from their present departments had formed a plan to found a new department in social science. It would combine such ﬁelds as social and personality psychology, social anthropology, and the whole of sociology. The chief conspirators were Professor Parsons (sociology), Professors Allport and Murray (the latter not yet a professor) in psychology, Professor Kluckhohn (social anthropology), and others. They had won over the new Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Professor Paul Buck, who had further agreed to support the new department by assigning to it two new tenured professorships (one regular, one associate). The regular professorship was to go to Professor Samuel A. Stouffer, a distinguished statistician, and though I was not aware of it at the time, I was a candidate for the junior post. My candidacy became certain of success when my chief rival, Ted Hartshorne, was killed by accident while with the Army in Germany after the War was over. Once more my luck had held, but this time at a high cost - the death of a good man (Homans 1983, p. 18). 142 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members

Henry Murray, whose great influence was described in the previous section, was but one of the giant intellects at the core of Soc Rel; its most influential member was Talcott Parsons. Perhaps ironically, Homans was the chief opponent of Parsons, and became the chairman of the Sociology Department when it split off decades later. They both believed that the social sciences should be unified, but following very different principles, which they expressed in marvelous competing journal articles in 1964. Parsons believed in the existence of “Evolutionary Universals in Society,” clear and simple scientific laws that operated at the large scale, concerning even the biggest societies, and that evolved toward greater complexity and perfection over the centuries (Parsons 1964). He had begun to enunciate these grandiose ideas back in 1937 in a book titled ambitiously The Structure of Social Action, and in 1951 he had co-edited the “bible” of Soc Rel, Toward a General Theory of Action (Parsons 1937; Parsons and Shils 1951). Often called Structural Functionalism, this perspective believed that the norms, customs and institutions of society work together to achieve stability and solidarity. Wikipedia reports: “For Talcott Parsons, ‘structural-functionalism’ came to describe a particular stage in the methodological development of social science, rather than a specific school of thought.” That implies that no other way of thinking was valid for modern societies, whatever even grander theory might inherit that status in some future century.5 Homans agreed that the social sciences should be unified, and he added history to the list, as well as economics. But he doubted that any very general principles applied to large-scale social organizations, because the only real laws of human behavior applied to individuals, families, and small groups. That is to say, he reduced social behavior to the human prehistorical heritage of living in small hunter-gatherer groups, presumably built into our biology and the wiring of our brains, that have not evolved much if at all in the past hundred thousand years. He titled his competing 1964 article, “Bringing Men Back In,” meaning of course refocusing social science on interactions between individuals (Homans 1964). At the beginning of my 1987 interview with him, Homans referred to the bible of Soc Rel as The Yellow Book, as it indeed was called among its authors, so I asked him, “How would you describe the doctrines of The Yellow Book?” Homans replied, “Parsons was a very intellectually dominating person because he would never, in effect, admit that anyone had different opinions from his own. Rather hard to do.” I encouraged him to say more, by asking: “I am not sure that our students today would know exactly what that was. How would you describe it?” His reply began by rephrasing my question: “How would I describe Parson’s work? Well, I would describe it as a series of definitions of words locked into a very elaborate scheme of classification, and the scheme of classification was based on the notion of each cell in the classification representing a functional necessity for a society. But the real trouble with it was that it was a scheme, and you could fit all sorts of people and social behavior into it, but it never consisted of any propositions;

5en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_functionalism. 5.2 Finding the Appropriate Conceptual Framework 143 that is, saying X varies as Y. I’d already made up my mind that you couldn’t have any science without propositions of that general nature, and a classification scheme, though no doubt interesting, was worthless unless it led to these. The interesting thing is that I think that the so-called sociological theorists today, most of them, still haven’t gotten this notion clearly in their minds.” For several minutes we talked about the details of Soc Rel, and the problems facing social science in the 1980s that it had failed to solve. Then I returned to the main theme I wanted to explore with Homans: “We were talking at the very beginning about the social relations concept. Now, in The Nature of Social Science, you say there is just one social science” (Homans 1967). Enthusiastically, he replied: “Yes. That’s right, and that includes economics, politics and so on.” “Even history?” I asked. “Yes, even history,” he asserted. “In the sense that all the social sciences, when analyzed, share the same kind of general propositions. Now, they don’t necessarily study the same concrete fields, but they use implicitly or explicitly the same general kinds of propositions.” Recalling that The Nature of Social Science was published in 1967 and that Soci- ology divorced from Soc Rel in 1971, I commented: “You wrote that book shortly before social relations began splitting apart. What were your feelings? What was your analysis as the different fields began spinning off on their own here at Harvard?” “That was a more down-to-earth problem” he observed. “We’d gotten so big, I think, that we could no longer make sensible judgments; for instance about pro- motions, because we didn’t know the people, never heard of some of the people in psychology, for instance. And I think it was a good idea, hard as it was to integrate when you had 15 people in the department, but when you got up to 60 or something like that, it was really impossible. But that was a practical problem. The fact is that all of these disciplines share the same set of general ideas but, of course, they apply them into different concrete areas, so it makes perfectly good sense to split up on that basis.” I then asked a leading question, related to recent history: “Had the social relations concept decayed at that point at the end of the 1960s?” “I think it had decayed,” he replied, “and since nobody was willing to pick up my idea, which is that all the general ideas of all the social sciences are the same, that kind of unity was impossible. Now I’m beginning to be heard. But I certainly was then a voice crying in the wilderness. They couldn’t keep it together on the basis of that idea, and therefore the divisive forces, which were immediate and practical, of low level but very important just the same, took over. “You were the chairman of this department shortly after the division; it that correct?” “Yeah. I was the first chairman of the new Sociology Department after we divided up again.” “What were the most important issues that faced you as the chairman at that time?” He responded with my earlier, leading question in mind: “Well, I would say that the most important issue that faced me was trying to get the department—which is true 144 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members of many other departments at Harvard—to recover from the absolute demoralization caused by the student troubles of the early ’70s, late ’60s. We don’t realize what the atmosphere was, particularly the notion that students should have a powerful voice in such things as appointments. And my real preoccupation was to certainly stop that and get back to a more reasonable governance of the department. You don’t realize how much we were going to be taken over by the notion that students, charwomen, so on, all of them have equal say in governing the department. It’s all past, I’m glad to say, at least for the moment. Some European universities have never recovered.” My next question asked him to expand on the point he had just made: “What are the devastating effects of great student involvement in those decisions?” “Just that they don’t work out as well as the method by which we learned to govern ourselves as a body of scholars, professionals. Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t listen to what students say, but to have them have a decisive say in things about which they really aren’t prepared to have a judgment, I think, is bad. And so, though it had very few outward signs in the early days of my chairmanship, that was the thing that worried me most: that there would be further assertion of ‘everybody participates,’ you know.” Later in this very long interview, after we had extensively discussed the past struggles and current problems faced by sociology, our focused turned forward, and I asked: “Would you have any suggestions for young sociologists on fields or approaches that might be very fruitful for them in the near future?” He first argued for development of more rigorous theories, as he judged had already begun to happen in economics and political science, then responded to a question about research done in industrial settings by advocating more field research, collecting observations in real-world settings rather than merely using statistical analysis on data that already existed. “Another area I might get into if I were starting again, is the real failure of the family to do its job. The family has been the great transmitter, besides religion, of moral values. Kids, for instance, hardly ever eat with their parents. It was over the family dinner table that whatever morality I ever acquired was acquired. I think, since my youth, in many areas there has been a great deal of cultural disintegration. And how is this to be stopped? And it’s the foundation of all the rest that may be good that goes on in society. One of the things that the fundamentalists or the evangelicals may be intuitively reacting against or stimulated by is this cultural breakdown.” On this point, Parsons might well have agreed with Homans, both convinced that the family serves necessary functions for all societies, and both believing that religion and possibly other large-scale institutions might serve essential functions. However, Homans held a rather less optimistic view of the course of history than Parsons did, believing that many features of a society were historical accidents, and that the chaotic accumulations of problems could cause the entire collapse of a society. Is human history marked by inexorable progress, perhaps starting when the family expanded to become the tribe, or is everything that happened over the past hundred thousand years a fragile superstructure that might easily collapse, returning humanity to life in tiny bands based on biological families? Both answers would be grandiose, 5.2 Finding the Appropriate Conceptual Framework 145 and for an example of a more moderate viewpoint, I can briefly report the result of interviewing David Riesman, not long after I interviewed George Homans. Although Riesman was considered a sociologist, his training had been in Psycho- analysis and law, and his work was interpretive rather than rigorous, which could have placed him in the humanities. He was most famous for the 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd, that was both an outline of all human history and a sketch of the rather incompatible forms of social relations that existed in modern America (Ries- man 1950). Tradition-directed individuals predominated in pre-industrial societies, whereas inner-directed individuals were successful in societies undergoing transition from ancient to modern forms, and other-directed individuals harmonize with the complex social institutions of modern society. The title was somewhat ironic, because other-directed people may lack a sense of inner self, adjusting from moment to moment, in response to fluctuations in the expectations that other people have for them. Thus Riesman offered an historical framework for understanding different personalities, but not moving very far from the family-centric viewpoint of Psycho- analysis. I began the interview with Riesman by asking, “What were the circumstances under which you joined the Sociology Department here?” He started with the fact that he had attended Harvard Law School, gave a few details such as that he had taught a summer school sociology class in 1954, then we found ourselves discussing the nature of the universe and the complexity of sociology. Then I suggested, “Let’s return to when you came to Harvard and what kind of department was it that you were joining.” His response built upon a topic we had just discussed, his discomfort at how the University of Chicago and other leading universities were imposing a view of sociology as the use of elaborate statistical techniques to analyze quantitative data, with hardly any human meaning. In considering moving to Harvard, he imagined it would have a nice mixture of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, but discovered: “I was quite mistaken about that. I had thought of various other places to go when I decided that the Chicago situation was too disagreeable. Cal Tech interested me; I have always liked to teach bright scientists, once they relax and realize that sociology, at least working with me, is not their definition of science. As you know yourself, having worked with scientists, they can be among the greatest students.” For Riesman, the goal was not running a research laboratory, following whatever paradigm, but sharing interpretations of society with students: “But what attracted me to Harvard, with the support of Social Relations as my host, was a new General Education course, geared to undergraduates, which, as General Education was then defined at Harvard, would be a departure from a historical, humanities-oriented program. Sam Beer taught a big General Education course with the classics of political and social thought. I was going to do some of that, but I was going to have empirical work, contemporary work. I made enough compromises with the General Education Committee to make that viable.” The professors who taught the popular General Education courses had their homes in a variety of departments, where they might teach more specialized undergradu- 146 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members ate classes and graduate seminars. For Riesman, that meant joining Soc Rel: “From the department I expected something which was based on quite a false impression I had had. I thought there would be two towering figures: Talcott Parsons, whom I respected, and Sam Stouffer, on the survey and field methods side. I came here to discover Stouffer had virtually no students; he had assistants. It was a great disappointment.” I then asked a question that might seem to have an obvious answer: “Was there any sense in which the Social Relations Department was unified intellectually by shared perspectives or theories?” His answer actually ignored the stereotype that Soc Rel had a monolithic ortho- doxy expressed in its supposed bible, Toward a General Theory of Action.Healso disagreed with the viewpoint Homans had expressed in his intellectual autobiography, Coming to My Senses, in which Homans argued that most other sociologists needed to come to their own senses, abandoning unreasonable utopian hopes (Homans 1985). “I differ from George Homans’ judgment of the department in his interview with you, and also in Coming to My Senses. I wanted the department to continue, and I was against the splitting off of sociology. I didn’t think a uniform scheme was conceivable—here I agree with George—but an ethos was. George speaks of Social Relations as being too big. But just because the full-time sociology wing of the department was small, I was grateful for the department’s overall size. It meant that in a sociological group of anarchical individualists, we didn’t have to find a chairman. The whole department was served by eminently fair-minded chairmen in Robert White and Roger Brown. We sociologists didn’t even have to find a head tutor. We had to find only someone to head the committee on higher degrees. Since so many of the people like myself had other bases outside the department, mine being General Education and later Social Studies, it was an advantage.” Twice during the interview, Riesman spoke explicitly about the family. At one point I asked a question inspired by what Homans had said about its moral function: “Do you ever hear the criticism that at least in a small way sociology has contributed to some of the declines; the decline of the family, the erosion of traditional structures and roles?” “Yes, he replied. “Freud, sociology. We sociologists are part of what is sometimes called the ‘new class,’ what Paul Hollander, who once taught in Social Relations, regards as ‘the alienated intellectuals.’ It is really world wide: in Paris and Tokyo. I would think explanations include the relative openness of sociology, the fact that unlike anthropology it doesn’t have a threshold of fieldwork. Sociology is also open to people with ‘big thoughts.’ To craftsmen and to intellectuals with or without craft.” Later he asked himself a profound question: “What will happen to make for a more equitable family life, a lower divorce rate, more concern for children, more tilting of resources away from the old like myself and toward the young? None of these things is going to be easy.” I cannot pretend these were perfect interviews, but when I did them I already had a good deal of experience doing open-ended interviews, primarily within radical religious groups that had unusual family structures, for which I had prepared general topics of interest but did not write out a list of precisely-worded questions. This pair 5.2 Finding the Appropriate Conceptual Framework 147 has a fundamental similarity to family history interviews in which the interviewers are themselves members of the family: I had personally known all the people and had shared the same rather compressed environment with them for a long time. The preparation also included having read all the books that were mentioned, just as family historians would familiarize themselves with many kinds of documentary information prior to in-depth interviews. My own views may have surfaced occasionally, but only in the context of gently phrasing a question to elicit the interviewee’s views and memories. The context was somewhat public, because both professors knew that their answers would be shared with other members of the department, as Riesman explicitly noted by referring to the interview with Homans. Between Homans and Riesman there existed a polite combination of agreement and disagreement, even as both shared a deep interest in human social relationships, and both considered the family paramount among social institutions, while also concentrating on intimate social relations among friends, co-workers, and neighbors in their writings. When Homans criticized the trend coming out of the 1960s to give students more power within universities, he seemed almost to be imposing a parent- child model upon the professor-student relationship. In family interviews, it is quite likely that different members of the same family will express contrasting views of what their relationships should be, as well as of what they already had been. The following section of this chapter will explore the use of open-ended questions in a now-historical online research study, as a step toward thinking about how family historians might do remote interviews, not sitting in the same room as had been the case with Homans and Riesman.

5.3 Open-Ended Questions

Professionally done interviews often begin with a few standard questions about the respondent, intended as much to establish rapport as to collect background information, then an open-ended question begins the real research. Decades ago, in two software-textbook publications about computer-assisted sociological research methods, I offered two slightly different definitions: “Open-ended items: questionnaire items that give the respondent a blank area of paper on which to write a response in whatever way seems appropriate” (Bainbridge 1989). “Open-ended item: a questionnaire item that requires a verbal response, sometimes a lengthy one; the opposite of a fixed-choice item” (Bainbridge 1992). While we naturally think of interviews as taking place face-to-face, or perhaps by telephone, and define “verbal response” as a spoken answer to a question, those two projects offered software I had programmed from scratch to administer questions via computer. Today, given the geographic distribution that families often have, Internet-based text interviews are a highly viable option. In 1997 I began to explore the opportunities for online data collection by setting up a website called The Question Factory, that chiefly ran pilot studies to develop questionnaire items. One of the most fruitful results was this simple open-ended 148 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members item: “Imagine the future and try to predict how the world will change over the next century. Think about everyday life as well as major changes in society, culture, and technology.” Two years later, this item was included in a major online survey called Survey2000, developed by a team I had joined that was led by James Witte, which collected responses from roughly 46,500 adults (Witte et al. 2000; Witte and Pargas 2004). Two decades later, I am still finding fresh insights in the data from that pioneering project. For example, many respondents mentioned possible changes in the structure and functions of families that might occur by the year 2100, that suggest primary dimensions of today’s family life that are in people’s minds. It is more than a platitude to note that the future is a consequence of the past, and the year 2100 will become history in 2101. In the United States, about 1 married woman per 1,000 became divorced in the year 1860, 5 per 1,000 in 1915, and more than 20 per 1,000 in 1975 (Cherlin 1981). Does that trend predict 100 divorces per year per 1,000 married women in 2100? The trend from 1975 to when Survey2000 was done was actually rather flat.6 Whatever the trend in divorce may be, what is its meaning? In recent years, many demographers and sociologists have labored long and hard to understand even the most obvious connections between divorce and other factors. For example, does increasing participation of women in the workforce cause an increase in the divorce rate, or is it caused by an increase in the divorce rate (Ozcan˝ and Breen 2012)? Questions like this that seek insight in the over-all trends suggest issues that may relate to a particular family, but the strict answer may differ from one household to the next. The individuals who responded to Survey2000 answered the question about the year 2100 from their own unique standpoints, which included the recent history of their own families, even as it concerned abstract conceptualization of the far future. Respondents offered many ideas related directly or indirectly to the future of the family, and I sorted their statements into categories, three of which related to different conceptions of family structure: traditional families, family breakdown, and alternative families. These three categories might be just as well used to categorize today’s families or those of the past. Therefore, it is worthwhile not only to define them but also to report, in paraphrased and combined form, what the respondents said about them. Traditional Families: In this first scenario, Survey2000 respondents imagined that the family will continue to be the most important institution of society throughout this century. Indeed, they predicted that many people would revert to a more traditional family life style with one partner caring for the children and home, and the other earning income in the work world. They also suggested there would be much greater emphasis on extended families, which include grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins as well as the couple and their children (Silverstein and Bengtson 1997). Here are condensed paraphrases of some of their specific ideas that fit this scenario, in each case combining phrases from several respondents:

6“Monthly Vital Statistics Report,” vol. 43, no. 9, supplement (Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control, 1995). 5.3 Open-Ended Questions 149

Marriage and fidelity will become fashionable again. The divorce rate will be low, because couples will marry after much soul searching and commitment, rather than with the thought of separating if things don’t work out. Perhaps mothers will be paid for staying home and taking care of their children. An extremely low divorce rate will create very few fractured families. Very few women will have children without husbands. Having grown up in stable, nurturing families, children will have great respect for adults, especially their own parents. A renaissance of the traditional family could come about as a result of a revival of traditional religion, or these two processes could work together, each reinforcing the other (Institute for Theological Encounter with Science and Technology 1999; Bradford Wilcox 1998). Another variant of this scenario imagines that family units will become stronger because work and other activities outside the home will cause insurmountable stress. People will leave their homes less frequently, and this will bring immediate families closer together. Thus the family will thrive as a refuge in a chaotic and often hostile world. Ideally, careers and jobs will be flexible so families will have the time they need to raise their children (Glass and Bet Estes 1997). There will be an increase in the time that individuals spend in direct contact with family and friends, since their work hours will be far more flexible. Organized clubs for children will be tremendously popular, to keep them off the dangerous streets and away from the physically debilitating television screen. Real-life marriage and parenting classes will be mandatory for all high school students. People will work harder on their relationships, so divorce will be rare. Women will not be forced to choose between raising a family and having a career, because technology will allow greater flexibility in daily life and the workplace. Every child will be wanted and loved. Parents will find joy in watching children grow and smile at their laughter.

Family Breakdown: A very different scenario expects the cohesion of the family and its stabilizing inﬂuence on society to disintegrate even further (Goldscheider 2000). By 2100, traditional family life will have largely dissolved. Family structure will be weak, with many single parent homes and little involvement with grandparents, aunts, and uncles:

Society will be too busy and fast paced to attend to important matters such as family and child rearing. People will not be able to stay married for very long, because they are used to fast changes. Divorce rates will be above ﬁfty percent, and most children will be raised in single-parent homes. The typical person will experience multiple divorces and remarriages. Because of divorce and non-marital pregnancies, the rate of single parenthood will be high. Perhaps single parent families will contribute toward the decline of morals and an increase in crime and poverty (Bianchi 1999). Children’s lives will be unstable, because of a high level of divorce and lack of extended families. People will have little contact with family members who are separated by more than one generation, and they will know little about their families’ histories. Grandparents will have very little signiﬁcance in the lives of their grandchildren. In this scenario, the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family will cause increasing social problems. Problems of youth violence will increase, as family members continue to spend less and less time interacting with one another. A decrease in family closeness will result in a breakdown in the work ethic. Because of the overall decline in close family units, society will consist of less caring, less devoted and less dedicated people. Families will cease to be units of love and comfort. The individual will be alienated from friends and family. Marriages will decrease drastically in occurrence as fewer individuals share intimate relations with one another. This will be a vicious circle in which family disintegration in one generation fails to prepare the members of the next generation to create strong families. Indeed, young people will lack guidance and support, so they will be forced to invent their own ways of life. 150 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members

Disintegration of the family and other modern trends will leave children to their own devices. After school, many children will return home unsupervised, due to the economic need for both parents to work. They will have little experience of childhood, having to take responsibility and fend for themselves. Children will leave home at a very young age. In consequence, young people will rebel against parental authority. They will be disrespectful, rude, lazy, and ill mannered. Youth society will be outrageous in an attempt to be different from the previous generation. Adolescents will ﬁnd new music to irritate their parents with. Raising of children and moral instruction may be done by the peer groups and by technology, not by the family. At the extreme, there will packs of children living together without schooling or adult supervision. Social problems will increase as more and more young girls abuse alcohol and drugs during their pregnancies. Children will be desensitized to brutality through violent videos, news broadcasts, and computer games. Perhaps society will be so desensitized to violence that school shootings will no longer make the news. Lacking healthy forms of stimulation, children will be less and less creative. Many will largely stay indoors and have virtually no experience with the world of nature. It is possible that some youth will ﬁnd a successful way to adapt, despite all these stresses and disadvantages. Young people will experiment with the most radical uses of technology, because they are the generation most integrated into the high-tech culture. Perhaps technology gaming will allow children of ability to participate in the intellectual work world instead of having to wait, applying the computer skills they learned from videogames, computer games, and online play activities.

Alternative Families: This scenario predicts that a wide variety of alternative family structures will be accepted. In one variant of this scenario, “common law” relationships will all but replace formal marriage. That is, couples will simply cohabit without any explicit arrangement or legal contract (Smock 2000). By one careful estimate covering the period just beforeSurvey2000 was administered, there were about 1,100,000 such cohabiting couples in the US in 1977, and over 4,850,000 in 1997 (Casper and Cohen 2000). Living together has become a step toward marriage for many couples, but for an apparently increasing number of people cohabitation has become an alternative setting for childbearing (Raley 2001). Rather than conceptual- izing such circumstances as family breakdown, many respondents saw opportunities for development of creative alternatives:

For many people, a system of temporary conjugal contracts may replace permanent marriage. One common variant will be open marriage, permitting the parties to love many other people, while still keeping a good relationship with each other. In 2100, there will be a greater acceptance of the concept that the person you marry and possibly have children with, may not be the person you remain with the rest of your life. Biological families may be largely replaced by extended non-biological friend-families. Many single women will choose to have children, and in this scenario that is a perfectly healthy alternative. People will chose the unmarried life without a sense of guilt of being inadequate when compared to their married friends. At the extreme, marriage will be a thing of the past, and the traditional family will cease to exist. Perhaps the family will be redeﬁned until it will be common to see three or four adults of the same generation in a household, along with children they produced in different combinations. The ideal of a family unit will expand to include multiple overlapping marriages. By the year 2100, many men and women will live in multigenerational households in which all members work part time and raise families. Groups of people will live together in communal households, raising their children collectively, and for much of the population, the traditional family unit will be replaced by group homes (Kanazawa and Still 1999). One Survey2000 5.3 Open-Ended Questions 151

respondent was skeptical, however, saying that because of jealousy and competition for mates, multi-partner group marriages may be exceedingly rare (J. H. Noyes 1870;P.Noyes 1937;Carden1969;Foster1981). Many marriages of the future will be between partners of the same sex (Frank and McEneaney 1999). It will be quite common for homosexual couples to adopt children, but there are also a number of ways through which homosexual males or females can produce their own biologically-related children. One respondent believed that infertile women, or those repelled by pregnancy, will easily find a surrogate mother willing to bear their children for a price. Under these conditions, perhaps children will be raised according to scientific statistical data, not by human emotion and intuition. New technological procedures may increase still further the options for alternative family structures. For example, one respondent thought that by 2100 infants will be grown in artificial wombs, eliminating the need for women to play a special role in reproduction. At the same time, infertile women will be able to conceive children by a variety of methods. Another respondent thought men will discover how to carry babies, and some will opt to become mothers of their own children. Technologies to assist reproduction will largely overcome the necessity of parents to have their children during the early adult years. People of any age will be able to reproduce, and the consequences of this innovation for family structure could be very significant (Heinlein 1966). The final ideas in this alternative scenario naturally invoke possible technological innovations that may reshape human relationships, and may seem unlikely. How- ever, the technological development and political debates concerning birth control techniques were certainly significant in the previous century, and we need not now decide how technology might reshape the family over the remaining decades of this century. The Survey2000 dataset includes responses to two open-ended questions, the other one concerning a significant geographic move the respondent had experienced, building on fixed-choice items about migration (Griswold and Wright 2004). Here is how one respondent answered both open-ended questions, choosing to connect them, which most respondents did not do: “At the age of ten, I was sent to the United States to live with my mother. I did not know her at the time as she left my native country when I was very young. The move meant leaving all of my family and all that I have known behind. It was also the first time I, from all of my family, would fly on a plane. I think the society will become more impersonal. Family ties will not be valued as much. Ethnicity, culture, all that makes us different may very well become uniform with little to make us individual. I think technology will see to that. Are we not already teaching our children that to be different is to be an outcast or at least an undesirable thing?” One of the few other respondents who explicitly connected the two questions also described an international move, a common experience today when everywhere is connected to everywhere else by global technologies, but expressing nearly the opposite viewpoint: “When I moved to live with my father in 1983, because that gave me a world of opportunities that I could not have with my mother. My mother is Motswana and my father is English, I therefore grew up a white rather than a black, or coloured as I am. The future for me is being able to make my mother’s everyday life more comfortable. When she is comfortable, then the rest of my family will be my next priority. As for the world itself, I have not gotten that far, as I am preoccupied 152 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members with the well being of my family.” Literally hundreds of the respondents mention the relevance of their most significant move to their families, and here are some others that also linked to ethnicity and culture:

Moving to Mexico at age 12 to live with my father. I had to learn a new language and was exposed to an entirely different culture. Learning Spanish then, has been of use to me in business in later years. Because of my father’s work, we moved a lot when I was a child and lived several years in Latin America. I think the most significant move was when we came back to Canada for good: the culture shock was a surprise! I was only 15 years old when we came back and I felt like an alien in my own country. I used to have lots of friends in Latin America but here and in the States people are different, I still can’t fully relate to North American people. My friends in Canada are all Latin American; I feel more at ease with Latin people and society. I suppose the most significant move was when I was a baby - my father being a service person was transferred from Victoria B.C. to Montreal, where we spent 15 years. I consider myself a transplanted Montrealer. I was the only person in my family to grow up in Quebec; my life was informed by French Canadian culture, whereas the rest of my family was very different in their attitudes. When I was eight, my family moved to Taiwan for three years. My father was in the service. It is the most significant move because I learned at a young age about prejudice, poverty, and how a lot of Americans (who were well off in comparison to the average Taiwan citizen) treated the Taiwanese as lower-class, second-rate and less-important individuals. I found this very disturbing as the Taiwanese were always polite. The most significant move was when I decided that no one could make me happy except myself. I had lived a very dictated life when my father was around (I am of mixed parentage, Chinese (mom) and Indian (Dad)) but after he has passed away, I feel so much more free and “liberated”. It is difficult when you are caught in mixed culture environment. The Indian culture is more conservative and sheltered as compared to the Chinese who are more expressive and expansive though sometimes expensive. I was pretty mixed up at first after my dad passed away but my mom helped me through. I hope many people in this world can realise that they are the centre of their own happiness and they have their family and community to get them by.

In the context of an anonymous online questionnaire, some respondents were quite ready to report negative judgments of a family member: “It was the point when I felt free from the abuse of my father upon the whole family.” “Our family ﬂed my father’s house due to the fact that he was crazy, mean and a child molester.” “Calling the police and literally throwing my father out of the household at the age of 14. Smart move, it saved all of us (him included) a great deal of suffering.” “I was 18 and returning to the land of my birth after 18 years of hell with a step father who would never stay in one place for longer than a year.” “I left an abusive mother to move in with my father.” “My mother had distanced herself almost completely from societal life and became manically depressive.” “Marriage - I inherited a multiply disabled child whose biological mother deserted and the government decided that since a stepmother was present there was no need for assistance. It altered the course of my life, career, dreams, and possibilities.” One of the challenges in constructing a family history by means of interviews is that criticism of one family member by another may poison the atmosphere, and many families have split in ways that cast blame in multiple directions. A family historian 5.3 Open-Ended Questions 153 may genuinely wish to heal the wounds with an exculpatory narrative, while others will feel they have no choice but to take a side in the historical family dispute. It is true that often families are torn apart by events beyond the control of any of their members, or may be preserved by responding to a problem by moving, and here are some examples.

My mother died in January and my father was career Navy. It was 1941 and the war started in December. I moved in with an aunt and uncle who were in their 50s and had no children. I stayed with them until I graduated from high school Although I don’t remember that time, I’m sure the traumatic events colored my all my life. Every move was significant: my father served, as I do now, in the United States Navy, and my family was transferred at least once every two and a half years. My first apartment away from my father’s home. Although I knew it was time for me to be on my own, it was very difficult for me because my mother had died when I was 15 (I moved away from home when I was 23) and I always worried about my father being alone. I moved back to my home town when my mother became ill. I’m very glad I was near her during her illness and death. Now I’m here for my father on daily basis and try to help him with his daily life. When the family moved from Arkansas to Arizona in 1945. I was only 10 years old and Phoenix was a small town then so I had a chance to see it grow and grow up with it. The move was made for my Father’s health (TB). If we hadn’t moved, he probably would not have survived and I would have never had the opportunity to work with him which I did for six or seven years before he retired. When I separated from my husband after 22 years of marriage, my whole lifestyle changed from perspectives to finances to emotions. It changed me dramatically and I am still feeling the repercussions of that move, of slowly developing my own self again. Most of all though I desperately missed my children who chose to live with their father. I have limited contact with them.

Clearly, the right way for a family historian to handle family conﬂicts depends upon the actual history as well as current situation, in emotional as well as factual terms. We can suggest that accuracy and compassion are primary values, yet they sometimes conﬂict. Many families have fragmented more-or-less peacefully, or at least not plagued by hatred and blame. For them, a family history can be a bridge across the chasm, and a preparation for future generations to posses a coherent sense of their origins. Without knowing their detailed history, here are examples in which people have built upon broken families, thus accomplishing some repair, or at least avoiding casting angry blame:

The most signiﬁcant move of my life was when I came to Phoenix from Los Angeles. I had been living with my mother (in L.A.) and decided after my high school graduation to move in with my father in Phoenix. This was only going to be for a few months, to get to know my father a little better, then I was going to go back to L.A. While I was in Phoenix, I met the man who would later become my husband. When I went back to L.A. for New Years, my plan was to stay for good. My future husband called me daily to talk me into returning to Phoenix, and what our lives would be like together. Luckily, I went back to Phoenix and my future husband. He is my love and my life. The most signiﬁcant move in my life was when I was 13 and my mother took my sister, my younger brother, and myself to Florida after she divorced my dad (which took 3 years). 154 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members

This was such an impact as my father and 2 older brothers stayed in New Jersey, therefore, separating us for long stretches. My father moved, my mother stayed. I moved, my brother stayed. Split family in half, new town, didn’t know anybody. My fear of the unknown for some reason didn’t kick in at all during it. Thus, in retrospect, I can’t believe I did it. The most signiﬁcant move in my life was when I went with my Mother and new Stepfather to Florida. I was only four years old and had never been off the island I lived on. It was a totally different environment. I missed my extended family. I found that I had step-siblings when I arrived in Florida. Leaving Arizona when I was Seventeen to meet my biological father for the ﬁrst time. He then invited me to live with him in Texas and I did and eventually married and stayed. Moving from England to Canada in 1957. Have never been back to England and I can’t remember much about it. I have only met about a dozen relatives and have no memory of any of the others. I have no memory at all of my father’s parents. They never wrote to us children or even sent birthday cards. I feel that my siblings and I were deprived of knowing our grandparents and most of our other relatives. I was adopted and was able to locate my birth mother when I was 21 years of age. I also discovered I had 2 sisters and my relationship with them all has been absolutely wonderful since.

It is said that time heals all wounds, but more modestly time can provide the opportunity to understand wounds and develop a reasonable treatment to promote healing, or at least to avoid further injury. When the family historian is a member of the family, it is probably quite practical to conduct interviews in multiple segments, even over the course of a year, not completing the process with one interviewee until many of the others have already responded to key questions. Without allowing the interaction to degrade into some form of mediated argument, this may allow the family to develop a shared system of meaning, or at least an awareness of the range of meanings that other family members apply. The challenge of time may be more difficult for professional family historians, but might be handled by various ways the client pays for the services. This book is not the place to state with any confidence what business model professional family historians should apply to their work. But one model deserves mention, rather like the professor-student model. The professional historian might set up a local business offering alternatives, depending upon for example the amount of archival work to be done, and even whether the family is ready to pay for a book like those done by Louis Effingham de Forest described in Chap. 1, or a full length biography of a particular family member, as when Dr. Will arranged for A. H. McKinney to write a biography of Will’s mother, Lucy (McKinney 1932). But a less costly and more flexible component of a diverse business plan would be for the historian to teach local classes, formal or informal, to people who wanted to become historians for their own families. After graduation from the class, motivated students could pay the professional historian to tutor them, and also to perform specialized tasks like genealogical searches, especially to guide them in conducting interviews over a period of months. 5.4 The Process of Interviewing 155

5.4 The Process of Interviewing

A huge research and methodological literature exists concerning different goals and means of interview research, far beyond what any one book chapter could possibly survey, a good deal of it published decades ago and thus inherently historical (Rice 1929;Katz1942; Becker 1970). However, a couple of starting points will be of value for the reader, who can later decide what social-scientific literature might be relevant to a particular project or professional subfield. For much of the 1990s, I managed the investment in the General Social Survey by the National Science Foundation, and I have often used the data readily available to anyone online.7 The GSS is a questionnaire study, done on a regular basis with some standard questions and some special modules included just once or only occasionally since the first administration back in 1972. But the questionnaire is administered in the respondent’s home, as a 90-minute face-to-face interview, obtaining more reliable and representative data than mailing a paper questionnaire might achieve. In family history research, the interviewees may be especially motivated to answer the questions, and there may be opportunities to gather their responses in multiple stages, whether online, on the telephone, or in sit-down meetings. A paper questionnaire based on the GSS worked well with 1,025 motivated members of a religious group called (literally) The Family for my book, The Endtime Family, which focused on the group’s history in the context of its beliefs that the current world was coming to an end in the divine millennium, while its members lived their daily lives in a dispersed collection of complex-marriage communes (Bainbridge 2001). That research project was not limited to a mailed questionnaire, also including many visits to a number of Family communes in the United States, plus one each in France and Canada, including open-ended interviews as well as ethnographic observation. A key advantage of the questionnaire was that the family under study was far too huge and geographically dispersed to rely entirely upon interviews, but that also permitted statistical comparison of members with the data of the GSS respondents who were close to a random sample of the nation where the Family had come into existence. It may sometimes be useful even when studying one’s own small family to ask a few fixed-choice questions from a standard questionnaire, but more time should usually be invested in open-ended interviewing like the examples provided above. In the 1940s, there was considerable debate among psychologists and social scientists about the extent to which the question and answer formats should be prepared ahead of time, following rigorous methods and with well-specified goals, versus being exploratory and open-ended. In the Psychoanalytic tradition intense debates started when Freud’s cantankerous disciples Jung and Adler eroded the authority of any particular theory of neurosis, and thus the authority of the psychoanalysts as well. One influential result was a fresh client-centered or person-centered approach developed by Carl Rogers, which set a new standard for interviewing in general, as well as establishing yet another brand of psychotherapy. Wikipedia says: “Person-centered therapy seeks to facilitate a client’s self-actualizing tendency…

7gss.norc.org; gssdataexplorer.norc.org; sda.berkeley.edu/sdaweb/analysis/?dataset=gss16. 156 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members via acceptance (unconditional positive regard), therapist congruence (genuineness), and empathic understanding.”8 Writing to the general public in a 1952 issue of the popular magazine Scientific American, Rogers himself outlined the person-centered vision: Client-centered therapy is built on two central hypotheses: (1) the individual has within him the capacity, at least latent, to understand the factors in his life that cause him unhappiness and pain, and to reorganize himself in such a way as to overcome those factors; (2) these powers will become effective if the therapist can establish with the client a relationship sufficiently warm, accepting and understanding. From these two convictions it follows that in practice we do not try to do something to the client. We do not diagnose his case, nor evaluate his personality; we do not prescribe treatment, nor determine what changes are to be effected, nor set the goal that shall be defined as a cure. Instead the therapist approaches the client with a genuine respect for the person he now is and with a continuing appreciation of him as he changes during the association. He tries to see the client as the client sees himself, to look at problems through his eyes, to perceive with him his confusions, fears and ambitions The therapist in such a relationship is not concerned with judging or making suggestions, but always strives to understand (Rogers 1952, pp. 66–67). While we often encounter unhappiness and pain, as well as their antonyms, our goal is not usually to help the interviewee to solve problems, but to achieve and preserve an understanding of the family to which the individual belongs. Families consist of multiple persons, so to some extent an interviewer must be both person- centered and people-centered, often helping several individuals develop a shared understanding, even as sometimes disagreements persist and must be respected. As interview methodologists have often debated, sometimes more than one person may be present during a family-focused interview, often the wife and husband, which may encourage communication in some ways and discourage in others (Aquilino 1993; Zipp and Toth 2002). Related to person-centered methods, both historically and technically, is open questioning, as described by Jean Converse in an article on the debates about interviewing in the 1940s: The technique was designed to be as close as possible to a natural conversation, featuring most questions in open format that (1) suggested no alternatives, answers to which were recorded as (2) verbatim transcription, or as close to that as interviewers could get. The (3) probing for detail and clarification was the most artful feature of the technique, requiring detailed knowledge of the study and question objectives, and sensitive avoidance of biasing questions, which in turn made (4) interviewer training especially important. Training was adapted from Rogerian nondirective clinical psychology (Converse 1984, p. 271). The preparation and even training required to do interviews on some topics can be quite demanding. For example, when Vivian Perlis did interviews for her biography of a composer of modernist classical music, Charles Ives Remembered: an Oral His- tory, she observed: “Interviewing composers poses special problems. Musicians deal primarily with abstract sounds. Consequently, it is difficult for them to express their thoughts and ideas in words. An interviewer must be fluent in the subject’s musical language, if the interview is to go beyond the ordinary collecting of facts” (Perlis 1994, p. 616). When Harriet Zuckerman did her interview study of scientists who

8en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person-centered_therapy. 5.4 The Process of Interviewing 157 had won the Nobel Prize, she prepared a written biographical summary for each scientist:

The summary sheets prepared for each interview were invaluable during the first part of the interview. They included information on where the laureate was located during various periods and lists of other scientists at work in the same place. The dates of major investigations were noted, as well as the co-authors of the papers reporting them. Cases of simultaneous independent discoveries, if any, were included. A second sheet consisted of lists of particular questions, usually prompted by something the laureate had written. Relevant scientific terms and their definitions were also included. Before each interview, these summaries were carefully reviewed and much of their contents committed to memory. They were, however, always used for reference during the interview (Zuckerman 1972, p. 168).

Zuckerman’s biographical summaries provided the material for the early questions of her interviews, but later questions were often derived from things the interviewee said. She would have fully agreed with something Robert K. Merton and Patricia L. Kendall wrote in 1946, that even when doing a focused interview with a speciﬁc topic of interest, “the interviewer must develop a capacity for continuously evaluating the interview as it is in process” (Merton and Kendall 1946, p. 545). This evaluation should not end when the interview does, for at least three reasons: (1) A family history is assembled from many components, and documents as well as other interviews may provide an evolving context for understanding the results of any one interview. (2) Even an interview about the past history of a family takes place at a particular point in time, and under other conditions the interviewee might add or revise information and interpretations. (3) The wider socio-cultural context shapes the methods and results of interviewing, as may momentary public assumptions about trends. In 1969, Edward Saveth expressed concern that the family history of that period was based on a factually incorrect belief about past trends: “An assumption of theory about the 19th and 20th century family is that the family is in transition from a state of prior integration apparent in the colonial and early national periods to one of progressive disintegration; from a family in which the authority of the father was strong to one in which his authority was weak; from an extended family with strong ties to a nuclear family with weak ties” (Saveth 1969, p. 317). Many factors may have encouraged the general public to assume that family life in a previous century was more stable than it really was, but when Saveth wrote, the psychoanalytic approach to interviewing may have exaggerated contemporary family problems precisely because its goal was to solve them. Writing about how historians may use the information already collected in an oral history collection, Ronald Grele noted:

Interviews are conversations; perhaps not in the form we usually associate with the term - an equal give and take - but in the relationship between interviewer and interviewee, what we record and present to the researcher is a conversation. Thus the interview will roam; pieces of a story will appear in many different places in the conversation, the same story will be used to illustrate more than one point, and the organization of the conversation will be determined as much by the social situation or the feelings evoked as by the logic of the narrative, or the historical evidence being discussed and evaluated (Grele 1987, pp. 570–571).

Perhaps because interviews are often used to achieve practical purposes, such as scientific research or evaluation of job applicants, a number of publications have 158 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members discussed the effective strategies for extracting correct answers to the questions. In his 1969 book, Interviewing: Strategy, Techniques, and Tactics, Raymond L. Gordon summarize much of the earlier literature in specifying eight inhibitors that burdened interviews, and eight facilitators that benefited them (Gordon 1969). Here are the inhibitors: 1. Competing demands for time 2. Ego threat 3. Etiquette 4. Trauma 5. Forgetting 6. Chronological confusion 7. Inferential confusion 8. Unconscious behavior. The first of these may not be severe for historians who belong to the family, because the interview can wait until the interviewee has some free time, but professional historians may need to get their job done fairly soon. Ego threat, etiquette and trauma all connect to memories of events that have negative meaning for the individual, at the extreme causing the person to decline the invitation for an interview, but also preventing the sharing of damaging or emotionally painful information in a question-answer session. Forgetting, chronological confusion, and inferential confusion are cognitive rather than emotional problems, that can oversimplify a narrative, confuse cause with effect, and draw haphazard meanings from whatever the person does recall at the moment. The phrase “unconscious behavior” derives from the psychoanalytic tradition of interviewing, suggesting that memories may be repressed and thus distorted, but many other schools of thought might apply the term to ingrained communication habits the person has acquired, whatever their psychological cause or effect on the truthfulness of the interview’s results. The eight facilitators are tactics the interviewer may take to encourage good response: 1. Fulfilling expectation 2. Recognition 3. Altruistic appeals 4. Sympathetic understanding 5. New experience 6. Catharsis 7. The need for meaning 8. Extrinsic rewards. Frankly, there is good reason to worry that these eight tactics may elicit false or distorted responses, even as they encourage the interviewee to talk. In the context of family history interviews, the person may fulfill a sense of duty by providing the information. At the same time, the person may be aware that their own position in the family is enhanced, for example as the previous chapter gave recognition to Ernest Wheeler by reporting about the memoir he had written for the family history. Altruistic appeals and sympathetic understanding are obvious tactics, the first 5.4 The Process of Interviewing 159 being a bit like fulfilling expectations, and the second having aspects of recognition but also perhaps providing superficial psychotherapy that helps interviewees deal with their memories. Yes, being the subject of an interview can be an exciting new experience, but that may emphasize novelty in the responses more than accuracy, and family historians may need to interview knowledgeable members of a family multiple times, over which the novelty will wear off. Catharsis sounds psychotherapeutic, and in a 1956 journal article Gordon connected it to some of the other inhibitors and facilitators:

A less intense threat to self-esteem is found when the respondent, though he consciously possesses the information, hesitates to admit it to the interviewer because he anticipates that the latter will disapprove. Often the respondent is torn between the temptation to withhold the information and the yearning for catharsis. If he is made to feel conﬁdent that the interviewer will not condemn him, he may welcome the opportunity to “tell all” (Gordon 1956, p. 159).

The interviewer may not “condemn him,” but what about the other family members, given that conﬁdentiality in this work is practically impossible, because it often is easy to deduce who possessed the information summarized in the history? The seventh facilitator in the list may provide an answer, “the need for meaning.” All families have unresolved issues, some more intense than others, and assembling an accurate narrative can help members understand why others behaved as they did, and from understanding may come sympathy and forgiveness. The eighth item, extrinsic rewards, probably refers to the money payments researchers often pay to their research subjects, so it may not be relevant here. The need for meaning applies not merely to the interviewee, but also to the interviewer and the project of which the interview is a presumably small part. Both parties to the interview should be able to “free associate” and discover new topics that would enhance the total family history, but the interviewer may also wish to base questions upon standard theories of family life, drawn from the social sciences. In 1983, Andrew Cherlin observed:

Historical research has traditionally been more descriptive than explanatory, more concerned with illuminating speciﬁc events than with generalizing across time and space. It has, therefore, been less concerned than social science with developing widely applicable social theories. Family historians, with their fundamental interest in the great changes over the past several centuries, have adopted theoretical models developed by social scientists to help interpret changes in the family. The most widely used model is modernization theory, a loosely deﬁned approach that postulates a more or less linear movement from traditional society to modern society (Cherlin 1983, p. 61).

Cherlin’s essay is rather critical of modernization theory, arguing that many modern conditions existed decades or even centuries ago, and the course of history is not a straight line. When he refers to “family historians,” he chiefly means academics who write about general topics, although often using specific examples. Here we use the term to describe members of a family who seek to assemble a narrative and archive of their own heritage, or professionals helping families achieve this goal. Yet Cherlin’s points apply here as well. Reading twentieth-century social science relevant to family history may over-emphasize modernization theory, which Cherlin 160 5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members says seemed most appropriate in the 1950s, but in fact that literature contains many theories and topics, from which today’s family historians may choose. For example, in 1987 Susan Juster and Maris Vinovskis criticized three established approaches, generations, household composition, and family cycle, then advocated a fourth, life-course (Juster and Vinovskis 1987, p. 197). The idea that families can be understood as a series of generations makes perfect sense within many small families, but in large households and across large family trees, people of very different ages may be assigned to the same generation. Household composition was often simplified in terms of the numbers of residents within a particular home, yet especially a century or two ago very large households often included distant relatives, boarders who rented a room, and among a large faction of the professional as well as upper classes, servants. For a while, specific models were popular charting the history of a family across a standard series of steps, cycling each generation, but Juster and Vinovskis reported that no real consensus had developed about which model was widely applicable. They suggested instead a life-course approach that “takes the individual as the unit of analysis rather than the family, and embeds the development of the individual within the changing context of family, neighborhood, and community” (Juster and Vinovskis 1987, p. 197). However, over the decades a very large number of focused studies and surveys of the family literature have found merit in combining household composition and individual life-course accounts, preserving such concepts as generation sequence and reproductive cycle, avoiding being locked into any single model (Smelser 1963; Kertzer 1991; Cavanagh et al. 2006).

5.5 Conclusion

Family historians preparing to perform interviews need not adopt any particular framework, other than the one that good judgment suggests ﬁts the particular family, and the topics of interest at that point in the development of the project. Some interview projects may have wider scope, emphasizing family but not limited to it. One exceedingly prominent example is the nearly 52,000 video interviews conducted 1994–1999 with people who had experienced the European Holocaust, by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which had been founded by Steven Spielberg, and in which information technology research projects had been conducted.9 Integrating the results of such a vast project challenges even relatively large teams of professional researchers, but even a small family can produce diverse materials that challenge an individual historian. Assembling the results of multiple interviews, especially with many members of the same family, need not lead to consensus, but may beneﬁt from seminars at which family members discuss the results of their individual interviews with each other, probably in recordable online teleconferencing systems like WebEx or BlueJeans, if participants do not live near each other. This chapter has emphasized free-form

9sﬁ.usc.edu/. 5.5 Conclusion 161 question-answer interviews, yet the stimuli that encourage a person to report memories need not be verbal. Another computer-supported approach is preparing visual material as background for an interview, for example asking the interviewer to explain what is happening in a set of related photographs, or doing a virtual walk through a home, neighborhood, school, or workplace. Another alternative, that leads into the following chapter, is to display a family artifact, such as a toy, a tool, or an artwork, and ask, “What does this mean to you?”

References

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Abstract Artifacts are humanly-created physical objects that embody information of value to archaeologists, anthropologists and historians, and some also function as emotionally valuable relics for the families that own them. To the extent possible, a family historian should document and interpret them in situ, that is within the physical and social context where they were used. The chapter begins with multiple examples of in situ documentation using descriptive text and photographs, ﬁrst within a communal religious movement from a sociological study, then within the home of an ordinary family. Although often ignored by scholars, among the most meaningful artifacts are childhood toys, as is explained with examples from a roughly 1922 professional photograph of three children with their most treasured toys, then a 1932 home movie that includes one of the same artifacts. Several examples show how some artifacts can be preserved by scanning, beginning with a war relic cross that was collected in Flanders Fields in 1918, sharing the results both with the wider family that has the physical cross, and with the people who live today in the exact area where it originated, through their local history website. Then two pictures are scanned in different ways, while their metadata are considerably expanded through online searches. Not all artifacts are small objects that can be held in a human hand or displayed on a bookcase, so the chapter ends with a variety of methods for preserving very large things, speciﬁcally farm machinery and sailboats, starting with a 1942 home movie and then considering a range of alternatives including computer simulation of the object.

Physical artifacts are clearly important for archaeology, cultural anthropology, and the antiques industry, but they are also important tools for understanding the skills and life experiences of the members of a family. The chapter will explore a number of technical means for documenting artifacts and incorporating their relevant information in a family history. These go far beyond merely identifying a commercial product, like the Buick shown in Fig. 1.3, and linking to online sources. Many artifacts are unique, or nearly so, such as an engraved artwork or an inscribed trophy, and they may require very extensive research to produce a worthwhile metadata record. As simple as it may seem to photograph a physical object, whether with a

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 165 W. S. Bainbridge, Family History Digital Libraries, Human–Computer Interaction Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01063-8_6 166 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts handheld camera or on a document scanner, full technologies for three-dimensional documentation are both necessary and not yet available for many kinds of artifact. This chapter will connect the challenges faced in building artifacts into a family history with both old and new approaches, from the use of photographs a century ago by anthropologists like Franz Boas, up to awareness that developments in 3D printing associated with the Maker Movement could preserve artifacts as data ﬁles from which they could be reconstructed.

6.1 Documenting Artifacts In Situ

In 1964, anthropologist Colin Turnbull was kind enough to show me the collection of artifacts in the African Ethnology storage section of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, complaining at one point that many of the objects contributed in early years had not been documented properly. Of course, the museum had long endeavored to achieve high quality in documentation, and one of the classical examples was published in the museum’s bulletin in 1901, “The Eskimo of Bafﬁn Land and Hudson Bay,” by Franz Boas. This book-length publication includes a vast number of drawings of artifacts, from arrowheads to clothing, from cooking pots to kayaks, but also many pages of ethnographic description of the Eskimo culture that provides a context for appreciating the artifacts (Boas 1901). Boas himself was quite familiar with the area and the people from whom the artifacts derived, but other people had assembled much of the collection, rendering this research an extensively collaborative endeavor. Turnbull’s mentorship was very much in my mind when I began my own most extensive anthropological ﬁeld research in 1969, beginning with an observation study of Scientology in 1969–1970, then moving to one of its offshoots, The Process, in 1970–1976. The Process was an exceedingly complex communal religion, derived not only from Scientology but also from Psychoanalysis and the diffuse groups of sub- cultures variously called Ritual Magick, Rosicrucianism, Thelema, and the Golden Dawn. The academic results were a book-length ethnography, a series of articles and separate book chapters, and in more literary form, a novel (Bainbridge 1978, 2017). Much of the theoretical analysis centered on the social-cultural dynamics through which radical cultures emerge, so I collected a good deal of data about the evolving ideology and set of exceedingly ornate rituals. But visual symbols and distinctive clothing were also fundamental expressive features of the culture, so I also collected artifacts and information about their meaning to dedicated members of The Process. After a few months of interaction, the leaders of the Boston branch of The Process were quite comfortable letting me take photographs of themselves, their headquarters, and their rituals. They published over a dozen of them in their magazines, and a number of the pictures I had given them appeared years later in a book that I was not involved in writing. But I was not myself a formal member of their commune, despite having completed the doctrinal classes required to become one. By interacting closely with the members, I was able to learn directly what the symbols of The Process 6.1 Documenting Artifacts In Situ 167

Fig. 6.1 A Power Point slide of Process artifacts in situ meant to them personally. The relevance here is that it provides a background for advocating in situ photographic documentation of artifacts, in the rather different context of family history. The technical term in situ is Latin for in or on the site. A reasonably good online dictionary notes that in situ is an adverb or adjective meaning, “situated in the original, natural, or existing place or position: The archaeologists were able to date the vase because it was found in situ.”1 The meaning of this term expands when used to describe research on how members of a culture use and understand their artifacts, the site referring to their lives as well as their location, their situation more generally. Figure 6.1 provides an introductory example. It is a PowerPoint slide from a sociological lecture, two images showing the same location in the Alpha ritual room of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, house used in 1971 as the headquarters of the Boston Chapter of The Process. The picture on the left shows one side of a circle of members engaging in a group meditation, and the picture on the right shows the ritual equipment kept at that location, when the people were not present. Of course these pictures do not show the objects with perfect clarity, but other pictures were also taken to provide more complete images. The red color in the air at the top of the left picture is an exposure-exaggerated glow from incense smoke, and a blue curtain carrying a silver cross symbol is the background for both images,

1www.dictionary.com/browse/in-situ. 168 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts covering windows that otherwise would show the street in front of the house. The opposite end of the Alpha had a similar but black curtain that carried a red and black Mendes Goat face of Satan. The silver cross represented Christ, who was not Jesus in the theology of The Process, but the personified principle of Unity, contrasted with Satanic Separation, in the Game of the Gods. The Process was not a conventional religious group, and the meaning of its symbols to members could not be guessed by outsiders. At the bottom of the right-hand image is the circular altar, holding four candles. It was a simple wooden box, topped with a circular piece of plywood, a dark cloth, a red cut-out version of the main Process symbol called the P-Sign, and a circular plate of glass. The altar does not appear in the left-hand picture because it had been placed in the center of the circle of meditators, which is out of the frame of this particular shot. The other equipment seen clearly in the right-hand picture is less clear and behind the meditators in the left-hand image. It includes two hand-made chairs, two stands holding bowls of different colors, a big gong, and an incense cup on top of the gong. The cup cannot be seen in the left-hand image, because it was on the altar and spewing incense. These pictures record a moment in history, at least one of the people having died, the artifacts destroyed, and even the building represented by the floor and wall having long ago been torn down. The equipment was used in different ways for different rituals. The main Alpha gathering each week was the Sabbath Assembly early Saturday evening, for which the altar was placed in the center of the room flanked by the two stands. The silver bowl was filled with water, representing Christ, and the red bowl belched fire, representing Satan. The two chairs were placed at opposite ends of the room, at right angles to the line between the stands, one under each of the two god symbols hanging on a curtain. The chair near the Christ symbol was for the Sacrifist, who directed the main structure of the elaborate hour and a half ritual, including chants and occasional bangs on the gong. The chair under the Satan symbol belonged to the emotional Evangelist who performed the dramatic sermon. If newcomers were present who wanted to become members, they could kneel before the Evangelist to be inducted as Acolytes. Somewhat experienced Acolytes could ascend to Initiate rank at a different point in the service, by kneeling before the Sacrifist, as assistant priests held the two bowls on either side to permit baptism by both water and fire. To be sure, an esoteric religious ritual is not the same as daily life in a secular family, yet this example does demonstrate a universal truth: Artifacts take on their human meanings only in a wider context involving people, other artifacts, and somewhat specialized actions. Figure 6.2 offers six glimpses of the wider context in a collage of details from other Process photos. The upper left corner shows a triangular pin with the Mendes Goat face of Satan, as worn on the uniform of an inner member of The Process, with a rank higher than Initiate, most often Messengers and Prophets. The top center image shows just part of a portrait of a Messenger selling magazines on the Boston streets, wearing two such pins flanking a silver cross. The date is again 1971, when the color of uniforms had just shifted from all-black to all-grey, but lacking a gray cloak on this cold day she is wearing her old black one over the new gray shirt and pants. The upper right corner shows a different member of Prophet rank, gazing 6.1 Documenting Artifacts In Situ 169

Fig. 6.2 In situ photographs of Process artifacts conveying symbols between the fingers of her hand, one of which is wearing a silver ring in the form of the P-sign that expresses her higher rank in the strict Process hierarchy. The lower-right corner of Fig. 6.2 is a different view of the Altar, on which the candles have been lit but not yet the incense. The symbol looks like a hybrid of a Maltese cross and a swastika, but was initially four copies of the letter “P” for Process, superimposed from the four points of the compass to represent the dynamic partnerships of the Four Great Gods of the Universe: Christ, Satan, Jehovah and Lucifer. The original version of this symbol consisted of four straight lines, that later were flared out at their ends, depicting what some members informally believed to be the four trumpets of the gods proclaiming “the End and a New Beginning.” The bottom center of the figure is the Sign of Union, an Alpha representing the male god Lucifer inside an Omega representing the female goddess Jehovah, as it appears on the blue tabard worn by the Sacrifist during a Sabbath Assembly. The lower left corner appears similar to the altar but is simply one of the improvised tables used in the basement coffee house called the Cavern, made from a large empty telephone wire spool. The pictures were all taken using a Nikon 35 mm camera, usually with color film, but under dark conditions like the coffee house with more sensitive black and white film. The shots in Figs. 6.1 and 6.2 were all done with the ordinary lens, but both wide-angle and telephoto lenses were also used in other aspects of the research, notably outdoors. For night-time and indoor shots, the photo lab was often asked to “push” the developing, to make the results brighter. I never used a flashbulb, because it would disrupt social gatherings, but for carefully staged photos I did employ a pair of floodlights.2 Of course today the technology for digital photography is quite

2en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_(photography). 170 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts different, notably in that we can instantly see exactly what shots we have taken, make whatever adjustments seem desirable in taking more shots, and record metadata describing images in realtime. In 2009, Timothy Wyllie and other former leaders of the Process published a book presenting their memoirs of membership, illustrated with many photographs, some of which I had given them back in 1971–1972. One was a contact sheet takenlatein 1970, with 20 shots of black-robed Process members seeking donations in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Wyllie 2009). Contact sheets were often made for black-and-white film, by simply placing four sections of 35 mm film directly on a paper photographic print and exposing it briefly to light, resulting in tiny images not very different from the antique gem tintypes mentioned in Chap. 2. One could then see which of the shots had turned out well and deserved to be used to make enlarged prints. One incidental result was that the name of the film type was also preserved along the edge, and in this case it was Kodak Plus X Pan, a type of film that ceased manufacture in 2011. Even as they document artifacts, old photos can themselves be artifacts, especially when they document the nature and use of obsolete forms of technology, such as the “negatives” that reversed black and white in non-color pictures. Several other photos in Wyllie’s book that I had taken documented the clothing and symbols in many other contexts, such as a P-Sign belt buckle, the P-Sign emblem on the red tabard of the Evangelist, and the Sign of Union silver ring worn by a Priest. Most striking is a photograph I had taken of one of the group’s children, in full uniform, sitting in a chair but in a posture that clearly shows the design of his costume and the placement of the symbols. The caption was especially meaningful: “Daniel, who was tragically shot by a friend some years after he left The Process, wears uniform with cross and Goat of Mendes” (Wyllie 2009). Daniel was the model for Malachi, the protagonist’s brother, in the semi-autobiographical novel, Beyond the Cabin, by Jared Nathan Garrett. Jared was one of the children born and raised inside The Process, which evolved into the Foundation Faith worshipping only Jehovah, which Jared renamed for his novel Fundamental Faith. The text on the back cover summarizes this remarkable work of literature:

Fourteen-year-old Josh longs to get away from the Fundamental Faith. Although cult life is all he’s known, he refuses to give into the group’s weird mix of hyper control and near-total neglect. Josh and his oldest brother, Malachi, plan to escape from the cult, but when Malachi leaves Josh behind, Josh has to ﬁnd a way to survive the isolation of being surrounded by abusive people he will never understand. Or get out on his own. Within months of leaving, Malachi is killed in a drug deal gone bad. Now Josh has to grieve while coping with a tyrannical cult leader - who happens to be his mother - and his own terrifying temper (Garrett 2014).

Books can be considered artifacts, and the radical changes in the publishing industry are challenging all traditional deﬁnitions. Beyond the Cabin was self-published and contains no information about how or where, the “when” being recorded only in a 2014 statement that the copyright belongs to the author. My copy is autographed, and the author wrote this advice: “William: Always go beyond!” It is available in both 6.1 Documenting Artifacts In Situ 171 paperback and electronic versions from Amazon.com.3 As of February 10, 2018, 25 generally quite positive customer reviews were available on the Amazon.com site, including these comments that are relevant here, in that they connect the novel to real-life experiences:

Having been a part of this cult, I found this book to be rather disturbing but very insightful. I think it takes great courage to document a dark time in one’s life and Jared has done a fantastic job. I found myself reading it all the way through at some cost to sleep but worth every minute.

“Beyond the Cabin” captured feelings and reminded me of childhood events that I had long forgotten about for years. The feelings of anger, happiness, disappointment, wonder, shock, and sadness echoed parts of my own upbringing and resurfaced fond memories that I smile about from time to time, as well as those that I had kept ﬁled away, desperately hoping that I would never need to access those dark archives ever again. But I didn’t grow up in a cult. In fact, I lead a relatively happy/normal nuclear childhood all things considered.

Based on true events, this is an inside look at life in a secretive cult from the viewpoint of a teenager. More than anything, this was a very emotional book. It was very descriptive and I could feel the frustration, the anger, the confusion… it felt very real. But what was even more interesting was the switch from helplessness to empowerment and the emotional maturity and intelligence that was learned. Very great, sometimes raw read that makes you appreciate family, freedom and individual choice.

While we don’t all grow up in controlling cults, all of us face obstacles in life. Beyond the Cabin for me was about a journey of identity, not for Joshua the main character but for me. I was able to identify the cabins I have built in my life and reﬂect on my life “Beyond the Cabin” that I had built for years.

The value of an artifact has two primary dimensions, practical utility and symbolic meaning. When The Process underwent schism in 1974, the main group renaming itself The Foundation and rejecting all gods but Jehovah, the artifacts shown in Figs. 6.1 and 6.2 lost any sacred signiﬁcance for members, and many of them were sold in a small store the group operated in Manhattan for a while. In secular families, the younger generation tends to inherit artifacts throughout life, but especially at the death of an ancestor, which may confer special emotional meaning to the objects. Many inherited objects have practical value, such as a set of dinner dishes used only on special occasions until accidents have broken many of them, at which point they may become every-day dishes or most simply be put in the trash, while hanging one plate on the wall like a museum exhibit. However, given the information technology focus of this book, we can consider the possibilities for separating practical utility from symbolic meaning, consuming the practical utility during our every-day lives, and preserving the symbolic meaning forever by sharing it online or in private data archives.

3www.amazon.com/Beyond-Cabin-Jared-Nathan-Garrett/dp/1503192989. 172 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts

6.2 A Brief In Situ Example of Preservation

The full range of archaeological and anthropological methods for documenting and preserving artifacts can be employed by family historians. An example of the in situ approach is captured at frankly low fidelity in Fig. 6.3, which shows four photos, probably from the same roll of 35 mm film, that I took around Christmas time in about 1960. They were taken inside the home of my parents, and nearly all of the artifacts shown were destroyed in the fire that took place May 14, 1965. That tragic fact emphasizes the value of documenting artifacts far more thoroughly than was accomplished by these few informal photos. The top left image in Fig. 6.3 shows the south wall of the living room, and the direction “south” was confirmed by looking at the satellite view of the house in Google Maps, given that with great effort the house was repaired and inhabited by a new family. In the center of the wall is a two-door doorway leading to a semi- enclosed porch, flanked by built-in bookcases and four low cabinets. To preserve and document books, it may only be necessary to write down the usual bibliographic reference for each, because other copies exist in libraries and private collections, and today online reviews and metadata place essentially all books in a public context. I recall the exact locations of two books written by family members, which had different fates. On a shelf immediately to the right of the center of the door was a copy of Beyond the Ranges, the autobiography of my great-uncle, Consuelo Seoane,

Fig. 6.3 Recording artifacts around 1960 inside a conventional home 6.2 A Brief In Situ Example of Preservation 173 and it was a simple matter to obtain a new copy.4 In the first cabinet to the right of the door was the only copy of an unpublished book manuscript by my mother, Barbara Bainbridge, essentially an anthropological textbook about the world’s peoples, and after an extensive search I had to recognize that no copy of it survives. She had worked for the American Museum of Natural History, and its library staff was kind enough to search for a carbon copy, to no avail. Most of the books are not visible in the picture, because it was a family tradition to put all the Christmas cards that had been received there for a couple of weeks, simply slipping the hind portions of folding cards between or over books. Other cards were pinned to a band of cloth hanging down between the two doors, with the face of a snowman at the top. Minor family traditions like this may be worth preserving in deed as well as in data. The cards from one year were not saved after this brief display, except for rare examples that had been specially created, rather than bought in a store, by close friends or family members. The picture at upper right happens to be in the upstairs bedroom in the southwest corner of the house, taken from floor level looking upward at Stripy the cat, who is standing on the bed. This incidentally preserves the artifacts hanging on the wall, including two swords and their scabbards that did survive the fire because of their durable metal materials, one being a military school ritual sword, and the other an antique Japanese sword which might or might not have been manufactured as a costly tourist item a century ago. The large patterned item on the wall is a genuine but store-bought bark cloth or kapa, described thus in a popular digital library hosted by the Library of Congress: “Made from wauke, the paper mulberry plant, by a time- consuming, labor-intensive method, Hawaiian kapa (bark cloth) had many useful functions in everyday life in early Hawaii. Because of the time and effort required in its making, kapa was quickly replaced in modern Hawaii with new durable, easily manufactured fabrics. But the making of kapa continues, the craft practiced by a devoted group seeking to revive the venerable traditions of the Hawaiian culture.”5 A similar photo was taken of Stripy’s brother, Grayful, peering out of a paper bag on the kitchen floor, which incidentally documents the green color and pattern of the linoleum. The lower-left image in Fig. 6.3 shows the top of a shoulder-height Korean silverware chest in the dining room of the home, with butterfly handles on the drawers, supporting two candles, a circular metal tray of unknown origins, and a carved head the family believed was from Thailand. The Korean chest was one of three purchased by Lucy Bainbridge in Korea, the other two appearing in Fig. 7.1. She went there as part of a world-circling tour that included Japan and a trip westward on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The trip took place in 1908, as documented by the monthly magazine of the Mission Society for which she had worked since 1891, and a copy can be downloaded from Google Books.6 Lucy’s autobiography, Yesterdays, which

4en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consuelo_Seoane. 5memory.loc.gov/diglib/legacies/loc.afc.afc-legacies.200002884/default.html. 6New York City Mission Society Monthly, April 1908, 20(4): 13; books.google.com/books?id= JW8PAAAAIAAJ. 174 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts can be read online at HathiTrust, described the Korean part of her second round-the- world voyage only brieﬂy.7 The lower-right image shows a painting of June Wheeler Bainbridge with her son William on her lap, slightly impressionist but very charming, of which no other image quite so clear survives today. A family should photograph entire rooms of its home, showing some treasured artifacts in situ, but it is also necessary to capture images of some items at high resolution and careful positioning. If one existed, several branches of this family would display a copy of this now-vanished, century-old painting in their contemporary homes. Another picture in the same set, not reproduced here, includes just one corner of another precious family painting that was destroyed, yet exists today in a very different form. It was a more photographic oil painting of June as a young girl, sitting in a swing and gazing upward at her brother Ernest, who stands beside her. There were actually two versions of the painting, and the other showed June looking downward, rather than at Ernest. Anyone can see it today, because it was reproduced on the cover of the novel Mustard Seed, written by June’s daughter, Barbara, displayed and discussed in Chap. 9. Indeed, that image can be viewed instantly by anybody, because the book is for sale from Amazon.com, that displays its cover.8 Exactly zero metadata was associated with the photos in Fig. 6.3, and only because I was the photographer and still have a functional memory do we know what these pictures show. Among the vast photo collection I inherited are three pictures of a house, one exterior and two interior shots that very well depict the distinctive furniture of a period I guess is about 1880. On the back of each, someone wrote “Standish Farm” and the outdoor picture also has “Greene Maine.” Another person wrote a question on the back of the exterior photo: “often visited by Wheelers - run by a relative?” A Wheeler genealogy mentions families named Standish and Greene, but does not provide any information connecting to a farm named Standish or to close relatives (Wheeler 1914). Online newspaper searches on multiple sites turned up only a 1905 article about a murder that took place at what appears to be the location: “The Standish farm is situated about two miles from the Greene depot.”9 The owner was then Howard L. Keyser, who may have purchased the farm years after the pictures were taken. He is buried in a cemetery containing some Wheelers, but that name is common, and so even a dramatic murder has not identiﬁed the family context of the three antique photos. It would be feasible but costly to visit the area physically, and look through whatever real estate records still exist from that period. The obvious lesson of this example is that the time, place, and human meaning of photographs need to be documented before the crucial information is lost.

7babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89077002913;view=1up;seq=138. 8www.amazon.com/Mustard-Seed-Barbara-Bainbridge-McIntosh/dp/1530660009. 9“The Fourth Murder in Five Days in Maine,” Main Woodsman, Phillips, Maine, April 28, 1905, p. 1. 6.3 Toys, Play, and Reality 175

Fig. 6.4 A century old photo of three children with their favorite artifacts

6.3 Toys, Play, and Reality

A remarkably efficient way to start looking at the connections between artifacts and people is Fig. 6.4, a photograph of the same three children in Fig. 1.4, taken about the same time but not all in exactly the same clothing, showing them not with their father but with their toys. Their heights graph their ages: William was born on January 11, 1914, John on November 1, 1915, and Barbara on April 1, 1917. The photo was clearly taken in a studio, and the nondescript background is a pale image of a forest, saying nothing about their natures and potential future lives. In contrast, their clothing and toys communicate significant meanings. William is wearing a business suit and tie, John a sailor suit, and Barbara a very feminine dress, which could be the same one in Fig. 1.4. Their fancy attire suggests relatively high social status, within a culture having very different expectations for males and females. Remarkably, William did in adulthood become an executive of a major financial corporation, John commanded a warship in the US Navy during the 176 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts

Second World War, and Barbara concentrated her efforts on her family, as illustrated by the family-based novel Mustard Seed she wrote, playing a traditional feminine nurturant role. There are also three toys in Fig. 6.4. Barbara is holding hands with a girl doll as well as with her brother, expressing intimate family connections. John is holding a mechanical lion doll, and he actually became closely connected to its symbolic homeland, investing a decade running an organization that set up and staffed law schools in sub-Saharan Africa (Bainbridge 1972). The toy sailboat stands before both William and John, implying some connection to both. While John served in the US Navy, it was William whose main hobby for over a decade in adulthood was sailing sailboats around Long Island Sound. Presumably the children chose which toys to bring to the photographer, but still it may be largely chance that the three toys do foretell important aspects of their future lives. In documenting any family’s collection of photographs, there may be many opportunities to write commentaries or record anecdotes related to the objects depicted in some of the pictures. In this case, the lion held by John serves as an excellent hyperlink. I actually recall playing with it myself in the late 1940s. You wind it up, set it down, and watch a dramatic scene. It makes a sound rather like growling, rears slowly back while moving slightly from side to side, then jumps forward, repeating this in a sequence of surges until the spring has wound down. The children’s mother recorded this in a home movie she made in about 1932, borrowing the title, Bring ‘Em Back Alive. Released August 19, 1932, the commercial movie Bring ‘Em Back Alive was a dramatic documentary by animal collector Frank Buck, tremendously popular and connected to a successful radio show.10 Figure 6.5 assembles four frames from the home movie. The process of copying these four single frames highlighted a number of technical details that represent much broader problems in movie and video preservation. The MPG video file is dated January 13, 2002, which is when I translated it from a VHS cassette that had been made from the original 16 mm movies by a local service between 5 and 10 years earlier. In grabbing the screenshots recently, I happened to use a recent CyberLink Power Media Player program that displayed the video in high resolution, which revealed from moment to moment various faint rectangular shapes that indicated that the version of VHS or MPG in which the file had been made was somewhat low resolution in the scale of shades of gray it was set for. There were also areas of colored tint, that of course the original black and white film did not have, and later I used Photoshop Elements 14 Editor to remove that error. Power Media Player allowed me to pause anywhere in the video I wanted and step forward one frame at a time. Seen individually, many frames depicting rapid motion were out of focus, but when played as a video the human eye combined frames and did not see the blur. These observations underscore the importance of two points. First, to the extent possible videos must be captured and copied in high resolution, or with whatever settings are required to prevent degradation of the images. Second, transferring any

10en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_%27Em_Back_Alive_(ﬁlm); en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Buck_ (animal_collector). 6.3 Toys, Play, and Reality 177

Fig. 6.5 Action toys in an old home movie complex image from one technological medium to another is problematic, requiring care but not always within the user’s control. The upper-left image in Fig. 6.5 is the title at the beginning of the original home movie, with a monkey hand puppet moving its head vigorously this way and that. The upper-right image is the same toy lion held by John in Fig. 6.4, and the series of images records exactly how it moved. It was introduced by a text saying, “Deep in the jungle stalked the king of beasts.” Searching online, I found pictures of very similar if not identical toy lions that had been made by Roullet et Decamps, which Wikipedia says “was a French toy manufacturing company operating in the 19th and 20th centuries, which specialized in automata.”11 I suspect Dr. Will obtained it during his trip to Europe in 1921, and seem to recall his wife June saying something to that effect. The lower-left image is a monkey doll temporarily attached to a branch of a tree, and somebody outside the field of view waved the branch back and forth. The lower-right image was introduced by this text: “The one legged stork is almost extinct.” It is a jointed, wooden stork, with moveable neck and beak, operated by somebody outside the field of view to the right pulling on a string to make it look as if the stork is pecking at the water for its dinner. Like living lions, eventually the one in Figs. 6.4 and 6.5 ceased functioning, and the dynamic nature of all the toys makes an important point. The best ways for preserving an artifact depend upon the functions it served when it was in use. Many family paintings and other pictures hang first on this wall in this home, then that wall

11en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roullet_%26_Decamps; fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roullet-Decamps. 178 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts in that other home. Ideally, good photographic copies of any family painting should be shared, so that many homes may hang the same picture if in derivative form. Photos of many paintings can be assembled into traditional albums, print-on-demand family artbooks, and purely electronic media like PowerPoint, with appropriate metadata. But the chief function of a painting is to be seen. What about artifacts that were used to accomplish one or another goal? For many years in the early 1950s, I used the very microscope Dr. Will had used early in his medical practice. No longer functional today, only one of the lenses has been preserved as a non-functional memento. The action of the lion has been preserved in the home movie. Ancient books written in the Latin language function today, but in complex ways. Most obviously, they have been translated into modern languages, but often will not have their full meaning for readers without connections to external information. For example, what did it mean, geographically or politically, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon? Such examples suggest that physical preservation of an artifact is different from functional preservation, and information technologies are especially supportive of function.

6.4 Scanning and Searching

This book advocates the use of a great variety of technologies and methods in preserving information within family history digital libraries, often exploring how a very common technology might be of value outside its usual range of applications. All of the traditional photographs presented here made their way to the printed page by way of a document scanner that transmitted each file to a somewhat distant computer. There are also many cases in which I found it reasonable to scan in a physical object, often getting a somewhat ugly result, but one that documented the general character and exact size of the artifact. An example I will not publish here because of its low aesthetic quality is a scan of a hand-sized statue of R2-D2 from the Star Wars series. Its somewhat bizarre origins illustrate how it is occasionally both advantageous and necessary to go outside the conventional expectations for a particular technology. In 1977 I was given a rather nice birthday cake, with a three-dimensional representation of R2 lying in the center, made from icing. In the year of the public frenzy around the first Star Wars movie, local bakers used a standard mold to add this distinctive work of art, and charged significantly for this service. We carefully cut the center out of the cake, eating the rest, letting R2 dry for a few days. I then applied a quick-drying plaster over the image, and let it solidify to duplicate the original baker’s mold. The next step was to remove the cake and icing, and fill the plaster with epoxy metal compound, which solidified in a few minutes, after which I cut the plaster away to reveal a high-tech sculpture of the high-tech R2 droid. This was then placed on a wooden background, and hung on the walls of my offices over a period of four decades. Before wrapping it carefully and placing it in storage, I placed it on a scanner, capturing an image that documented without quite duplicating it. 6.4 Scanning and Searching 179

Fig. 6.6 High resolution scans of an artifact collected in the First World War

Figure 6.6 is a far nicer image of a stone cross, that Dr. Will had obtained a century before it was scanned. This is a composite of two scans, one for each side. Originally a short label was attached to it, saying that he had taken it from a ruined “Belgian” church during the First World War, but that label was lost, and the cross broken, during the 1965 house fire. I had glued the two pieces back together immediately after retrieving it. Given that the cross is essentially flat, its faces scanned well, but I did not attempt to scan the edges. Early in June 1918, Dr. Will visited the British forces on the Belgian front in Flanders, and one morning he came under German fire while collecting this ornately- carved stone cross from the rubble of a church. He amassed a huge collection of war relics, including a Mauser rifle and a series of gas masks illustrating their development over the years of the struggle. They were kept in what he called the War Trophy Closet at Gramercy Park, and most relics have subsequently been lost. However, a written inventory still exists, dated August 24, 1946, and it recorded the place the cross was found: “Grande Sec Bois.” Especially in the case of foreign cultures, one can never be sure how common a place name may be. I have known cases in which people mistook Washington the state for Washington the city, even in the United States. Is Santa Cruz in California or Bolivia? Google Translate reports that Sec Bois means Dry Wood, so it does sound like a geographic locality rather than some more exact 180 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts man-made location. Thus I could not guess what kind of hits I would get if I googled Grande Sec Bois. But in this case there was a clear consensus. Sec-Bois is a tiny area inside Vieux-Berquin. The French version of Wikipedia locates it in France but right at the Belgian border: “Vieux-Berquin est une commune française, située dans le département du Nord en région Hauts-de-France.”12 A website about French cemeteries offered a connection to the exact spot in Google Maps, permitting a quick view of a combination map and aerial photo. Advertisement tags identify the location of a lawn mower store, an auto repair shop, and Chapelle Notre- Dame de Lourdes within walking distance of Cimetière du Sec Bois-Vieux-Berquin. However, another website, focused on the area’s religious heritage, offers a map marking the location of fully 7 chapels tightly clustered around a village. Near the exact center is a church, Eglise Saint Charles Borommée.13 A page commemorating the centennial of the First World War consists of a month by month calendar marking the exact days in which specific victims of the war were killed.14 Several other websites provide more information about the area, all pretty much in agreement. A website devoted to the First World War offered a map confirming that a German offensive had advanced into that exact area in April 1918, and it was about a month later when Dr. Will acquired the cross.15 Scanning the cross into a digital file allows sharing it with other family members, and documenting its origins provides additional meaning. What are the implications for the physical artifact itself? One alternative would be to identify which immediate member of the family associates the most intense meaning to the symbolism of the Christian cross, and transfer custody of it to that individual. Another would be to return it to its “rightful place” in the church from which it was taken a century earlier. I was able to make contact with the local historian who maintained the most relevant website, by means of this bilingual message:

Please forgive our ignorance of the French language. We are using Google Translate.

S’il vous plaît, pardonnez notre ignorance de la langue française. Nous utilisons Google Translate.

We are not sure if you are the person we should communicate with. Please tell us.

Nous ne sommes pas sûrs si vous êtes la personne avec qui nous devrions communiquer. S’il te plait dis nous.

In the ﬁrst week of June 1918, a member of our family was in Sec Bois. He entered a damaged church, in great danger. He took a cross, believing it would be destroyed by the war. Dans la première semaine de juin 1918, un membre de notre famille était à Sec Bois. Il est entré dans une église endommagée, en grand danger. Il a pris une croix, croyant qu’il serait détruit par la guerre.

12fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vieux-Berquin. 13nddouxberquin.canalblog.com/pages/clocher-de-sec-bois/30568887.html. 14nddouxberquin.canalblog.com/pages/centenaire-1914-1918/32644632.html. 15www.ﬁrstworldwar.com/maps/graphics/maps_62_german_drives_1_(1600).jpg. 6.4 Scanning and Searching 181

He was named William Seaman Bainbridge. He was a New York doctor with many colleagues in France and Belgium. He was very active helping France in the First World War. After the war, he helped found an organization that still exists. Il s’appelait William Seaman Bainbridge. Il était un médecin de New York avec de nombreux collègues en France et en Belgique. Il a été très actif en aidant la France dans la Première Guerre Mondiale. Après la guerre, il a aidé à fonder une organisation qui existe toujours.

Comité international de médecine militaire, fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comité_international_de _médecine_militaire.

We could send you a picture of the cross. It appears to be ancient.

Nous pourrions vous envoyer une photo de la croix. Il semble être ancien.

We are not sure which church it was. But probably it was one of your chapels or your main church. Do you agree?

Nous ne savons pas de quelle église il s’agissait. Mais c’était probablement l’une de vos chapelles ou de votre église principale. Êtes-vous d’accord?

Do you want us to return the cross to you? It has been far from its home for an entire century!

Voulez-vous que nous vous rendions la croix? Il a été loin de sa maison pendant un siècle entier!

We saw all the war history and memorials on your website. We admire your anniversary activities. Perhaps you may wish to consecrate this cross.

Nous avons vu toute l’histoire de la guerre et des monuments commémoratifs sur votre site Web. Nous admirons vos activités d’anniversaire. Peut-être voudrez-vous consacrer cette croix.

Sincerely… Cordialement…

The immediate result was the addition of a page to the French website, containing this message plus the two images here reproduced in Fig. 6.6.16 Wherever the physical cross winds up, its information and images are now well distributed not only among the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the man who retrieved it from the war zone in June 1918, but also with the current residents of the exact neighborhood where that event occurred a century ago. If the function of the cross was to memorialize, then the image may be sufﬁcient, just as the words of a poem may memorialize. Canadian solder John McCrae died before the end of the war, but his words are immortal: “In Flanders ﬁelds the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place.”17 Having been salvaged from this exact area, the virtual cross in Fig. 6.6 can perform that function. Using a cross as the focus for prayer, however, may require the physical object, however spiritual prayer may be.

16nddouxberquin.canalblog.com/pages/la-croix-de-sec-bois/36453809.html. 17en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCrae. 182 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts

6.5 Scanning Basics

For some years, computer-based systems have existed for scanning physical objects from all directions, converting the images to a mathematical model, and sculpting a duplicate via 3D printing (Lindtner 2014, 2015; Lindtner et al. 2016). They are costly, complex, and have severe technical limitations, although we may well imagine that inexpensive yet accurate versions may be sold to the general public in future decades, or operated by local workshops that scan artifacts for customers. Today, we must be content with more limited tools of preservation. Like photographs and small flat objects, small drawings and paintings can easily be copied by a scanner. The exact settings that would be best to use depend upon the particular hardware and software. Therefore the family historian should study the scanner’s instruction manual and experiment to determine how best to achieve the desired results. So, we cannot provide those technical specifications here. But two examples can communicate general principles of scanning and connecting. Figure 6.7 shows sections of three scans of an engraving of birch trees, made using different settings and then assembled as thirds of the full image. Using the “rainbow” metaphor, an image that uses different scanning settings across its area can be called a scanbow. The original resolution setting on the scanner was 600 pixels per inch, my habitual setting, and for some later applications the file resolution can be reduced, for example by setting a graphic program to 50% and resulting in an image very similar to what an original setting of 300 would have achieved. The variable that distinguishes the three parts of the image is not pixel resolution, but color resolution. The left third of Fig. 6.7 was set to produce a pure black and white result, with no shading whatsoever. The central third was set for grayscale, with shading but no color. The right third was set for color. Reproduced here, some of the fine points of the differences may not be fully visible, but the figure does suggest that family historians should experiment with their own examples, including other options that their hardware and software may offer. Often, as for example in Fig. 4.1,itseems necessary to add lines at the edge of a scan, to define the scope of the image, but here no such border exists at the left edge, allowing the image to merge with the printed page or computer screen where the reader views it. As I look at the original images displayed on my computer, the color image seems rather more yellow than the actual paper on which this etching was painted. Both the scanner and my computer software permit adjusting the color balance in several ways, but the “correct” setting is very difficult to determine. Most images in this book employed the system’s default settings. An exception is Fig. 6.3 earlier in this chapter. The color in the photograph prints had faded somewhat over the intervening half century, so I increased the contrast moderately when copying the images in a graphics program, using the same setting for all four pictures. We may worry a bit whenever we make such adjustments, but it is worth noting that the engraving’s paper may have changed color as well, and the artist could just as well have printed on other paper. The physical picture of the birches does possess shading, rather than 6.5 Scanning Basics 183

Fig. 6.7 A modern scanbow of an antique etching being a pure line drawing. So I tend to prefer the grayscale version in the center of Fig. 6.7, but will save all three versions. A good starting point for discovering the meaning of a work of art, but by no means the ending point, is the identity of the artist. The back of the print had the penciled words “silver birches,” and the signature in the lower-right corner of the front has “F. Weber.” Googling “birches weber” gave far too many irrelevant hits, and adding “etching” did not help much. Knowing that the artwork had been inherited through a branch of the family who lived in New York suggested adding “New York.” That turned up a reference on eBay to an item no longer for sale, but in which a full name can be found: Frederick R. Weber. A Google text search using the full artist’s name plus “birches” turned up an image of a different etching in the same style on an 184 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts image-hosting website.18 There it was titled, “Birches in winter near oyster bay l.i. etching print - signed frederick r. weber.” The phrase “oyster bay l.i.” undoubtedly refers to the location where the trees grew, Oyster Bay, on Long Island, which is part of the New York metropolitan area.19 The website of the Smithsonian American Art Museum has a page featuring an engraving of an outdoor scene in New York City with the exact same signature as on our birches engraving, confirming that the artist has been identified correctly. It offers this limited further information: Frederick Theodore Weber, born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1883; died in New York, New York, 1956.20 Scrutinizing the New York City engraving quickly suggested to me that it depicted Gramercy Park, and the tall building in its background was the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower that was built in 1909.21 This was confirmed by looking around the park in the street view feature of Google Maps.22 Further searching turned up a 1929 newspaper article about an art exhibition, including: “Four of the etchings of Fred Weber, new president of the Brooklyn Society of Etchers, include his ‘Silver Birches,’ ‘Madison Square Garden,’ ‘Gramercy Park Snowstorm,’ and ‘The Swiss Room of the Metropolitan Museum.’”23 An online copy of the program for a different exposition gave Weber’s address in 1916 as 31 Gramercy Park.24 Given that Dr. Will had his office and home at 34 Gramercy Park, they were near neighbors, and we can speculate that Weber was a patient of this particular doctor. In any case, they shared an enduring social connection, and when Dr. Will’s son William married in 1937, Weber gave a different engraving of Gramercy Park to the wedding couple, a fact I noticed only after making the above online connections. The second example is a rather large 1865 artist-enhanced photograph of John Farmer Seaman, the father of Lucy Seaman Bainbridge. It was one of a pair, the other similarly representing his wife, Cleora August Seaman. Each was scanned in color at 600 pixels resolution. Figure 6.8 offers a rough example of how to combine elements of the same image at different resolutions, but also illustrates that at different points in history distinctive artforms may be popular, in this case one that combined drawing with photography. We know that the print dates from 1865, because on the back it bears a dated tax stamp, similar to the one seen in Fig. 2.6. At the top in Fig. 6.8 we see most of the top two thirds of the original picture, while the bottom is a much higher resolution detail of the area between John’s left eye and ear, and a scan of the artist’s signature has been pasted less obviously in

18imged.com/birches-in-winter-near-oyster-bay-l-i-etching-print-signed-frederick-r-weber- 25893632.html. 19en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_Bay_(town),_New_York. 20americanart.si.edu/artist/frederick-t-weber-5270. 21en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Life_Insurance_Company_Tower. 22untappedcities.com/2014/12/02/you-can-now-see-inside-gramercy-park-via-google-maps. 23Brooklyn Life and Activities of Long Island Society, Brooklyn, New York, Saturday, June 29, 1929, p. 20. 24New York Water Color Club: Twenty-Seventh Annual Exposition, 1916; research.nyarc.org/ digital_projects/gilded_age/31072002251421.pdf. 6.5 Scanning Basics 185 the upper right corner. Given the nature of the work, and the fact that Seaman lived in Cleveland, it was not difﬁcult to determine that the photographer and artist was Edgar Decker (1833–1905), whose work is somewhat known today and who was praised by two Cleveland newspaper articles in the same year the artistic print was made:

July 3, 1865: On Saturday evening last, Chief Engineer James Hill was presented by the members of No. 3 engine Co., with a magniﬁcent photograph of No. 3 engine, with the photographs of the members of said company arranged around it alahalo or aureola. The photograph was executed by that capital artist, Mr. Decker.25 November 17, 1865: A very ﬁne photograph of Mr. Richard H. Geary, taken by Decker, ornaments Castle’s show window on Superior street. We have never seen a photograph, in which the attitude of the subject is so easy and free, and the general expression so perfectly

Fig. 6.8 A combination photograph and drawing dating from 1865

25“Presentations,” The Cleveland Leader, morning edition, Cleveland, Ohio, July 3, 1865, p. 1. 186 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts

natural and life-like, as in this popular Treasurer of the Academy of Music. Mr. Decker has wrought a most marked success.26 An online website on the history of photography says of Decker: “He was one of the ﬁrst photographers to infuse humanity into the often austere daguerreotypes and ambrotypes. He later applied the same uncompromising expertise to his oil crayon and watercolor works, copying, and photographic enlargements.”27 Some- times managing a team of artists rather than working alone, he explored many ways in which photography could become artistic. Today, there is a commercial service named myDaVinci that offers to make drawings from photographs, commenting that the result will be “A beautiful heirloom that will be passed down for generations to come.”28 But its website shows artists sketching a separate drawing while looking at a photograph. Figure 6.8 appears to be something different, a faint photographic print on which the artist sketched hairs and other details, thus really marrying photography with drawing.

6.6 Free Camera Functional Preservation

To document a painting hanging on the wall of a home, one may begin by snapping a conventional still picture somewhat casually, using a cellphone, and connect the image file to documentation. For a more professional result, one might also copy the picture in a scanner if it is small, or if it is large one could use the inverted tripod method mentioned in Chap. 2. Professional family historians might want to gain the expertise and the relatively inexpensive equipment required to capture high-quality images. But how can we document large objects? How can we document artifacts in situ, when the situation is dynamic? The obvious answer is through movies and videos, as illustrated by the examples of a violin and the fleeting Google Glass augmented reality device in Chap. 3. An antique example relevant to family history is a home movie dating from around 1942, taken by William E. Sims at the dairy farm he owned but did not personally operate in Monroe, New York. During warm months of the year, the cows could graze the fields, but it was necessary to store food for the winter. Therefore, the farm had corn fields. After a harvest of ears of corn that could feed human beings, the extensive remaining stalks and leaves, the stover, could be harvested to feed the animals.29 This was a difficult job, and by the 1940s it could be done with heavy use of machines, and Mr. Sims did a good job documenting the entire process with his move camera. We do not know who owned the machines, but there are four theories:

26“A Fine Subject Well Done,” The Cleveland Leader, morning edition, November 17, 1865, p. 4. 27historiccamera.com/cgi-bin/librarium2/pm.cgi?action=app_display&app=datasheet&app_id= 2539. 28www.mydavinci.com/personalized-art/handdrawn/pencil-sketch-L845357.html. 29msue.anr.msu.edu/news/corn_stover_makes_excellent_beef_cow_feed_run_your_numbers; en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_stover. 6.6 Free Camera Functional Preservation 187

Fig. 6.9 A professional team using harvesting machinery

(1) He owned them. (2) The farmers owned them. (3) Farmers in the area shared, traded, or co-owned them. (4) They belonged to a company that contracted to visit a series of farms during harvest. We do know, from a Facebook group named Growing up in Monroe and described in Chap. 9, that one living member had helped harvest the cow fodder at this farm around 1960. The relevance to artifacts and family history is that the machinery was a complex collection of artifacts, serving the family but not necessarily belonging to it, and thus worth remembering but difﬁcult to document. Figure 6.9 shows six frames of the movie, throughout which Mr. Sims focused on the different technological artifacts. 188 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts

The upper-left shot shows some cows inside their barn, and it came just after some brief scenes of a member of the family that ran the farm demonstrating how milking was done. In this picture, the cows are eating fodder that has been placed on the floor where they can eat it, but separated from them by a wall of vertical metal bars that serves to prevent them from trampling and thus wasting the fodder. Other pictures not shown here depict the barn from outside, allowing us to deduce that the silo in which the corn fodder will be stored is behind the wall just to the right of the image. Had Mr. Sims wanted to document the daily operation of the farm, perhaps at different times in the year, a more extensive set of scenes would have needed to be filmed. The upper-right image in Fig. 6.9 shows a workman operating a tractor that pulls a reaper. It has the sole function of cutting the corn stalks at ground level, and thus is really not a harvester, because it leaves the stalks lying where they fall. The Wikipedia article for combine harvesters explains that the process may have three steps: “The modern combine harvester,orsimplycombine, is a versatile machine designed to efficiently harvest a variety of grain crops. The name derives from its combining three separate harvesting operations—reaping, threshing, and winnowing—into a single process.”30 The left-middle frame in Fig. 6.9 shows that men needed to pick up the harvest with their own hands, and use general-purpose vehicles to transport them to a different location for processing. The process depicted in the three remaining shots is not threshing or winnowing, because the goal is not to extract seeds or ears of corn for human consumption, but to chop the corn stover into small pieces. The right-middle shot in Fig. 6.9 shows one of the workmen managing a conveyor belt that is moving the stover from right to left. The lower-left frame is a close-up of the device that chops it up. The lower-right-hand picture reveals what is powering this process, a tractor where the engine is operating a belt rather than the tractor’s wheels. A later sequence, not included here, shows the silo where the fodder is being stored. Mr. Sims died July 21, 1959, and the farm was sold shortly thereafter. Even if he had owned the machinery depicted in Fig. 6.9, the family certainly would not have saved any of it as sentimental artifacts, feeling that the home movie he had taken years earlier was quite sufficient. How should family historians deal with items that are too large or otherwise inconvenient to retain? Clearly, there are many partial answers to this question, and a good example of many of them is a sailboat. I recall accompanying my father when he received ownership of his first sailboat, perhaps as early as 1950 but possibly 1951, from a local boatyard belonging to Ole Amundsen in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, and riding along as he used an outboard motor to take it downstream toward its mooring in Greenwich Cove, near the Lucas Point dock. It was a 19-foot centerboard sloop Hurricane sailboat, similar to the popular Lightning but with more rounded hull. Checking online, I see that it was an early version of the Rhodes 19, named after the designer, Philip Rhodes, so one way to preserve it in family history is the same method that works for mass-produced

30en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester. 6.6 Free Camera Functional Preservation 189 automobiles: record the make, model and year, and check public sources whenever one wants further details.31 A few boats in this series had keels, but ours like the majority had a centerboard, described thus by Wikipedia: “A centreboard or centerboard (US) is a retractable keel which pivots out of a slot in the hull of a sailboat, known as a centreboard trunk (UK) or centerboard case (US). The retractability allows the centreboard to be raised to operate in shallow waters, to move the centre of lateral resistance (offsetting changes to the sailplan that move the centre of effort aft), to reduce drag when the full area of the centreboard is not needed, or when removing the boat from the water, as when trailering.”32 Indeed, each winter the boat was removed from the water and placed upside-down on sturdy sawhorses at Lucas Point dock. Recalling Ole Amundsen’s name allowed me to find further online information, notably a 2011 article in the Stamford Advocate, the publication from the town just east of Old Greenwich. It described his boat work: The Amundsens, Tina and Ole, bought the waterfront property on a tidal inlet of Greenwich Cove from the Marks family around 1933 during the Depression. Ole Amundsen was a boat builder and used the first floor of the building of 3,135 square feet to build sail boats and skiffs, some of which may still be afloat today. Many were one-off designs, but he also built 19-foot Hurricanes of molded plywood in the late 40s and early 50s that were sailed out of the Rocky Point Club, according to his son, Erik Amundsen. He also built small cruising boats up to 34 feet but stopped building when fiberglass boats arrived on the scene.33 Exactly what it meant for Amundsen to “build” the Hurricane is not entirely clear. A sailboat is an assembly of many components, some of which are purchased from suppliers, and others of which, notably the large hull, are constructed in the assembly workshop. My parents named their boat Compass, both to symbolize a sense of orientation toward a goal, and as a pun on the challenge, “come pass.” It was a casual racing boat, and there did exist a club of people owning the same model that organized races, over a complex course just a few miles in extent. There was no cabin, so a family could not sleep overnight on it, but it was capable of visiting nearby locations along the coast of Long Island Sound. The upper-left image in Fig. 6.10 is a frame of a 1952 home movie that shows it sailing around in the vicinity of Lucas Point dock. With respect to functional preservation of the experience of sailing a small boat via videos, there are two obvious alternatives. First, a family historian may create the videos, attaching other information such as a narrative describing the events or interviews with family members about their personal experiences. Second, in priority as well as order, is watching videos other people have produced featuring essentially the same sailboat model. Searching YouTube for “Hurricane sailboat” merely produces videos of sailors in very bad storms. Searching for “Rhodes 19

31sailboatdata.com/viewrecord.asp?class_id=5254. 32en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centreboard. 33Susan Nova, “Former Old Greenwich Sawmill Goes on the Market,” Stamford Advocate, Stamford, Connecticut, May 25, 2011, www.stamfordadvocate.com/business/article/Former-Old- Greenwich-sawmill-goes-on-the-market-1395845.php. 190 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts sailboat” is more successful, because boats of the same size and similar design are still being used today. The most obvious difference from the Hurricane we sailed is that the hulls are made of plastic rather than wood and plywood, as in 1952. Table 6.1 lists eight YouTube videos viewed in early June, 2018, that rather directly connect to the 1952 Hurricane video, but also serve to suggest how a family historian could scan online examples in preparation for taking new videos, to identify a range of approaches, themes, and styles. The video about the Landings Rhodes 19 Sailing Program is an advertisement for a sailing club on Skidaway Island in Georgia that owns 7 of the boats for use by paying members who race year-round on weekends, taking turns with the boats so there is no long-term advantage if some boats are naturally faster than others. DiMare’s video records: “Thursday night R19 racing at Courageous Sailing in Boston Ma. All footage shot with ‘Team gratitude’ including Boston’s only septuagenarian sailboat racer.” Pendleton’s places racing in a wider context: “Footage of our trip from Marblehead, MA to New Orleans to compete in the 2013 Rhodes 19 Nationals. One week—an absolute blast. Thank you Renee and Elise - unforgettable trip. Jim, we missed you.” The “Winthrop Frostbite” video got its name from an event of a Winthrop, Massachusetts, sailing club on a rather frosty November day. It is worthy of note here because it is an example of how media can be used in various ways, being a “slideshow without audio” of a very large number of still pictures that seem to document the event very well from several viewpoints. Of the four specialized videos listed in Table 6.1, two concern the technical aspects of the sailboat as an artifact, and two concern the near-shore ocean environment

Fig. 6.10 Four conceptions of sailboat preservation 6.6 Free Camera Functional Preservation 191

Table 6.1 Representative YouTube videos of Rhodes 19 sailing Title Creator YouTube ID Posted Time Views Sailing and racing The Landings Rhodes 19 Martin Vernick lIB657ROd8U 2008 8:54 8,921 Sailing Program Rhodes 19 Racing Jake DiMare YvVgfYU6eHo 2012 5:32 4,789 Rhodes 19 Nationals 2013 Charles MO2N5pDNrmI 2015 5:00 3,277 Pendleton Winthrop Frostbite John Pomer EthiAtONuBo 2011 7:15 582 Specialized videos How to Rig a Rhodes 19 Audrey Milite Qqi5cIR3izk 2012 5:57 8,193 Sailboat Rhodes 19 Restoration Boatworks GUoYx9C3gnA 2016 3:37 14,548 Project (Intro) Today Greenwich Point Park, Old kookiemoose EYRiE6y_3XA 2011 4:13 2,610 Greenwich, Connecticut Pirates Cove, Port Jefferson, ksfotosinc QQkdAZvmRvU 2016 3:30 1,200 NY where it sailed. The video of rigging the boat—which means preparing the sails for use—shows a process very similar to that experienced in 1952. As a sloop, the Hurricane had one mast and two sails, a small jib held in place by the wind and ropes in the bow, and a mainsail firmly attached to the mast and boom aft of the jib. As Audrey Milite attaches the jib, we see a couple of plastic windows in it, something that would have raised eyebrows rather than eyes in the good old days. Unlike the jib, which was stored somewhere else, the mainsail is already on the boom, so a protective cover must be removed, before it is run up the mast. While sailing downwind for an extended period, a third sail called a spinnaker could also be raised, temporarily replacing the jib. That was not shown in this video, but can be seen in the Landings video. Boatworks Today has posted a very large number of sailboat-related videos, and Rhodes 19 Restoration Project is the first in a series that salvages a decades-old and nearly ruined sailboat from a field far from the water, and seeks to restore it to usable condition. This video garnered many comments, some of which enthusiastically suggested how to deal with the problems of transporting the damaged hull without completely ruining it: “Maybe secure the keel to the hull with heavy duty ratchet straps and winch the trailered boat onto a tilt bed wrecker.” “Maybe you can remove the keel where it sits and slide the boat w/out the keel onto a flatbed. Then pick up the keel with a tow truck and load onto the flatbed.” Other comments express a range of feelings about the value of the project: “I’ll do a lot of crazy #$%ˆ but that looks like it needs a match and a lot of diesel. I’ll definitely be watching. If you can save that, I believe you can turn water to wine.” “To the average eye that boat looks like a lost cause, however in the hands of a master it will be the envy of any marina!” 192 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts

“You’re a brave man! I’ve seen boats in better condition scrapped so I can’t wait to see what you do with this; perhaps when others see what can be done they may try restoring theirs rather than scrap it.” Considered somewhat abstractly, comments like these are like a seminar discussion in a college artifacts class. The full process of preservation can be found online.34 Compass was the ﬁrst of three sailboats owned by the immediate family, its suc- cessor being an old 36-foot yawl, named September Song after William and Barbara’s favorite nostalgic song from the 1938 Broadway musical, Knickerbocker Holiday, which uses the months of the year as metaphoric stages in the lives of two lovers, as they near death in December: “And these few golden days I’d spend with you.”35 So, even just understanding the name they gave the boat preserves powerful emotions from two lives that never actually survived past metaphoric September. I do not currently know the maker or model of this boat, but am optimistic that careful study of a surviving home movie and online research could determine that information. Also, it may have been listed in a catalog that does not happen to be online yet. For over a century, publications like Lloyd’s Register have listed prominent yachts, typically requiring the owner to pay a subscription fee for the honor of being included, but this has not been a realistic medium of preservation for information about many insigniﬁcant little sailboats.36 On July 1, 1955, William wrote to his mother, June Wheeler Bainbridge, “I believe that our boat is going in the water, probably today, and the four of us are terribly excited about it and the many pleasures that we are going to have on it. As our schedule now is, the four of us will take off around July 13th or 14th, for a couple of weeks up the New England Coast.” A surviving home movie shows the process by which professionals moved September Song from drydock into the water, adding the masts and rigging, with members of the family trying to help. Possessing a two- room cabin with four bunks, and a “head” or built-in bathroom, September Song was quite suitable for a family of four to live in for two weeks. The later trip up the coast included scenes shot in the marvelous maritime museum, Mystic Seaport, which the family visited more than once in the late 1950s. As Wikipedia says, “It is notable for its collection of sailing ships and boats and for the re-creation of the crafts and fabric of an entire 19th-century seafaring village. It consists of more than 60 historic buildings, most of them rare commercial structures moved to the 19-acre (0.077 km2) site and meticulously restored.”37 The movie frame in the upper-right corner of Fig. 7.10 shows an area of the Mystic shoreline where private yachts were allowed to dock and spend the night. Indeed, near the left edge of the image we see September Song. On the far right looms the stern of one of the most famous historic ships in the world, the Charles W. Morgan. Its own Wikipedia page explains the glory of this huge artifact: “an American whaling ship built in 1841 whose active service period was during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

34www.boatworkstoday.com/videos/moving-the-rhodes-19-back-to-the-shop. 35genius.com/Kurt-weill-september-song-lyrics. 36catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000047466. 37en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystic_Seaport. 6.6 Free Camera Functional Preservation 193

Ships of this type were usually used to harvest the blubber of whales for whale oil, which was commonly used in lamps. It has served as a museum ship since the 1940s and is now an exhibit at the Mystic Seaport museum in Mystic, Connecticut. She is the world’s oldest surviving merchant vessel and the only surviving wooden whaling ship from the 19th century American merchant fleet. She was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966.”38 We could fantasize that September Song had been acquired by the museum, and can still be found there. It is certainly not impossible to imagine an ambitious family going to great length to preserve a 36-foot yawl, but if it no longer sails it might be hard to share the experience across the family tree. The third and final sailboat owned by William and Barbara was a 39-foot Con- cordia yawl they named Tripoli. The layout was similar to that of September Song, but it was in nicer condition. Tripoli still exists but has been renamed Dongeal and is harbored in Southport, Maine, rather than Riverside, Connecticut, where the Bain- bridges kept it for the years 1960–1963. It had been built in 1956 by Abeking and Rasmussen, and first owned by William T. Okie who moored it in Darien, Connecti- cut, and called it Land’s End. We know these fine details because the Concordia Company devotes a web page to each of its yachts.39 During its continuing lifetime, the boat has also been given sequentially the highly cultivated names Fledermaus and Candide. How did it get the geographically exotic name Tripoli? William Wheeler Bainbridge was quite aware that he, his father, and his grandfather had been named “William” after Commodore William Bainbridge, who was the grandson of his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Edmund Bainbridge, mentioned in Chap. 1, not a direct ancestor but a member of the historically extended family. Accurately, we used to joke that Commodore Bainbridge had the distinction of sinking both a British battleship, the Java, and an American battleship, the Philadelphia, and anyone interested in such matters can check this bizarre claim. Amazingly, that particular William Bainbridge had been held captive for the two years 1803–1805 in Tripoli, Libya, by the Barbary Pirates, whence the yacht’s name Tripoli (Barnes 1897; Long 1981). On April 29, 1960, William Wheeler Bainbridge wrote a letter to his mother about a family gathering that included Professor Angus McIntosh who was visiting from Scotland plus members of the extended Wheeler family that lived nearby: We had a partial family reunion one evening Angus was with us, and he will tell you more in detail about it. We had cocktails at the house - Walter and Floy, Muriel and Carlton, Charlotte Ann and Fred Allen and us. We then went over to the Club for dinner as our house is still a shambles. Following the Club we went to Muriel’s house and really got into an old-fashioned discussion, debate, argument - what have you. To me it was very amusing but I am afraid that Walter got a little bit out of line. In fact, Muriel has not talked to him since. We are planning a further family gathering on Sunday the 15th, on the boats. Angus is going over with us on “Tripoli” to Stamford Harbor to tie up to the “Cotton Blossom”. Carleton’s boat and Fred Allen’s will probably be in the water at that time so there will be four of us tied up. Not only is this an impressive gathering, but I don’t know any other family that has really takentothewaterasweallhave.

38en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_W._Morgan_(ship). 39www.concordiaboats.com/yawl.php?id=39. 194 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts

The social group consisted of four married couples. Walter Heber Wheeler Jr. and Muriel Wheeler Marsh were brother and sister, William’s only first cousins but rather older than he, since they were born in 1897 and 1894 compared with his birth date of 1914. Charlotte Allen was one of Muriel’s five children. Exactly what they argued about is not known, but I recall Walter as an extremely domineering person, who struggled to handle his aggressiveness by taking on altruistic ideological positions. In 1974, his New York Times obituary gave a simplified but mostly accurate summary of his early adulthood, that jumps to a sentence about the Cotton Blossom mentioned by William in his letter: In 1918, at the age of 19, while a sophomore at Harvard University, Mr. Wheeler joined the American Ambulance Corps in Paris and won the Croix de Guerre for carrying the wounded safely to hospital while under heavy shellfire. The following year, he entered the Navy as an ensign and was awarded the Navy Cross for service aboard a submarine chaser. On his return to Harvard, he was elected captain of the football team. Mr. Wheeler won many sailing trophies with his 71-foot ocean-racing yawl, Cotton Blossom IV,which he once sailed across the Atlantic.40 I attended the May 1960 gathering at which indeed all four yachts participated, noting that Cotton Blossom IV was not only vastly larger than the other three, but also had a paid crew of two sailors. As Chap. 4 mentioned, Walter was the chief executive of Pitney Bowes, an early but still profitable information technology corporation. Wikipedia says: “Pitney Bowes is a global technology company most known for its postage meters and other mailing equipment and services, and with recent expan- sions, into global e-commerce, software, and other technologies. The company was founded by Arthur Pitney, who invented the first commercially available postage meter, and Walter Bowes as the Pitney Bowes Postage Meter Company on April 23, 1920.”41 How did Walter Wheeler connect with Pitney Bowes? Through Walter Bowes, as a 1961 book about the company explains, who was a sailing enthusiast: “In the summer of 1907, while sailing in Long Island Sound off New Rochelle, he first became acquainted with Walter H. Wheeler, Sr., a big, kindly man, older than himself, a wholesale meat packer by trade, whose interest in sailing matched his own. Bowes soon became a close family friend and a favorite of Wheeler’s small, ten-year-old, sailing minded son, Walter, Jr. The friendship was to have an important influence on Bowes’ future—and on young Wheeler’s” (Cahn 1961). The full story may deserve to be the plot of a soap opera, because that “important influence” operated through a family disruption. Walter Wheeler Sr. invested heavily in Bowes by cashing in a life insurance policy, who returned the favor by having an extra-marital affair with Mrs. Wheeler who became Mrs. Bowes in 1912. The dynamics around this schism were complex, so any psychoanalyst might well speculate that young Walter Wheeler experienced an intense and multi-dimensional Oedipus complex, that drove his unusual ambitiousness. In an unpublished memoir he dictated in 1973 and 1974, Walter Wheeler, Jr., recalled:

40“Walter Wheeler Jr., 77, Dead; Ex-Chairman of Pitney-Bowes,” New York Times, Decem- ber 12, 1974, www.nytimes.com/1974/12/12/archives/walter-wheeler-jr-77-dead-exchairman-of- pitneybowes.html. 41en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitney_Bowes. 6.6 Free Camera Functional Preservation 195

I loved my father and liked Walter Bowes (the last of some twelve children, English born). He rode a bicycle and was an athlete and a sailor. We got on well together although I was perhaps some twelve years his junior. The family situation with Muriel and me after Mother’s remarriage was a difﬁcult one. Grandfather not only had acquiesced in the cashing of the life insurance policy, but had helped Bowes by introducing him to some of his friends and banking connections which played a good part in getting him started. There was naturally a great deal of bitterness on the Wheeler side - but Muriel and I managed somehow. Father himself remarried shortly.

He also wrote about the ﬁrst marriage of his sister, Muriel, which produced her ﬁve children and that also was facilitated by yachting:

One of my very important jobs as a youth was chaperoning my sister Muriel. While we were living on Riverside Drive in New York she had met Donald MacIntyre, a very attractive boy of Scotch descent with a great sense of humor and mechanical ability. We got to be close friends. He used to cruise with us a lot on the old “Gossoon”, a forty foot auxiliary yawl which my father had bought. I was always sent tagging along after Donald and Muriel whenever they went ashore. They didn’t seem to mind it much. One day when we were walking in Block Island, Muriel saw some lovely pond lilies that she yearned to have. Nothing to it, but Donald and I had to get them. We ﬁnally did, but we both got our white ducks covered with Mud in the process. Donald was a great sailor and introduced me to a catamaran which his older brother, Malcolm, a most delightful chap, had built. After the war we used to sail a lot together on my Cotton Blossom I.

His relationship with Walter Bowes was always difficult, but he was employed by Pitney Bowes since its birth and became the chief executive in 1938. Sometime in the 1940s, when William Wheeler Bainbridge was an employee of Equitable Life Insurance with responsibilities to design group insurance policies for companies, he invested consider time and effort developing a plan for Pitney Bowes. Walter Wheeler adopted the plan, but, gave it to a different company from the Equitable, presumably seeking to avoid any charges of nepotism. At least so I was repeatedly told, not too many years afterward. This was not only a disappointment but a near disgrace for William, although he was able to keep his job and later become a Second Vice President of the Equitable (Buley 1967). Over the years they periodically attempted to reconnect, and William tended to refer to Walter Heber Wheeler, Jr., not by his given name, Walter, but by his family connection, as “Cousin Junior.” On February 19, 1960, a few weeks before the April gathering, Walter sent William a letter with this footnote: “P.S. - I think it’s high time we dropped the ‘cousin.’ Plain Junior or Walter will do nicely.” I cannot guess what problem Muriel had with her brother in 1960, that might have made her so angry with him. Her daughter, Charlotte, was named after their mother. She married Donald in 1915. The 1930 census shows her living in Greenwich, Connecticut, with her mother, then named Charlotte Bowes, her husband Donald McIntyre and their five children, but not, at that exact moment, counting Walter Bowes as a member of the household, although he lived until 1957. The 1940 census shows her still living in Greenwich with four of her children, but listed as widowed. Carlton Marsh was Muriel’s second husband. Clearly, those immense artifacts called yachts can play very significant roles in human social relations, including family gatherings in a stimulating context insu- 196 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts lated from ordinary terrestrial environments. Tripoli was connected to the Riverside Yacht Club, and Cotton Blossom IV to the Stamford Yacht Club, near each other in Connecticut. The ballroom of the Stamford club has a “Cotton Blossom display,” and its website devotes a page to Walter.42 What about Tripoli? I have some photos of it, and we have already seen it still exists under another name, but the image in the lower-left corner of Fig. 6.10 offers very different kind of artifact representation. The image is a scan of the pre-assembly components of a plastic model of the nuclear powered U. S. S. Bainbridge guided-missile frigate, sold by the Aurora toy model company in 1964. I have in fact glued together another copy of that model, and obviously it represents one way in which very large artifacts may be preserved, as much smaller replicas. The instructions for building the model include a brief history of the real ship, ending with this exciting prophecy: “The USS BAINBRIDGE, which cost $150 million to build, opens a vast new field in naval military operations. With its ability to travel great distances at high speeds, fewer ships would be needed to patrol an area, and crews could be rotated without extending their tour of duty. And, in case of enemy attack, the nuclear-powered ships would be more effective in the defense of the country.” Wikipedia notes that it was but one of five Navy ships by this name, and rather than representing the future became obsolete over two decades ago:

USS Bainbridge (1842), was a 12-gun brig commissioned in 1842 and lost off Cape Hatteras in 1863. USS Bainbridge (DD-1), was the ﬁrst destroyer of the US Navy, in service from 1902 to 1919. USS Bainbridge (DD-246), was a destroyer, commissioned in 1920 and sold in 1945. USS Bainbridge (CGN-25), was commissioned as a nuclear-powered frigate and in service from 1962 to 1996. In 1975 during Naval reorganization, she was redesignated as a cruiser. USS Bainbridge (DDG-96), is an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, commissioned on 12 November 2005 and currently in service.43

These ﬁve ships are connected to each other and to the Tripoli, because all six refer to the same Commodore William Bainbridge of yore, rather far across the extensive family tree from the owner of Tripoli. The lower-right image in Fig. 6.10 was a screenshot taken in June 2018 on the glorious steamship Titanic, not at the bottom of the sea, given that this ill-fated monster ship was doomed to sink in 1912, but in the non-game virtual world Second Life. In the form of a computer avatar, anyone may walk around on the deck of this full-scale replica, and a counter reports there have in fact been over a million avatar visits.

42www.stamfordyc.com/About_(1)/Club_History_(1)/Short_Tacks_Articles/Commodore_ Wheeler. 43en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Bainbridge. 6.7 Conclusion 197

6.7 Conclusion

On January 12, 2018, the online news site of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, EurekAlert, republished a news item posted the day before at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, on the opposite side of the planet, with the provocative title: “Print a 200-million-year-old dinosaur fossil in your own home.”44 This title referred to a rather impressive online scientific article, containing a vast collection of computer-generated images based on three- dimensional computer tomography X-ray scanning of a particular fossilized dinosaur skull (Kimberley et al. 2018). In fact, the paleontologists were not using the CT scan data to control 3D printing of duplicates of the skull, but that would be feasible. A cheaper but perhaps more valuable translation into physical substance would simply be using an ordinary color printer to produce a copy of the 56.847 megabyte article file, its 84 pages fitting on both sides of 42 pieces of paper. Another alternative would be following the example of the virtual Titanic, and the following chapter will consider in some detail how digital simulations of reality may be used to replicate houses, artifacts, and other physical structures, of interest to family historians. Yet in the context of family history, the choice of digital technology would depend on the nature of the artifact and its meaning both to its original users, and to the people for whom the family history is created. Thus, functional preservation can take on multiple meanings, including: (1) Conservation of the object independently of any function it may serve. (2) Perpetuation of the function that the artifact performed for its original users. (3) Safeguarding the capabilities of the artifact so it can perform functions desired by new users. (4) Application of the artifact to goals of the historian, as a tool for deciphering the meaning of the past.

References

Bainbridge JS (1972) The study and teaching of law in Africa. F. B. Rothman, South Hackensack New Jersey Bainbridge WS (1978) Satan’s power: a deviant psychotherapy cult. University of California Press, Berkeley Bainbridge WS (2017) Revival: resurrecting the process Church of the ﬁnal judgment. Feral House, Port Townsend, Washington Barnes J (1897) Commodore Bainbridge. Appleton, New York Boas F (1901) The Eskimo of Bafﬁn Land and Hudson Bay. Bull Am MusM Nat Hist 15(1):4–374 Buley RC (1967) The equitable life assurance society of the United States 1859–1964. Appleton- Century-Crofts, New York Cahn W (1961) The story of Pitney-Bowes. Harper, New York, p 24 Garrett JN (2014) Beyond the cabin. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

44www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-01/uotw-pa2011218.php; www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/research-news/2018/2018-01/print-a-200-million-year-old- dinosaur-fossil-in-your-own-home.html. 198 6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts

Kimberley E, Chapelle J, Choiniere JN (2018) A revised cranial description of Massospondylus Carinatus Owen (Dinosauria: Sauropodomorpha) based on computed tomographic scans and a review of cranial characters for basal Sauropodomorpha. Peer J 6:e4224 Lindtner S (2014) Hackerspaces and internet of things in China: how makers reinvent industrial production, innovation, and the self. China Inf 28(2):145–167 Lindtner S (2015) Hacking with Chinese characteristics: the promises of the maker movement against chinese manufacturing. Sci Technol Hum Values 40(5):854–879 Lindtner S, Bardzell S, Bardzell J (2016) Reconstituting the Utopian vision of making: HCI after technosolutionism. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, pp 1390–1402. ACM, New York Long DF (1981) Ready to hazard: a biography of Commodore William Bainbridge, 1774–1833. University Press of New England, Hanover, New Hampshire Wheeler AG Jr (1914) The genealogical and encyclopedic history of the Wheeler family in America. American College of Genealogy, Boston, Massachusetts Wyllie T (2009) Love sex fear death: the inside story of the process Church of the ﬁnal judgment. Feral House, Post Townsend, Washington, pp 221–241 Chapter 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes

Abstract Over roughly the past quarter century, progress in computer graphics and the rise of Internet have facilitated public experimentation with online virtual environments where multiple people may congregate in the form of avatars, chieﬂy in the game industry but also in non-game environments like Second Life, where, for example, the author organized 30 grant proposal review panels for the National Science Foundation. The chapter begins with two sets of photographs taken in the 1940s, one documenting the interior of an apartment and the other the exterior of a rural house, the latter example by luck permitting construction of a 3-D stereographic image. With this background from the real world, the chapter then enters Second Life, investigating a virtual simulation of the rural house that is a conceptual representation, not visually identical to the original but functionally complex, for example allowing the user to watch a 1949 television program through a replica of the exact model television set the family bought in 1948. A visit to the Second Life simulation of the Roman fort in Britain named Vinovia shows how one constantly changing location may be simulated at different points in its history, and visiting Hotel Adlon in Berlin, during the 1920s, reveals how communities of enthusiasts are living portions of their current lives in an earlier historical period. The chapter concludes by showing how even some of the online games are historically valuable simulations, notably Lord of the Rings Online and Dark Age of Camelot.

Homes and workplaces are primary environments where families live out their history, so this chapter will outline a symbiosis of both old and new ways to document and understand architecture and the richness of physical domestic environments. For a century and a half it has been possible to photograph a home, both inside and out, and to write text about its history and the meaning of its features. Now it is quite practical to assemble such materials in a substantial archive, share the materials, and provide an indexing system that allows the user to ﬁnd the historical materials relevant to some modern purpose. However, it is also possible to create virtual representations of homes and other locations that are meaningful to a family, whether experienced through a realistic head-mounted display, the screen of a traditional personal computer, or projected such that many people may simultaneously

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 199 W. S. Bainbridge, Family History Digital Libraries, Human–Computer Interaction Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01063-8_7 200 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes experience the same aspect of history. Several choices must be made in designing an effective virtual reﬂection of a real home or natural environment. Should it be visually realistic, or focus on meaningful ideas, or be a combination of both? Should it be static, preserving a moment in time that users may revisit over the years? Or should it be dynamic, responding to actions the user takes and representing multiple points in time? Should it be self-contained, or link to multiple other media and sources of information? This chapter begins with pre-Internet examples as a basis for considering the range of future possibilities.

7.1 Gramercy Park

In many people’s minds, the ideal image of a home is a separate house, surrounded by a lawn, apart from other structures and almost a universe of its own. Our first example here, 34 Gramercy Park, will contradict that stereotype and emphasize the fact that people’s homes as well as their lives are embedded in larger communities. We begin, as comprehensive family histories generally should, with some background on how the family came to live at this particular location, then describe the building and the park after which it is named, then look briefly inside. For his oral history of Manhattan, You Must Remember This, Jeff Kisseloff interviewed both John Bainbridge and Barbara McIntosh about their childhood residence at 34 Gramercy Park, and of course family historians today should include memories of home among their interview topics. Their father, Dr. Will, opened his medical office there in 1897, at the foot of Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. From my own interviews with John, and other sources, we know much about the background. First of all, the Gramercy Park area was and is the home for many prosperous families, and was situated only a couple of blocks from the headquarters of the Mission Society where Lucy had worked since 1891. It reminded Dr. Will of Cavendish Square in London, which was filled with successful doctors.1 He had taken the first steps toward a medical career back in 1888, immediately after graduating from Mohegan Lake, while his family was living in Brooklyn where his father was employed by the Brooklyn City Mission and Tract Society. A friend of his mother’s, Dr. Eliza Mosher, gave him lessons in anatomy and the use of a scalpel, by guiding him in the dissection of seven stray cats.2 Subsequently, Dr. Mosher took Will to Chautauqua, the summer religious center in upstate New York.3 He soon became inspired there by Dr. Jay W. Seaver who operated an anthropometry laboratory, filled with instruments to measure the human body (Seaver 1890). He

1John Seaman Bainbridge, quoted by Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This (New York: Schocken, 1989), p. 404; Trow Directory, Printing and Bookbinding Company, 1897 Trow’s New York City Directory (New York: Trow, 1897), p. 60; Trow Directory, Printing and Bookbinding Company, 1899 Trow’s New York City Directory (New York: Trow, 1899). 2William Seaman Bainbridge, notes from a speech, St. Bartholemew’s Men’s Club, Brooklyn, New York, January 26, 1933. 3chq.org; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chautauqua_Institution. 7.1 Gramercy Park 201 earned his M.D. degree from Columbia University in 1893, then did internships at Presbyterian Hospital and Sloane Maternity Hospital where he studied gynecology. He studied physical diagnosis at Roosevelt Hospital, and did a year of post-graduate study in pathology and bacteriology at Columbia.4 In 1896, he began practicing as an independent doctor at Chautauqua every summer, caring for the chronic health problems and sudden infections or accidents suffered by the usually rather rich people who took culturally uplifting vacations at Chautauqua, which naturally recruited patients for his future Gramercy Park practice. Unexpectedly, he received a telegram begging him to take charge of the case of a wealthy patient connected with Lucy’s Mission Society in Manhattan, who had gone violently insane. The treatment consisted of taking the man to Europe, both to get advice from leading doctors there and to conceal the madness from New York society, incidentally allowing Dr. Will to develop relations with leading European surgeons that were not only instructive but prepared the basis for his intense involvement with European medical communities in later years. At one point in their travels, however, the insane man tried to kill Dr. Will, which would have had the long-term consequence of preventing this book from being written. The case, to borrow the words of Winston Churchill, is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”5 It was of great significance for the history of some families, yet hidden, seemingly imaginary, arguably unreal, thus having some of the quality of a computer-generated virtual environment. This case illustrates the fact that for many reasons people may conceal facts that can be crucial for historians. Dr. Will went to great lengths to hide the name of this patient and thereby protect the man’s family. In later decades, he publicly referred to this case several times, always briefly, and never giving any hints about identity. However, at the time when the newspapers were filled with the Teapot Dome scandal involving the probably unrelated Harry Sinclair of Sinclair oil, he mentioned privately to his family that this patient’s name was John Sinclair. His son, John, remembered this and told me the identity of the mysterious patient, which was confirmed by references in his father’s diaries. Wanting to see what other forms of confirmation might be available today, in Ancestry.com I was able to find a passport renewal application for Dr. Will, dated November 27, 1896, stating that he was living at Grand Hotel in London, England. It was co-signed by John Sinclair. Searching for the combination of Sinclair’s name and the New York City Mission Society finds him listed on the board of directors in many issues of its monthly magazine, years after his 1896 crisis. For example, the inside front cover of the issue for the April 1907 issue reports he was responsible for a $50 contribution through one of the Society’s sponsoring organizations, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. The online inflation calculator of the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not go before 1913, but $50 in that year was worth $1,260 in 2018.6 Searching for Sinclair in

4“Dr. W. S. Bainbridge: Cancer Research,” The Times of London, September 26, 1947; Louis Effingham de Forest, Ancestry of William Seaman Bainbridge (Oxford, Scrivener, 1950), p. 26. 5www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/RusnEnig.html. 6data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=50&year1=191301&year2=201801. 202 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes connection with his church turns up his 1908 obituary in The Princeton Theological Seminary Bulletin, which ends: “Mr. Sinclair was married Feb. 24, 1870, in New York City, to Fanny Coit Bunker, who with two sons and two daughters survives him.”7 Ancestry.com gives the genealogy of this nuclear family, including the names of the four children who benefitted from the apparent recovery of their father from his madness, and concealment of that dark episode.8 One consequence was Dr. Will’s financial ability to acquire the primary home and office that would serve for the rest of his life. Today’s description of Gramercy Park at Wikipedia would have been accurate early in its history, and when I often visited it in the 1940s: “The approximately 2-acre (0.81 ha) park, located in the Gramercy Park Historic District, is one of two private parks in New York City—the other is Sunnyside Gardens Park in Queens—as well as one of only three in the state; only people residing around the park who pay an annual fee have a key, and the public is not generally allowed in—although the sidewalks of the streets around the park are a popular jogging, strolling and dog-walking route.”9 For a time, Lucy’s Mission Society had a facility at 7 Gramercy Park West on the opposite side of the park, and the April 1917 issue of its monthly magazine published a poem by an anonymous student, beginning: Oh, Training School at Gramercy, To Thee our praises swell, We’ll spread thy fame to many lands, For oh, we love Thee well! Fair as the morning Thou dost stand, To mould our lives to serve Within the kingdom of our Lord - Ne’er may our purpose swerve.10 The historically common human tendency to sacralize homes may have faded somewhat over the past century, but one of the surviving family movies documents a formal ceremony to plant a tree in the park in memory of Lucy in 1934. Other scenes show many unidentified children playing in the park, one with a tricycle and another with a toy baby carriage. At one point, boys both inside and outside the park fail to open a locked gate, and cannot climb over because of the spikes on top. A winter scene shows anonymous children riding a sled. John and Barbara, who had reached their mid to late teens, stand in the snow beside one of the park’s statues, and John hurls a snowball past the camera. In clear weather, John drives past the camera a car that looks like a 4-door Packard sedan, from the years around 1930. Another scene appears to be a May Day celebration, in which ladies in white dresses dance around a maypole, and dozens of people wearing antique costumes March to the

7The Princeton Theological Seminary Bulletin, August 1908, 2(2): 506. 8www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/102230384/person/100017245978/facts. 9en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramercy_Park. 10New York City Mission Monthly, April 1917, 60(2): 13. 7.1 Gramercy Park 203 statue of actor Edwin Booth (1833–1893) who founded the Player’s Club that still exists at 16 Gramercy Park South.11 One shot shows family members looking out the front window of their home which confirms my childhood memory that it was on the second floor of the south side of the building, immediately above Dr. Will’s office. Here is how a 2015 book describes the building: At the southeast corner of Gramercy Park and the northeast corner of Gramercy Park South and Gramercy Park East there is 34 Gramercy Park East, which opened in 1883 as Manhat- tan’s first luxury cooperative apartment building. It was designed by George Da Cunha, the same architect who gave us the first Plaza Hotel. The nine-story red brick building with a brownstone base, terra-cotta detail and Queen Anne forms is sometimes described as Vic- torian or Renaissance Revival in style. The facade features an octagonal turret corner, lion heads over the entrance, Indian faces on the third floor, eagle heads on the fourth floor and geometric squares on the sixth and seventh floors. The outer lobby tile floor gives the impression of being a mosaic, but it isn’t because the designs are in the tiles themselves rather than the tiles making up the design. The inner lobby has English encaustic tile floors. The building retained and used its great birdcage elevators from 1883 until they were replaced in the 1990s (Pommer and Pommer 2015). Unlike the case with a condominium, residents did not own the apartments they lived in, but Will purchased stock in the Gramercy Company which owned the entire building. The building staff included a doorman, an elevator man, and two firemen in the basement who tended the central heating.12 In addition to the passenger elevator, there were two freight elevators, one of which opened into the kitchen at the back of the apartment. A hall ran fifty-two feet from front to back of the grand apartment, and a small bedroom off the kitchen assured that the cook would always be near her duties. Figure 7.1 combines two photographs taken inside 34 Gramercy Park, perhaps in the year 1948 in preparation to sell, in the wake of Dr. Will’s death. The blurs at the right end of the top image are slight fire damage, given that most of the photos in this collection were stored in the attic of the house that burned in 1965. The Mason and Hamlin upright piano seen clearly on the left of the lower image is also in the upper image, but seen from behind through the opening between the rooms. These photographic prints, and a few others showing other rooms, were taken by a professional photographer, but before moving out of a home it makes sense for any family to take a collection of such pictures and place them in an album, in both paper and electronic media, along with text descriptions and, if possible, floorplan diagrams. When I checked online early in 2018, it appeared that a floorplan and pictures of this same apartment were on a page at StreetEasy, a division of the Zillow online real estate company.13 It was on the correct side of the building and was designated #2A/1AR, while other floor plan IDs seemed to begin with the floor number, which was 2 in this case. However, the “1AR” part of the designation represented a portion of the first floor connected by a stairway, which I did not recall the family having,

11www.theplayersnyc.org/home. 12Barbara Bainbridge McIntosh, quoted by Keff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This (New York: Schocken, 1989), p. 397. 13streeteasy.com/sale/1063063. 204 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes

Fig. 7.1 Two connected scenes inside 34 Gramercy Park and the trim around doorways and along the ceiling was different. Of course, over the span of 70 years a residence may be changed significantly during renovation. Human recollection is limited and somewhat flexible. I was still a small child, the last time I visited this location, but clearly recalled some rather simple episodes. These memories were sustained over the years by recalling, but other memories faded. The set of photographs from which these two were taken did not hint at a downstairs extension of the apartment, yet I did recall visiting Dr. Will’s office which was directly below. Seeing the online floor plan either revived a forgotten memory, or created a false memory, because I seem now to recall looking down 7.1 Gramercy Park 205 the stairs depicted in the diagram. As a natural experiment, this episode offers a subtle insight. If memories are revived by recalling, and historical records like these pictures stimulate memories, they may have the effect of eroding or disconnecting memories of the same topic which they do not happen to reinforce. Finding new historical records can revive legitimate memories. However, it is difficult to tell when an apparently revived memory is actually false, without additional confirmatory evidence, such as documents showing whether or not the first floor section belonged to the apartment when my family lived there. As we saw in Chap. 6, among the artifacts a family cherishes are likely to be several that were on display in their homes. Indeed, we see two of them in the upper image of Fig. 7.1, the painting of June and her young son William over the piano, and the carved wooden head perhaps from Thailand on the chest at the left. As Figs. 6.3 and 7.1 therefore have done, traditional photos and text can place family artifacts in the living context of a home. Recent information technology can do so more flexibly, and some versions of architectural Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software used by architects is also available at low cost. Some aspects of the technology are evolving rather rapidly, and apparently gaining traction in the marketplace. For example, grant 1721381 from the National Science Foundation, dated June 28, 2017, and providing $225,000 to a start-up company named OpenSpace, was titled “Fast Creation of Photorealistic 3D Models using Consumer Hardware.” A year later the company was beginning to serve customers.14 The primary goal was to “transform the construction industry,” but in ways very close to documentation of living spaces in family history projects:

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a fast, easy to use and cheap method to create photorealistic 3D models using off the shelf consumer hardware. Technical hurdles include validating the quality and efﬁcacy of models generated with consumer hardware, near instantaneous creation of 3D models on device, and automatic creation of routes through the 3D space without human annotation. With these hurdles cleared, advanced work might include automated analytics between and among 3D models of the same site captured over time. Because of the system’s ease of use, it will enable the collection of large, totally novel datasets. The goal of the research is to produce a prototype that a layperson can use to create a 3D model of a physical site in order to document it.15

A popular 2013–2018 cable television program, Fixer Upper, often used CAD to develop plans for remodeling old homes, thus capturing the shape and contents of a residence during a period of change.16 A variety of social media and advertising websites identiﬁed the particular software used by the program, and promoted versions to the general public.17 CAD systems tend to emphasize accuracy in terms of physical dimensions, because they are used to guide actual construction and recon-

14openspace.ai/about.html. 15www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1721381. 16en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixer_Upper_(TV_series). 17www.quora.com/What-design-software-do-they-use-on-the-HGTV-show-Fixer-Upper; design- studentsavvy.com/interior-design-3d-software; www.homedesignersoftware.com/products/home- designer-suite. 206 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes struction. More ﬂexible are today’s computer-based virtual reality systems, that can provide much more complex and dynamic simulations of long lost homes.

7.2 Bailiwick in 3-D

Modern computer simulation techniques are often developments inspired by rather old methods. For example, three-dimensional photographs viewed in a stereoscope were invented in the middle of the nineteenth century, and today there are many experiments with 3-D virtual reality using head-mounted displays.18 The Sims branch of my family owned one of the early-twentieth century stereoscopes, and I remember whenever I visited my grandfather’s home I would look again through the set of 3-D pictures of the Russo-Japanese War. A page at the Library of Congress dates it from 1905 and summarizes the content: “Photographs of the Russo-Japanese War include scenes taken during and after the siege of Port Arthur, Manchuria, focusing primarily on Russian soldiers, fortifications, war damage, and Casualties; Japanese nurses and doctors attending patients at a military hospital in Tokay; Admiral Togo’s celebratory official visit to Tokyo in Oct., 1905; and American armored cruisers entering the port of New York,probably at the time of the Portsmouth Peace Conference.”19 Like many children of the 1950s, we had a more modern View-Master, an inexpensive device with a large number of disks holding color images in pairs that would be seen in 3-D.20 What is possible is not necessarily what is popular. Today’s enthusiasts for 3-D versions of head-mounted computer displays should keep in mind how marginal products like stereoscopes have been in the past. Partly in response to competition from the new medium of television, in the early 1950s commercial movie mark- ers promoted 3-D films, and Wikipedia calls 1952–1954 the “golden era” for this medium.21 I can remember seeing the pioneer in this genre when it was first released: “Bwana Devil is a 1952 U.S. adventure film based on the true story of the Tsavo man-eaters and filmed with the Natural Vision 3D system. The film is notable for sparking the first 3D film craze in the motion picture industry, as well as for being the first feature-length 3D film in color and the first 3D sound feature in English. Bwana Devil was written, directed, and produced by Arch Oboler and stars Robert Stack, Barbara Britton, and Nigel Bruce. The advertising tagline was: The Miracle of the Age!!! A LION in your lap! A LOVER in your arms!”22 Today, we happen to own a Samsung 3-D wide-screen television set, but in 2017 it became a relic when the latest fad faded and manufacture of this technology ceased.

18en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscope. 19www.loc.gov/item/2005679313/. 20en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-Master. 21en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_ﬁlm. 22en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bwana_Devil. 7.2 Bailiwick in 3-D 207

Fig. 7.2 An historical stereographic image of an antique home

The fundamental principle of stereoscopic vision is that much (but not all) of human 3-dimensional perception is based on the fact that we have two eyes, situated a distance apart on our faces, and thus see the world from two slightly different perspectives. The original commercial stereoscopes over a century ago were light frames that often had a handle at the bottom so they could be held up to the face, blocking vision except forward through two lenses at two photographs of the same scene, originally taken some distance apart. The frame assured that each eye could see only one of the two pictures. An alternate but rather crude approach that could be used for movies, and was even applied to comic books in the wake of Bwana Devil,was called Anaglyph 3D.23 In this method two drawings would be displayed in different colors, typically red and green or cyan, and the user would wear a very cheap eyeglass holding plastic filters of the two colors, so that each eye would see only one of the images. The color movie craze of the early 1950s, and essentially all more recent theater presentations, used polarized filters in simple glasses, originally requiring two synchronized projectors, each with a polarizing filter at right angles to the other. The recent but discontinued Samsung device used a much more computational approach in which the TV communicated with the glasses to synchronize active shutters in the glasses, displaying alternate images to the two eyes.24 The instability of 3-D as a sequence of fads raises concerns about the durability of any technology that seeks to preserve homes and other family-relevant locations in a virtual environment. Yet the potential of this technology seems great, and there may be ways to transfer the data defining a home from one medium to the next over a period of years. The example we shall begin with here is Bailiwick, the house depicted incidentally in Fig. 1.3. By pure chance, two amateur photographs of the front of the house were taken moments apart, and the photographer happened to move slightly to the side, capturing the two images required for a stereoscope. They have been placed side-by-side here in Fig. 7.2.

23en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_3D. 24en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_television. 208 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes

The two pictures were damaged slightly, and the photographer rotated the camera slightly, thus making the 3-D image less than perfect. In the photographic print, the image on the left was somewhat darker than the one on the right, so I adjusted its brightness slightly, but with the system I was then using, increasing the brightness further would have produced blotches. In commercial stereoscopes, the picture on the left goes to the left eye, and the picture on the right goes to the right eye, a technological detail that seems quite obvious. I have arranged these in the opposite way, with the left image belonging to the right eye, and the right image to the left eye, because this achieves a classic 3-D “hack.” If you move back from the images, holding your head exactly horizontal with respect to them, and cross your eyes, with some skill it is possible to merge the two images, so you see three pictures of the house, not two or four, the middle one in 3-D. Yes, it works, but many people have trouble doing it. Of course, binocular vision is not the only means by which humans perceive depth in an image, and many animals with two eyes have them positioned such that the images they perceive do not overlap.25 “Perspective (from Latin: perspicere ‘to see through’) in the graphic arts is an approximate representation, generally on a flat surface (such as paper), of an image as it is seen by the eye. The two most characteristic features of perspective are that objects are smaller as their distance from the observer increases; and that they are subject to foreshortening, meaning that an object’s dimensions along the line of sight are shorter than its dimensions across the line of sight.”26 In the early years of this century, online virtual worlds and massively multi-player games used dynamic perspective to give a very convincing “feel” of reality. In this context, dynamic means that the perspective changes realistically as the human-appearing avatar representing the user moves around inside the environment. This chapter will refer to three very distinctive examples, Second Life, Lord of the Rings Online, and Dark Age of Camelot. Second Life launched in 2003 and I first entered it in 2006 (Rymaszewski et al. 2007). It was not the first example of a non-game virtual world, and the influential pioneer, Active Worlds, launched way back in 1995. Both display images of a three- dimensional scene in two dimensions, through accurate perspective, on the screen of an ordinary personal computer, with no need to wear special glasses. One enters such virtual worlds by creating an avatar, and moves short distances by making the avatar walk. Except for background features like the sky, sea, and land, in most areas all the objects one sees were created by users, by means of a variety of tools built into the interface software. There is no cost to obtain the software or an avatar, but virtual land must be leased from Linden Lab, the company that created Second Life, and there can be other small costs such as a fee for uploading images from one’s computer. I typically had two Second Life avatars, one for my own fun and research projects, and the other to operate a secure, private island for the National Science Foundation, on which a total of 30 review panels were held, committee meetings of reviewers

25en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binocular_vision. 26en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical). 7.2 Bailiwick in 3-D 209 who discuss which of a set of research proposals should be funded (Bainbridge 2007; Bohannon 2011). I created most of the equipment for the NSF island, and did so as well for my research projects, which included writing short programs to make some of the virtual objects perform actions. One of these projects was exploring alternate means for building a virtual version of Bailiwick. One naturally starts with the assumption that a virtual version of Bailiwick should look exactly like the real house, with the same internal structure. I did have photographs taken of the building in the 1940s from all directions, but other than my own memory I had no solid information about its internal structure and features. However, those memories were rather clear, and harmonized completely with the external structure as documented in the photographs. So initially I built a rough version of the entire structure, including a small basement, a main floor that consisted of a kitchen, dining room, living room, library, bedroom and a bath. The upstairs held two bedrooms, and I recalled when a second bathroom had been added in a small attic area behind the master bedroom. Soon I recognized that this strategy faced a serious problem, even if I had complete information about the physical structure of the house. The standard way to view a scene in Second Life is third-person, looking down upon one’s avatar from rather far above and behind. One can switch to first-person view, but it is quite disorienting. The display system lacks peripheral vision, and there are none of the physical sensations one feels while moving around, and even sound effects are quite limited. Conceivably modern head-mounted virtual reality displays can overcome these limitations, but we are not quite “there” yet even today. Thus, third-person view works best in Second Life, but one cannot see through the walls and roof of a house, as one would need to do from this viewpoint. There are several kludge fixes for this problem, but the most obvious one is to abandon the requirement that the virtual house be an exact model of the real one. I switched to conceptual representation of Bailiwick, for example in the museum display shown in Fig. 7.3, which represents only the three original rooms of the first floor. At the center in this particular screenshot, which dates from January 2012, we seehalfofFig.7.2 pasted on the outside of a wall, with this text: “The Bailiwick Project: Emulating an historic home in the form of a family digital library: The core of this house was built in 1743, and the Bainbridge family lived in it 1939–1950. The aim of this project is to develop a number of data interface methods for a ‘domestic’ archive, rather than to duplicate the form and appearance of the house.” A part of the wall on the left displays the same picture as Fig. 1.3; the image at the far right can also be seen as part of Fig. 9.1, and images have been placed both inside and outside to connect to the human meanings the family attached to their home. Actually, we are not sure of the exact date this core of the house was built, and 1743 was what the family commonly understood. An online real estate site reports the year 1740, but given the round number it may just be an estimate. A decades-old photo album assembled by Barbara McIntosh gives 1736, but I have no confirmation for that year. The text and the old picture of the front of the house were assembled in a graphic file, using simply the common Paint software, then uploaded to Second 210 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes

Fig. 7.3 A conceptual simulation of Bailiwick in Second Life

Life at a small cost in Linden dollars, the virtual currency bought with real-world currency that also paid the lease for the land on which the virtual museum rested. How realistic such a virtual house should be is an open question that can be answered only when the user has decided what the goal of the simulation should be. For example, behind the wall labeled “The Bailiwick Project” there could have been a virtual fireplace, set on the far wall of the living room between the doors to the bedroom (on the left) and the library (on the right), but one was not included in this particular display. These rooms were the “core” of the house, because originally the other rooms did not exist, but were added sequentially over the following centuries. The fireplace originally served as the cooking facility, as well as the only source of heat in the winter. In the 1940s, it still had an iron swing-arm that supported a cooking pot. Many virtual buildings, especially in fantasy-oriented online games, have fairly realistic burning fires, so this degree of realism would have been technically feasible. If we were building a more realistic simulation of the walls, we could photograph the external clapboard surface in such a way that the same image could be duplicated across the virtual surface rather efficiently.27 Similarly, a photograph of the internal wallpaper could be duplicated realistically across the internal walls. Figure 7.1 shows parts of rugs and the bare floor in two Gramercy Park rooms, and with some effort a useable image of a rug on the floor of Bailiwick could have been added. Instead, the effort creating this conceptual model went into the images and artifacts that connected it to other materials of a family history digital library. Figure 7.4 shows the inside of the front wall, after moving a couple of artifacts to that location. Lacking accurate images of the wallpaper and floor, I simply used textures already available in the Second Life system. The two portraits hung on the wall had not been displayed in the house, but represented family members who had often visited it, and who had actually decided the family would have homes in

27en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clapboard_(architecture). 7.2 Bailiwick in 3-D 211

Fig. 7.4 Reﬂections of a home from the past, in a virtual world

Bethel, Connecticut, Dr. Will and his mother, Lucy. Very brief programs in the Linden scripting language had been placed inside these portraits, such that clicking on one would open a browser to the page of the family website for that person. Indeed, the image of Lucy in Fig. 7.4 is the same one in Fig. 2.4 that shows the corresponding part of her web page. The frames on these portraits were not original, but simply copied from online collections of frame images. As in the case of 34 Gramercy Park, and for every home relevant to a family archive, an accurate but revealing narrative should be constructed of how and why this particular place became so signiﬁcant. Back in 1893, Lucy had written: “Our longing is for a country home of our own, accessible to New York, which we can use and control; a house which has a wing ﬁtted up for winter use, to which a tired worker may go for a few days of pure air and quietness.”28 Dr. Will became prosperous enough around 1910 to start thinking about buying a country home, while retaining 34 Gramercy Park, but the First World War intervened, and it was only when he knew his mother could not live much longer, in the 1920s, that they seriously explored the idea. According to a letter Dr. Will wrote for his mother’s funeral, November 21, 1928, in the early spring of that year she told him: “I want you to do something for me. I won’t be here very much longer, and want to have a little farm in the country,

28Seventieth Annual Report of the Woman’s Branch of the New York City Mission and Tract Society, February 1893, p. 20. 212 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes so that the children can be around me and we can be in closer touch. I want it near enough so that you can come up, and where I can be with June. I want a little house with a view. I cannot see a great deal, but want to see all I can. Have maple trees around it—a typical New England house, white, with green blinds, on a hill, and with some animals.”29 Lucy’s honeymoon trip, in 1867, had been remarkably unusual (Bainbridge 1924). She and her new husband traveled to Europe, Egypt, and Israel, where they camped for a while in an ancient cistern at Bethel, before heading into Russia. When asked by her son in 1928 where they should seek their summer home, she replied: “I want to go to Bethel.” In the thirty-ﬁfth chapter of Genesis, we read: “And God said unto Jacob, Arise, go up to Beth-el, and dwell there: and make there an altar unto God.” Jacob told his family, “And let us arise, and go up to Beth-el.”30 Will often quoted the paraphrase, “Let us go up unto a place called Bethel and there abide.” So they bought Maple Hill Farm in Bethel, Connecticut, and the house that became Bailiwick was included in the purchase, along with another small house nearer to the main building. Thus very personal emotions and religious symbolism decided that this particular location would be important to the family even two decades later. One reason for building the virtual Bailiwick following the conceptual approach was to explore the new computer technology, and its connection to its own ancestors. Deep inside Fig. 7.3, and more prominently in the lower right corner of Fig. 7.4, we can see a full-scale model of the Admiral television set the family obtained in the autumn of 1948, rather early in the development of the TV industry. Given the distance from Bethel, Connecticut, to New York City where the broadcast stations were located, a 30-foot high antenna needed to be placed on the barn, which was separated from the house by an apple orchard, and connected via a two-strand wire the technicians had twisted slightly, to prevent it from picking up static by magnetic induction. Information about classic electronic hardware is extensively shared online today, so in preparation for writing this chapter I searched in November 2017 and found that in 2010 a collector named Steve O’Bannon had posted a blog, praising the same model TV, primarily for the fact that it had two separate electronic chassis, one for the TV itself and the other for the power supply, which made it easier for the manufacturer to produce a suite of models, all using the same power supply. He praised other aspects of the design, but criticized the use of plastic in the screen cover. The blog was set up to encourage comments, so I entered this message: “Thanks, Steve! My family got a very similar Admiral 10” in 1948, the same in size and shape, and it lasted a decade. The screen cover was glass, but we also got an accessory lens that hung on a strap over the screen, making the picture slightly larger and changing the color a bit from sepia to more perfectly grayscale. The lens was plastic, but we were told it contained mineral oil, as described at www.tvhistory.tv/TV-Lens.htm.”

29Quoted in a letter dictated by William Seaman Bainbridge for his mother’s funeral, November 21, 1928. 30The Holy Bible (King James version) (Oxford University Press, London), Genesis 35:1, 35:3. 7.2 Bailiwick in 3-D 213

Checking back in January 2018, just two months later, I found that all the blogs O’Bannon had published about a range of historical electronic devices seemed to have vanished, without any obvious explanation. Perhaps there was only a temporary glitch, or the blog’s payments expired at the end of 2017, or even conceivably my innocent comment had reminded the system that many outdated blogs were still online. The more general lesson is rather obvious. While extensive information about historic mass-produced products exists online, in blogs and other information discussions between collectors, those sources are ephemeral. Thus, one needs to decide how much of the information would need to be ported over to the family digital library, for preservation there. Constructed in 2010, the virtual TV set actually worked, after a fashion, because it contained a brief program, written in Second Life’s scripting language, that connected to a 1949 episode of the children’s science-ﬁction program Captain Video, that the family actually watched back then. Visitors in Second Life would simply click their computer mouse on the image of the Admiral, and a box would open in the interface that asked if the user wanted to go to a website where the episode would play. The necessary script was exceedingly brief, and any amateur enthusiast could easily modify it to go to any other website, such as a video on YouTube. The episode of Captain Video was not at YouTube, or any other popular social media site from which it might vanish unexpectedly, but the durable Internet Archive. He is the entire code:

default { touch_start(integer total_number) { // load a dialog with a URL llLoadURL(llDetectedKey(0), “”, “http://www.archive.org/details/captainvideo”); } }

Between the two portraits in Fig. 7.4 is a virtual object that does not represent an artifact, but a person. A statue of the person could have been created, but it seemed more reasonable in this context simply to create a tall cylinder, put a photo of the face of the person on it, colored so it rather obviously did not represent any kind of family artifact. The person is Dr. Will, and a program was placed inside it that might be classiﬁed as an exceedingly simple chatbot.31 Clicking the user’s mouse on it caused it to print into the Second Life text chat window a random quotation from Dr. Will’s popular 1909 book, Life’s Day, which was a series of Chautauqua lectures that discussed the philosophical meaning of medical conditions experienced throughout the course of a life (Bainbridge 1909). The virtual library of this Bailiwick contained posters and book models, each of which linked to the appropriate online text. There was even a link to a 1920 recorded speech by Dr. Will’s cousin, Bainbridge Colby, that proclaimed: “It is important that we should constantly keep before us the duty of inculcating in the minds of

31en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot. 214 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes our citizens from overseas, the true meaning and signiﬁcance of America, and the high duty that rests upon every generation to sustain our blessed institutions, and to transmit them to posterity strengthened and unimpaired.”32 It would be a rather simple matter to interview a family member, whether formally in a few sit-down sessions, or casually throughout a series of days, to collect that individual’s favorite proverbs or quotations. Obviously, these could be assembled into a simple chatbot, in any number of different media, conceivably even one’s email footer or the top of one’s Facebook page. Or, they can simply form the framework of a chapter of a book, each chapter devoted to a different family member, in which the deeper meanings and origins of the quotations were added. For example, the preface of Life’s Day ends with this unattributed quote: “teach in suffering what others learn in song.” Searching this set of words online, but not forcing the search to ﬁnd them in this exact order, turns up this verse by Percy Bysshe Shelley33:

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong; They learn in suffering what they teach in song. The suffering referred to by Dr. Will, is caused by illness and death, felt by loving family members as well as by the afﬂicted person, “from the dawn of life to the coming of the night,” the metaphor that give Life’s Day its meaning. The son of two religious leaders, Dr. Will was himself rather religious, yet he held a very scientiﬁc theory about the nature of death. His concluding chapter, titled “Night,” begins:

Through the patient study of earnest minds, working in different directions, many of the problems connected with infancy, youth, middle life and old age have been solved. In the study of life scientists have learned something - not much - concerning that mystery of mysteries, death. They believe that death is not the necessary corollary of life, but that what is called “natural death” has been acquired during the process of evolution.

As we have seen, unicellular organisms multiply indeﬁnitely by division, each new part being as much alive as the other. They die only by accident, never naturally. “Natural death” is the outcome of cellular differentiation, and we are coming more and more to realize that differentiation inevitably culminates in death. Death, as Minot has said, is the price we have to pay for our organization (Bainbridge 1909, pp. 285–286). The book lacks footnotes or a bibliography, but its index gives us the fuller name Charles S. Minot. Dr. Will also quotes Minot about how our intelligence requires our death, because without the complex organization of multi-cellular brains, we could not think: “To the organization we are indebted for the means of appreciating the sort of world, the kind of universe, in which we are placed.” Searching for these words quickly found a Google Books copy of volume 71 of Popular Science Monthly, dating from 1907 and including the quotation in an article by Charles Sedgwick Minot (Minot 1907). It may seem a waste of time to footnote all the proverbs one gathers from a family member, but often such scholarship reveals a general school

32www.loc.gov/audio/?fa=subject%3Apatriotism%7Ccontributor%3Acolby%2C+bainbridge. 33en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley. 7.2 Bailiwick in 3-D 215 of thought or bygone subculture, that influenced the family members directly or indirectly, and that can be interesting to us today. The Wikipedia article for Charles Sedgwick Minot says he “was an Amer- ican anatomist and a founding member of the American Society for Psychical Research.”34 The article for the ASPR calls it “an organisation dedicated to parapsy- chology based in New YorkCity, where it maintains offices and a library,” listing quite a number of prominent scientists who were members, including the philosopher and psychologist William James who sought to reconcile science and spirituality.35 The first scientist cited by name in Life’s Day was Alfred Russel Wallace, who shares with Charles Darwin the honor of discovering evolution by natural selection, yet was also a spiritualist.36 Thus through dull footnotes we discover a fascinating antique intellectual tradition that believed that materialist biology and transcendent spirituality might be harmonized, both being necessary for meaningful human existence.

7.3 Historic Virtual Reality

Unlike a photo album, or even a video after it has been taken, a computer-based artiﬁcial environment can be dynamic, changing over time to represent the ﬂow of history, and hosting many in-time social activities. A good example is a full-scale simulation of Binchester in Second Life, also known as Vinovia. Wikipedia suggests that Vinovia was founded in the year 79 and explains the evolution of the names: “Vinovia or Vinovium was a Roman fort and settlement situated just over 1 mile (1.6 km) to the north of the town of Bishop Auckland on the banks of the River Wear in County Durham, England. The fort was the site of a hamlet until the late Middle Ages, but the modern-day village of Binchester is about 2 miles (3 km) to the east, near Spennymoor. The ruins are now known as the Binchester Roman Fort.”37 While I have visited Roman forts in physical Britain, including Vindolanda and Vercovicium, my exploration of Vinovia took place only in Second Life,butthe ease of getting there has allowed me to visit many times from 2010 to 2018. On November 2, 2009, David Petts posted this message on the Binchester blogsite: “One of the principal investigators on the Durham-Stanford Binchester Research Project is Dr. Gary Devore, who amongst other research interests is exploring the potential for Virtual Reality can be used to present information about the Roman world. Using the virtual world platform of Second Life he has created a fantastic reconstruction of the bath-house at Binchester.”38 The following May, Devore replied: “Actually Torin Golding inside Second Life built the reconstruction. I am working with Torin on the Virtual Worlds Project.” In another blog, Devore reported:

34en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sedgwick_Minot. 35en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_for_Psychical_Research. 36en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace. 37en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinovia. 38binchester.blogspot.com/2009/11/binchester-in-second-life.html. 216 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes

“Over the last year, I’ve been working with avatar Torin Golding inside the online virtual world of Second Life. Torin owns and manages a large recreation community based on the ancient Roman world. We’ve joined with him in adding two sims (virtual islands) to his large estate where Torin will build the project a full-scale reproduction of the Binchester fort and vicus. It will contain a wide range of inter- active displays and exhibits helping visitors to learn about the site and the history of Roman Britain.”39 It is common for users of Second Life to employ pseudonyms for their avatars, so we can logically conclude that Golding is the virtual manifestation of Devore, who describes himself as an archaeologist and author.40 Especially interesting in virtual Vinovia is the Praetorium, the home of the commander, which is displayed at four different points in time, changed by operating a switch mechanism. The original building was apparently largely wooden in construction, but in the second half of the third century a lavish stone building was erected, which is represented by the first of the four time choices. The second alternative was a century later, when the building was subdivided into apartments, and the third is the fifth century when the Roman army had left and local people were using the building for work and storage. The final stage is the site as it is today, only the ruins of a wall showing above the grass. Figure 7.5 shows three versions of exactly the same view, inside the Praetorium and showing the door to the commander’s apartment at the center of the top view, leaving out the fourth simulation when it was a total ruin. We may well imagine creating a time-variable simulation of Bailiwick and its yard, based on the history that is evident in its structure and recorded at least superficially and recently by photographs. A 1928 picture shows the very front, with huge bushes either side of the door that had been removed by the time Figs. 1.3 and 7.2 were taken. We can date them to about 1940, because the picket fence seen in both was constructed by my father, and we do not yet see the large trees he planted when each of his two children were born. It is possible that the two thin trees seen in Fig. 7.3 were the pair planted in honor of my own birth, because their location is correct. Years after we moved out, I twice drove past the house, in 1966 and 1986, seeing the same two trees and documenting the progressive disintegration of the picket fence by taking photographs. As noted above, the original core of the house was the three rooms represented by the simulation in Fig. 7.3. It had no full basement, but there was an airspace under the floor. The main section added to the right of the core added an upstairs bedroom, the dining room, and a basement that contained a coal-fired furnace and a pump to get water from the well. A small, separate one-story addition off the dining room was the kitchen. The 1966 visit revealed that a large porch had been added, on the side behind the car in Fig. 1.3, with some kind of basement or storage space beneath it. The 1986 photograph documents that a very small room had been added in the corner formed by the front part of the living rooms and the dining room. It also revealed that the inhabitants had ceased tending the lawn, which had gone totally wild, like a miniature forest. It was very common for old New England homes to go through

39rebuiltromans.blogspot.com/2010/04/binchester-in-virtual-worlds.html. 40garydevore.com/. 7.3 Historic Virtual Reality 217

Fig. 7.5 The Praetorium at virtual Vinovia at three points in history complex processes of enlargement and renovation over the years, but the general principle is universally valid: A home is a dynamic environment, having a history of its own that reﬂects and shapes the history of the family. Many historical buildings have been simulated in Second Life, so in February 2018 I searched for an example that might be useful here, having some tenuous connection to a family, even though most of the virtual restorations are public buildings. I found 218 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes

Fig. 7.6 The dining room of the 1920s Adlon Hotel in Second Life the Adlon, where Dr. Will had received “The Prophecy of the Adlon” in 1915, that he believed foretold the future history of war. The Adlon is a famous, elite hotel in Berlin, Germany, as Wikipedia reports: “The legendary original Hotel Adlon was one of the most famous hotels in Europe. It opened in 1907 and was largely destroyed in 1945 in the closing days of World War II, though a small wing continued operating until 1984. The current hotel, which opened on August 23, 1997, is a new building with a design inspired by the original.”41 The original Adlon has been recreated in Second Life as part of an area representing Berlin in the 1920s. The prophecy was received in a dining room of the real Adlon, and Fig. 7.6 shows a dining room of the virtual Adlon. By 1915, Dr. Will had visited Europe many times, and had developed several enduring ties with doctors there, so the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 gave him much to think about. The United States did not become involved for three years, so it was possible for him to visit nations on both sides of the conflict, with the intention of documenting military medical practices, and having adventures possessing the quality of espionage. Will collected supportive letters of introduction from many famous people, including the mayor of New York, the surgeon general of the navy, and the secretary of war. With a hint of Red Cross aegis, operating in a capacity somewhere between official and unofficial, he hoped to examine military hospitals and prisoner-of-war camps on both sides of the western front. Will departed in the company of Sanford Griffith, a fresh graduate of the University of Chicago, whom Will had known at Chautauqua and who wanted to become a war correspon- dent.42 They applied for new passports together, and their applications dated August 20, 1915 are together in the Ancestry.com online records, with identification pho-

41en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Adlon. 42“European War Symposium,” The Chautauquan Daily, August 3, 1914, pp. 1–2. 7.3 Historic Virtual Reality 219 tographs and data like their ages, 45 and 32. They sailed for Rotterdam on the Dutch liner, New Amsterdam, which carried its name in immense letters on each side so German submarine commanders would realize it belonged to a neutral nation.43 At Buch, a northwest suburb of Berlin, Will saw a splendidly designed military hospital with six thousand beds (Bainbridge 1919). In the German capital itself he toured the central laboratory where vaccines were prepared, and he stayed at the Adlon. Through a variety of means and connections, he convinced some German leaders that he represented potentially pro-German elements of the American leadership, which encouraged them to share their thinking with him. The prophecy came when he was having dinner at the Adlon with two German ofﬁcers, one of whom belonged to the General Staff of the army and spoke especially dramatically about their contingency plans. That evening Dr. Will wrote in his diary what the ofﬁcer had predicted would happen if Germany did not quickly win the war, which he reported in a 1924 publication by the US Government, Conditions in the Ruhr and Rhineland: (1) An armistice will come before any hostile army crosses Germany’s frontier. (2) There will be no scars on the fatherland from this war. (3) The immediate competitors in the economic and commercial world will be so crippled that when it is all over the Germans will be outselling them in the markets of the world long before they can get on their feet. (4) Following the war there will be economic hell, industrial revolution. We will set class against class, individual against individual, until the nations will have pretty much all they can attend to at home and not bother with us. (5) If need be, the fatherland may dissemble into component parts and reassemble at the strategic time. (Conclusion) The greatest struggle will come after the war. The weapon will be propaganda, the value of which we know. The Allies will be torn asunder, each will be put at the other’s throats like a lot of howling, gnashing hounds (Bainbridge 1924). Soon after the war, Dr. Will saw evidence he believed supported this prophecy, and he always assumed that the Second World War had been planned long before the Nazi Party came into existence. A rather sensational 1945 book titled The Plot Against The Peace by Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn called the Adlon Prophecy “the most sensational forecast ever made regarding German policy,” and promoted the wild idea that Germany was preparing to attack again and launch the Third World War (Sayers and Kahn 1945). Today, we might well speculate that nations other than Germany are in fact pursuing this strategy, including through covert cyberwarfare. The point of raising this story here is not to evaluate the Prophecy of the Adlon, but to note that family historians will often discover that some ancestor or contemporary had unusual views. I believe family members and historians have an obligation to consider such views seriously, not necessarily to adopt them but to learn from them. This case reminds us of at least two classic questions of vast scope. To what extent

43Entry of Sanford Griffith, Who’s Who in America 1944–1945 (Chicago: Marquis, 1944), p. 834; “Dr. Bainbridge Home Again,” The Chautauquan Weekly, November 18, 1915, p. 2. 220 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes is history the result of the actions of a small number of individuals who happen to be situated at a potential turning point for an entire society, or are individuals mere indicators of much larger general processes? How useful versus distorting is it to conceptualize history in ethical terms, most simplistically categorizing people and their actions into the gross categories of Good and Evil? Perhaps more relevant here is to consider how volunteers created the virtual Adlon and other structures from 1920s Berlin inside Second Life, and how they use them. The website of The 1920s Berlin Project calls it “time travel in Second Life” and reports that this ambitious project began in 2009 under the leadership of Jo Yardley: Our ideal was to show an as realistic and authentic as possible experience of visiting this part of history. Most historical sims show a somewhat romanticised, clean and charming view of the past where everyone lives in big houses and walks around in lovely clothes all the time. They offer the past up as they would have liked it to be. We wanted to show our visitors both sides of the coin; the amazing modern houses near Unter Den Linden where modern rich people in the latest fashion live a life of leisure, but also the dirty, narrow streets with tiny apartments where the poor try to survive. The 1920s Berlin Project offers you the chance to explore these two different worlds and even become part of one, or both of them. Spend your evening dancing in the mirror room of the luxurious Hotel Adlon or spend it in a damp basement Tanzlokal where they have lukewarm beer in dirty glasses.44 Second Life avatars generally have fictitious names, and the Facebook group for this project reveals that Jo Yardley is Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, a Dutch woman dedicated to exploring the potentials for online historical simulation.45 Although anyone may visit 1920s Berlin in Second Life, one of the formal SL groups is dedicated to it. As of February 22, 2018, it had 2,274 members. Jo Yardley is the “owner” of the group, and there is one policeman (Berlin Polizei). Table 7.1 shows the distinctive roles played by highly committed members, using text primarily from the internal “profile” of the group. These roles are fairly standard, and suggest the ontological social structure of any group that operates a virtual environment, thus serving as a prototype for future family history virtual environments having large numbers of participants. The admins have the power to add someone to the group, and to eject a member if he or she misbehaves. This power is encoded into the software system of Second Life. Shopkeepers, supporters, and tenants may add a new member, but lack the power to expel a current member. Shopkeepers not only sell virtual items, but also create them. For example, I purchased a postcard of the Adlon Hotel that was made by a member using the SL name Morganic Clarrington, for 5 Linden dollars or L$5, the internal Second Life currency. One side showed a picture of the virtual Adlon, while the other side had room to write an address and message, with a 1,000,000 Mark stamp in the upper right corner. Thus the postcard seems to date from about 1923, when Dr. Will did his field research for Conditions in the Ruhr and Rhineland, and hyperinflation had so devaluated the German mark that his souvenirs included a 200,000,000,000-mark bill so worthless it had been printed only on one side.46

441920sberlinproject.wordpress.com/about. 45www.facebook.com/jufjo; www.jufjo.net; www.hab3045.nl. 46en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinﬂation_in_the_Weimar_Republic. 7.3 Historic Virtual Reality 221

Table 7.1 Committed members of the 1920s Berlin Group in Second Life Distinctive role Number Admin 17 Administrators of the 1920s Berlin Project. Contact these people in case of an emergency such as griefers, Nazis, etc. Artist 45 Performers in 1920s Berlin Shopkeeper 10 Operate 1920s Berlin shops, where visitors may buy virtual products Supporter 22 The wonderful supporters of 1920s Berlin Temp rezzers 31 For people with temporary rezzing permission. Example; so they can shoot guns or rez a toy or tip jar for a single event. Everything rezzed must be removed before logging off Tenant 133 The tenant of 1920s Berlin who may rez things in their apartments or vehicles outside

When I bought the postcard, the conversion rate was around $10 US for L$2500. To create a postcard like the one I bought would have cost me L$20, because each side required uploading a graphic from my computer, at the fixed cost of L$10 each. Thus, to break even, before earning any pay for his effort or the cost of having a shop in 1920s Berlin, Morganic Clarrington would need to sell four Adlon postcards. Land in Second Life can be expensive, in real-world terms. At the time I visited 1920s Berlin, it seemed to occupy an entire “region,” with two cheaper adjacent Tiergarten “openspaces” devoted to a park. A full region cost $600 to set up and then $295 per month. The 2 supporters of the group presumably contributed to the set-up costs and made other fundamental donations. The 133 tenants rent virtual apartments, thereby helping to offset the costs. The terms “rez,” “rezzer” and “rezzing” refer to making a virtual object appear, and the software is set so that this requires formal permission. An online urban dictionary defines the term: “Rez (in Second Life) means to create or to make an object appear. If something were to appear out of nowhere, someone should say it ‘Rezzed in’. Reresolution, or just simply, rerez, is when a program who was derezzed, ‘comes back to life’, or resurrected. The term was inspired by the classic science-fiction movie Tron.”47 This 1982 film popularized the notion of virtual worlds through the story of “a computer programmer who is transported inside the software world of a mainframe computer where he interacts with programs in his attempt to escape.”48 The Facebook group associated with the 1920s Berlin project had 571 members on February 16, 2018, of whom at least 44 live in the real-world Berlin, as indicated by the summary descriptions connected to their link information.49 Six of them, including Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, perform administrative functions, and thus are the core of membership. I examined their personal pages to see what other visible groups they belonged to, locating groups related to the 1920s Berlin project, listed

47www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rez. 48en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron. 49www.facebook.com/groups/1920sberlinproject/members/. 222 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes in Table 7.2. The KPD referred to in the second and third groups is the historical Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands or Communist Party of Germany. Of the 571 members of the main group, the identities of 525 could be seen on Facebook, a few being duplicates or concealed. By definition, all 525 belong to that main group, but only 11 belong to the general 1920s KPD group, and 10 to the more specific 1929 KPD group. The following groups are listed in descending order of what fraction of their visible members belong to the main group. The Flapperette group represents the real-world Flappers, “a generation of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior. Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, driving automobiles, and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.”50 Many members of the Flapperette fan club may be interested in the 1920s, but not especially in Berlin. The bottom two Facebook groups have rather more general foci, advocating virtual revival of historical periods, but not narrowing on 1920s Berlin, while both having been created by admins of the main group. The Neo Traditionalism group was created by Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse and expresses a rather fascinating ideology, entirely in harmony with the theme of this book:

Neo Traditionalism is a way of life that looks backwards in order to go forwards. Neo Traditionalists see that progress isn’t always good and try to ﬁnd answers to today’s problems in the past. We can learn from our ancestors, of course not everything was better in the past but not everything was worse either. Just like Neo Traditional architecture that builds modern houses that have the modern comforts and technological progress incorporated into old fashioned looking houses, Neo Traditional people choose the best from the present and combine it with the best from the past. In modern society we see that things are going wrong in many ways, often culturally and socially. If we look back at how our grandparents lived we see that they had different problems but somehow succeeded in avoiding the ones we have today.51

7.4 Historical Virtual Worlds

Once computer technology had advanced to the point at which it was possible to construct somewhat realistic virtual environments, historians and archaeologists began testing their value as a research and education tool. Chapter 1 mentioned that the University of Virginia has played a pioneering role in the development of information technologies devoted to history, notably the archive named The Valley of the Shadow, and the concluding chapter of this book will examine that example more closely. Also at the University of Virginia, Bernard Frischer led a project to create a virtual version of an ancient Roman site, described here in the abstract of its grant from the National Science Foundation:

50en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flapper. 51www.facebook.com/groups/neotraditionalism/about. 7.4 Historical Virtual Worlds 223

Table 7.2 Facebook groups related to the 1920s Berlin project in Second Life Group name Description Members Seen Links Percent (%) The 1920s Official group for the 1920s 571 525 525 100 Berlin project Berlin project in Second Life 1920s Berlin Group for the KPD members of 14 11 11 100 KPD RP group the Berlin 1920s project, Second Life. This is for our comrades to organize roleplay and share historical informations about the work of the KPD, especially in Berlin, up to 1929 KPB Berlin Group for the members of the 11 10 10 100 1929 KPD ROLEPLAY community in 1920s Berlin The 1920s The place to find out what’s 16 15 14 93 Berlin Project going on at Berlin’s famous Zum Nussbaum restaurant Zum Nussbaum! 1920s Berlin This group is for announcements 93 88 67 76 Library and and discussion pertaining to the Archives 1920s Berlin library and archives. Meetings take place in Second Life Der Welt Der Welt Spiegel was a weekly 27 24 18 75 Spiegel—Illus- Berliner Magazine in the 1920s. I trierte Zeitung will post the complete year 1929 Berlin as summary in english, starts (historisch) with #38. This is at first for my friends and neighbors of the 1920s Berlin roleplay Sim in Second Life—to find some good ideas to integrate in their RP and to learn together with me a bit more about our preferred time Flapperettes AgroupforfansofThe 226 207 97 47 Flapperettes, the official dance troupe of the 1920s Berlin project Historical Group for everyone in the virtual 378 356 143 40 Second Life online world of Second Life interested in vintage, retro and historical things Neo Neo traditionalism is about 136 131 8 6 traditionalism as learning from the past and using a lifestyle our knowledge and passion for the world of our ancestors to create a better tomorrow 224 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes

The project will test the effectiveness of Virtual World Technology (VWT) for archaeological interpretation and dissemination. The research project is aimed at scholars and students of Roman archaeology, architecture, and culture, but it also has the potential to generate insights and results that archaeologists of other periods and cultures will find helpful as they adopt VWT. A testbed will be created which is a virtual world representation of Hadrian’s Villa (Tivoli, Italy). Hadrian’s Villa is the best known and best preserved of the imperial villas built near Rome by its emperors. The project will attempt innovate use of VWT avatar observation as a form of scholarly research and teaching. Using this designed space, undergraduates will take on the role of particular avatars who will be required to maintain ways of being that are consistent with their defined role. Graduate students will observe their interactions as a means of testing and possible challenge the existing thesis about how this complex space functioned.52 At its completion in 2013, the project’s website allowed users to download representations of many ancient structures from Hadrian’s Villa, “as it appeared toward the end of the lifetime of Hadrian (AD 76–128).”53 Exploring them uses a rather popular software: “Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technolo- gies, which is primarily used to develop both three-dimensional and two-dimensional video games and simulations for computers, consoles, and mobile devices.”54 Among the many more recent academic virtual structures is one that goes well beyond mere static visual representations: Supported by a Digital Humanities Implementation Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the goal of the Virtual St. Paul’s Cathedral Project is to recreate the experience of worship and preaching in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in the early seventeenth century. This project demonstrates the value of visual and acoustic modeling in helping us understand the look and feel of historical sites as well as their acoustic properties, by recreating events that took place in these spaces, to experience these events as they unfold, minute by minute, in the spaces where they originally took place (Wall et al. 2017). A cathedral is a public place, housing rather strictly defined activities, but we can imagine a family whose ancestors lived in London visiting the virtual St. Paul’s for an occasional reunion. When Facebook bought Oculus, a company that specialized in developing a head-mounted virtual reality display called Rift, there were many rumors within computer science about how such devices might be used to supplement or supplant ordinary Facebook groups, permitting people to experience being together even if they were thousands of miles apart. Most obviously, geographically dispersed families could have get-togethers every few days, perhaps in an environment that duplicated the home they used to share. So far, that kind of application is still developing only slowly, for example in a virtual world I have visited that has an evocative name: “In 2013, Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, left Linden Lab to work on a new virtual world designed for the Rift, called High Fidelity, which will link thousands of user-hosted virtual environments together into a consistent virtual world.”55

52www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1018512. 53vwhl.soic.indiana.edu/villa/mission.php. 54en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine). 55en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_Rift. 7.4 Historical Virtual Worlds 225

Fig. 7.7 A musical band performing in a virtual world

Currently, many families and groups of friends occasionally get together not in virtual representations of their old homes, but in online gameworlds that happen to suit their cultures and personalities. Here we will gain only a brief overview of the technical and organizational possibilities by exploring two examples of historical fantasy, Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) and Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC). Launched in 2007 and periodically expanded over the subsequent decade, LotRO is a vast representation of Middle Earth from J. R. R. Tolkien’s writings (Tolkien 1982, 1955). It contains many public buildings and allows users to have their own homes, although constructed in a pseudo-Medieval style rather than duplicating a family’s real residence. Figure 7.7 shows a social gathering in the Prancing Pony Tavern in the city of Bree in Middle Earth. Six of the seven human figures in the picture are avatars of real people, while the man standing in the back corner is an artificial person, generically called a non-player character or NPC, who is depicted as a barber. He not only cuts hair but can be paid to transform an avatar’s appearance, including the color of hair, skin, and even eyes. Four of the avatars in the picture are playing musical instruments, and LotRO has a rather impressive system that allows groups of people to become virtual musicians, even composing their own music and producing scores in the ABC notation system that coordinates performance by even large bands of performers.56 The man on the left side of the picture is just starting to dance, and LotRO allows avatars to learn several specific dances from its four main ethnicities: Hobbit, Elf, Dwarf, and Man (or Human). The woman sitting on the floor and listening to the music is my own avatar, named Ánræda, which is Anglo-Saxon for “constance” or “constancy” in the sense of being true to one’s words, reliable in the sense of faithful rather than

56www.lotrointerface.com/downloads/info380-Songbook.html; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_ notation. 226 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes

“constant” in the physical sense of unvarying. She is a representation of my sister, Constance, seen in Figs. 3.1 and 3.2, who died accidentally in 1965. In an earlier book, I devoted a chapter to Ánræda’s experience in Lord of the Rings Online, and wrote of her attraction to the Prancing Pony, reﬂecting the fact that my sister had often visited a music-oriented tavern in Port Chester, New York, named Vahsen’s (Bainbridge 2014). Had she survived another 5 years, she might well have been there the night Janis Joplin sang her last song, including these sad lyrics, “Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends” (Myers 2015). She had also been active in The Summer Youth Festival and Connecticut Playmakers, amateur groups that performed musicals and dramas, so in LotRO she joined a musical group named The White Flames, and I learned how to operate the simulated musical performance software. Ánræda also appeared in a chapter of another book, where she was a research assistant to Angusmcintosh, a Hobbit avatar based on our uncle Angus McIntosh, the expert in historical linguistics who appears with my sister in Fig. 3.2 (Bainbridge 2016). In Chap. 2, I raised the possibility that avatars can be a medium for memorializing deceased family members, and certainly among the motivations for family history are veneration, expression of grief, and meditation on what can be learned from lost loved ones. In my 2013 book, eGods: Faith Versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming, I suggested that there was little difference in the modern world between belief and suspension of disbelief , thus that computer games could have religious qualities for devoted players (Bainbridge 2013a). A separate chapter published in a collection that same year offered a fundamental concept potentially signiﬁcant for virtual enactment of family histories:

It is possible at the present time to create virtual representations of deceased loved ones, and inhabit them as a way of expressing reverence and of dealing with one’s own feelings of loss, as demonstrated by this study in which 18 Ancestor Veneration Avatars (AVAs) were created. Most obviously, this can be done in massively multiplayer online role-playing games and comparable non-game virtual worlds. The identity of any individual person contains fragments of other people, most especially members of one’s family. In addition, people play a variety of roles, adopting identities temporarily that are more or less distinct from each other. Furthermore, a number of social scientists and commentators have suggested that individuals have become protean or multiplex, as rapid social change, multiculturalism, and the division of labor have eroded the functionality of uniﬁed identities. Finally, secularization has undercut traditional religious ways of managing feelings toward deceased relatives. A remarkable deduction from these observations is that many people should consider playing the role of a deceased loved one through an avatar in an online gameworld, as a form of emotionally satisfying ancestor veneration (Bainbridge 2013b).

Tolkien’s works are among the best-known examples of high fantasy, while Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) can be classified as low fantasy. Here is how Wikipedia distinguishes the concepts: “High fantasy is defined as fantasy set in an alternative, fictional (“secondary”) world, rather than “the real”, or “primary” world. The secondary world is usually internally consistent, but its rules differ from those of the primary world. By contrast, low fantasy is characterized by being set in the primary, or “real” world, or a rational and familiar fictional world, with the inclusion of mag- 7.4 Historical Virtual Worlds 227 ical elements.”57 DAoC is based on the actual history and legendary culture of three large ethnicities of the European Dark Ages: Albion (English), Hibernia (Irish), and Midgard (Norse) (Mylonas 2005). While the four races of LotRO are generally at peace with each other, even allies, the three factions of DAoC are at war. Group conflict is very common in massively multiplayer online role-playing games, and the only reasons they escape criticism for being racist are that the ethnic groups do not match today’s real-life categories, and each faction tends to be an alliance of races that have come to terms with each other. Here we consider a census of DAoC avatars with the limited purpose of understanding some of the ways in which virtual worlds can provide social structure, such as might be needed to cluster families into communities. An ethnic group is really a very large branch of the human family. At much smaller scale, extended families spread out over the generations, and cousins may lose contact with each other as the years pass. Each of the three DAoC nationalities contains six ethnic groups, several of which are humanoid species that cannot be found on our real world, and one of which is central to the definition of the faction, as a DAoC wiki reports58: Briton: Native to Albion. Britons are a hearty, adaptable people with the ability to succeed in any profession or discipline set before them. Norse: The Norse people are a stout race, hardened by the harsh landscape and cold winters of Midgard. Celt: The Celts are a war-like tribe of Hibernian people who are known for their ferocity in battle. It is not uncommon for branches of families to live in different areas, and to dwell in somewhat different cultures, as illustrated by Fig. 3.2 that recorded the visits of New Englanders to Scotland. Indeed, the Albion faction of DAoC included a Scottish ethnic group, called Highlanders who even wear kilts, plus two other fully human races: Highlander: Once at odds with the Britons, these strong and able bodied clansfolk have come to the lowlands of Albion to defend against their common enemies. Proud of their clan heritage, they display their clan colors in the tartans they wear even as they charge forth on the battlefield. Saracen: Following in the footsteps of the first Saracen Knight, Sir Palomides, many men and women from the nomadic desert tribes have found their home in Albion. They are a dark skinned people known for their feats of agility and stealth. Avalonian: Said to be touched by the same arcane essence that empowers the Elves of Hibernia, this tall, fair race of humans has a strong affinity for the magical arts. They have come from the isle of Avalon to aid the heirs of Arthur. The Isle of Avalon is a mythical place, and yet in a sense it exists. In one of my several visits to Britain, I went to the location most closely identified with that site of the Arthurian legends, Glastonbury, which is just south of Wales, so the Avalonians may possibly be Welch.

57en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fantasy. 58camelotherald.wikia.com/wiki/Races. 228 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes

Fig. 7.8 A member of the Norse ethnic group as a virtual tourist in Albion

At the current time, there are two rather different versions of DAoC, that differ in terms of the relationships between the factions. A cluster of Internet servers called Ywain offers the more popular version, in which the factions are at war with each other, in the ruleset called PvP (player versus player) or RvR (realm versus realm). Less popular, but the primary focus of my own research in this virtual world, is Gaheris, where the factions are at peace: “Cooperative servers step away from the traditional ruleset, in that you may play in all three realms on these servers in a cooperative fashion. The server is completely Player versus Environment (a.k.a. ‘PvE’) with the exception of the dueling options. May not attack any player character. May play cooperatively with characters from any Realm. Characters may travel freely to all three realms. There is no RvR, only one-on-one dueling.”59 Figure 7.8 is a screenshot taken in 2009 that shows a Norse woman warrior, wearing a winged Valkyrie helmet, riding peacefully as a tourist inside Stonehenge, which is deep within the territory of the Albion faction. Table 7.3 gives the distribution of avatars who belonged to the six human ethnicities, and belong to the largest social structure in Gaheris, as of the second week of July, 2017.60 As it reports, fully 14,140 avatars belonged to 21 of the volunteer

59darkageofcamelot.com/content/rvr-server-types. 60search.camelotherald.com/#/guild/QolY3X36ST8. 7.4 Historical Virtual Worlds 229

Table 7.3 A census of six ethnic groups in the virtual world, Dark Age of Camelot Guild name Total Briton Avalon Saracen Highland Norse Celt Survivors 3,248 427 169 171 164 202 381 (Leader) Grace 1,679 233 81 103 47 82 273 Too Dangerous 1,421 164 56 69 68 81 139 To Be Good Legendary 1,357 180 73 68 59 76 155 Mercenaries Knights of 1,328 152 71 86 73 73 168 Caledonia Deadly 996 127 58 55 70 54 84 Intentions Oblivion 881 103 53 42 32 55 77 The Jaded Ones 655 97 34 27 30 37 52 Angels of War 449 55 22 12 26 39 44 Faithful Friends 304 49 9 7 13 14 49 Keepers of the 289 23 10 14 10 20 34 Light Sealed By Fate 254 32 15 13 9 11 28 Demon 253 32 16 23 11 9 17 Crusadors Novus Aera 213 33 9 9 6 18 17 The Motley 200 20 15 9 12 4 11 Crew Tyr’s Hand 178 28 13 6 8 15 12 Danish Huscarls 165 22 9 13 8 8 8 Knights of Fayte 105 12 8 13 2 10 9 Dominatio 86 10 6 5 2 7 9 Incendium Ultima Legione 57 7 6 5 0 4 4 Hounds of Hell 22 1 0 0 2 3 3 Total 14,140 1,807 733 750 652 822 1,574 Percent (%) 100.0 12.8 5.2 5.3 4.6 5.8 11.1 player organizations called guilds, that had formed an alliance under the leadership of the largest guild, Survivors, that had 3,248 members. In Second Life, most users have a single avatar, but in MMOs multiple avatars per person are common. However, this alliance is an objectively large social group. The six human ethnicities represent just 44.8% of the total membership, because there also exist several fantasy heritages including Elves and Dwarves as in the Tolkien mythos. Every single one of the 21 guilds has members from all three factions, although the races have different populations. Each guild has a headquarters building, and a text- 230 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes based communication channel. If these 14,140 avatars in a fantasy world seem rather distant from any real family, we should note that very large families may indeed wish to create a number of online groups for social purposes or to accomplish distinctive goals, comparable to these 21 guilds, and major branches of the family may distribute themselves in a complex pattern across such groups. If the number 14,140 seems a bit large for a family, I must report that the total size of the Wheeler family, living and dead, in the year 1914, as reported in a genealogy cited in Chap. 2, was fully 10,361! (Wheeler 1914)

7.5 Conclusion

Although still alive, the three virtual worlds visited in this chapter are no longer young, Dark Age of Camelot dating from 2001, Second Life from 2003, and Lord of the Rings Online from 2007. On World Heritage Day in 2018, the BBC reported: “High resolution 3D scans of more than 25 historical sites from around the world are being released. CyArk used cutting edge digital archaeology techniques including laser scanning and drones to capture the images which have been released by the Google Arts and Culture project.”61 Founded in 2003, CyArk promotes “digital preservation of cultural heritage sites and architecture,” prioritizing a growing number of culturally significant locations worldwide.62 In words relevant to the theme of this chapter, CyArk says, “We archive the data using state of the art processes to ensure that this data continues to be available in a disaster recovery scenario, tomorrow or decades in the future. And we strive to share this data in powerful ways, including truly immersive experiences in Virtual Reality that convey the power of these places, transporting users that may never have a chance to experience them and inspiring others to make the journey.”63 No one has as yet preserved Bailiwick in such a detailed and durable manner, but if one wishes to experience the actual park of Gramercy Park, but lacks a key to its iron gate, there is a virtual alternative online, if admittedly a primitive one.64 A cautionary lesson can be derived from the history of that virtual world archetype, The Matrix. It began as a blockbuster 1999 sci-fi movie with that title, then returned in two movie sequels and a series of computer games, including the 2005 virtual world, The Matrix Online. Literary science fiction had long explored the philosophical implications of virtual reality, from the 1953 novel The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke up through Neal Stephenson’s 1992 Snow Crash (Clarke 1953; Stephenson 1992). Actual online virtual worlds were evolving in the late 1990s, notably Active Worlds in 1995, Ultima Online in 1997, and EverQuest in 1999. The Matrix drew

61“Google’s 3D Scans Aim to Preserve Historical Sites,” BBC News, www.bbc.com/news/av/ technology-43797836/google-s-3d-scans-aim-to-preserve-historical-sites. 62en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyArk. 63artsandculture.google.com/partner/cyark. 64untappedcities.com/2014/12/02/you-can-now-see-inside-gramercy-park-via-google-maps. 7.5 Conclusion 231 upon serious philosophy, notably the work of Jean Beaudrillard, to imagine a virtual world inhabited by real people who did not know that the environment around them was unreal (Bainbridge 2011). So The Matrix Online was a simulation of a simulation, allowing the user to experience an apparently real city where clever hacking could disrupt the normal functioning of the program (McCubbin 2005). But in 2009, with sinking numbers of inhabitants, The Matrix Online was shut down. A good case can be made for establishing a public archive, preserving in functional form the best early virtual worlds, but that has not been done. This fact should warn family historians to be careful in the adoption of virtual environments for simulation of valued family contexts, or perhaps motivate them to select systems and develop tools that would permit moving Bailiwick to more advanced worlds over the years.

References

Bainbridge LS (1924) Yesterdays. Fleming H. Revell, New York, pp 52–60 Bainbridge WS (1909) Life’s day. Frederick A. Stokes, New York, pp 285–286 Bainbridge WS (Jan 1919) Report on medical and surgical developments of the war. Special issue of United States Naval Medical Bulletin, p 44 Bainbridge WS (1924) Conditions in the Ruhr and Rhineland. US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, pp 2–3. babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112055200502 Bainbridge WS (2007) The scientific research potential of virtual worlds. Science 317:472–476 Bainbridge WS (2011) The Matrix Online. In: The virtual future. Springer, London, pp 15–33 Bainbridge WS (2013a) eGods: faith versus fantasy in computer gaming. Oxford University Press, New York Bainbridge WS (2013b) Ancestor veneration avatars. In: Luppicini R, Handbook of research on technoself: identity in a technological society. Information Science Reference, Hershey, Penn- sylvania, pp 308, 308–321 Bainbridge WS (2014) An information technology surrogate for religion: the veneration of deceased family members in online games. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp 120–133 Bainbridge WS (2016) Virtual sociocultural convergence. Springer, London, pp 141–164 Bohannon J (2011) Meeting for peer review at a resort that’s virtually free. Science 331:27 Clarke AC (1953) The city and the stars. Harcourt, Brace, New York McCubbin C (ed) (2005) The Matrix Online. Prima, Roseville, California Minot CS (1907) The problem of age, growth and death. Pop Sci Mon 71:455–473 Myers M (2015) The story behind Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’. Wall Str J. www.wsj.com/ articles/the-story-behind-janis-joplins-mercedes-benz-1436282817, www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/ janisjoplin/mercedesbenz.html Mylonas E (2005) Dark age of Camelot: Epic edition. Prima Games, Roseville, California Pommer A, Pommer J (2015) Exploring Gramercy Park and Union Square. The History Press, Charleston, South Carolina Rymaszewski M, Au WJ, Wallace M, Winters C, Ondrejka C, Batstone-Cunningham B (2007) Second Life: the official guide. Wiley Hoboken, New Jersey Sayers M, Kahn AE (1945) The plot against the peace. Dial Press, New York, p 12 Seaver JW (1890) Anthropometry and physical examination. New Haven, Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor Stephenson N (1992) Snow crash. Bantam, New York Tolkien JRR (1982) The hobbit. Ballantine, New York Tolkien JRR (1955) The lord of the rings. Allen and Unwin, London 232 7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes

Wall JN, Schoﬁeld J, Hill D, Jing Y (Oct 2017) St. Paul’s Cathedral rises from the dust - news from the virtual St. Paul’s Cathedral Project. ERCIM News 111:32 Wheeler Jr AG (1914) The genealogical and encyclopedic history of the Wheeler family in America. American College of Genealogy, Boston, Massachusetts Chapter 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Ofﬁcial Records

Abstract Of great value for family historians are government documents such as census forms, records of legal disputes, medical ﬁles that document the lives of doctors as well as patients, and the great number and diversity of records from religious organizations, stored both in their archives and in public places such as old newspapers. Online commercial services such as Ancestry.com are a good starting point, as illustrated by a student-oriented project using the Gilbreth family publicized in the 1948 book and 1950 movie, Cheaper by the Dozen. Combining multiple records, from the 1915 Rhode Island census as well as from six decennial US censuses, provides a framework to organize the evolving structure of that family, as it moved geographically, and as members were born and died. Economists and sociologists make heavy use of the historical censuses, and in the period 1994–2003 the National Science Foundation helped set up several census data centers across the United States, but they are not open to ordinary citizens, because of privacy and cost issues. Legal records very in terms of how public versus private they are, and a private document dating from 1951 illustrates how online searches can place legal records in the context of a particular family’s turbulent history. Similarly, medical records are typically protected from public view, but two cases of temporary insanity reported in anonymize form in 1927 become more relevant historically when the real names of the patients are revealed, with connections to other data online about their lives. The chaotic life of a clergyman is documented by a series of newspaper articles dating from 1893, and internal records of a church dating from 1906. Each such example not only highlights the historical value of a different kind of ofﬁcial record, but also suggests interesting insights about the fundamental tensions in family life.

Information-rich records of many kinds can be of value to family historians, and this chapter will explore the human meaning of three main types: government documents including census records and reports of government actions, legal and medical records that document important aspects of the lives of professional personnel as well as their clients, and documents concerning religious organizations which can be found not only within their own archives but also in newspapers and similar external sources. As throughout this book, each record will be connected to others, which in sum

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 233 W. S. Bainbridge, Family History Digital Libraries, Human–Computer Interaction Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01063-8_8 234 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Official Records brings in a very wide variety of historical documentation. This chapter draws heavily upon issues studied intensively in the sociology of the family, notably the deep debate about the changing structure of families, for example the question of whether extended family structures have really been significant for many people in recent centuries (Laslett 1965; Cherlin 1981; Juster and Vinovskis 1987). However, that is chiefly the intellectual background rather than the visible narrative, because early hopes that the sociology of the family could be based upon a small set of simple theoretical principles were dashed long ago. For example, in 1978 Glen Elder argued that the 1960s were a turning point, after which serious social scientists could no longer believe the myth that family structure had evolved in some clear direction over the centuries (Elder 1978). In 1992, Phyllis Moen and Elaine Wethington considered whether the archaic optimism of family sociologists could be revived, for example through coherent theories about how specific strategies guide how families adapted to even randomly changing historical circumstances (Moen and Wethington 1992). Sociological works on the diversity of human families are very much worth reading, yet in studying a specific family the historian must start by assembling its facts and the perceptions of members, drawing upon academic theories only later, if at all.

8.1 Human Factors in Family History

To set the stage for assessing what family historians can learn from considering how social scientists have used official data, we need a rich and visible example, and one where using a standard online genealogy service will illustrate many points about data search and reliability. A remarkably good choice is the family connected to the October 19, 1904, marriage of Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lillian Evelyn Moller in Oakland, California, rendered famous with the American public through the 1948 book and 1950 movie, Cheaper by the Dozen (Gilbreth and Carey 2002 [1948]). Written as a humorous family history by two of their children, Frank Jr. and Ernestine, the book was exceedingly well titled, referring to the dozen children they had, but also in the word “cheaper” to the fact that their parents were innovative researchers and entrepreneurs, as Frank Sr.’s Wikipedia page describes them, “industrial engineers and efficiency experts who contributed to the study of industrial engineering in fields such as motion study and human factors.”1 We mentioned the Gilbreths back in Chap. 3, because they had been pioneers in the use of photography to capture and analyze human motions. Many Wikipedia pages relate to this family, including one titled therblig, out- lining the Gilbreth theory derived from time and motion studies of brick laying: “Therbligs are 18 kinds of elemental motions used in the study of motion economy in the workplace. A workplace task is analyzed by recording each of the therblig units for a process, with the results used for optimization of manual labour by eliminating unneeded movements. The word therblig was the creation of Frank Bunker Gilbreth

1en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bunker_Gilbreth_Sr. 8.1 Human Factors in Family History 235 and Lillian Moller Gilbreth, American industrial psychologists who invented the field of time and motion study. It is a reversal of the name Gilbreth, with ‘th’ transposed.”2 Arguably, they innovated in the shadow of pioneer work efficiency researcher Fred- erick Winslow Taylor, who however was quite happy to praise the Gilbreth research on how to improve the efficiency of cementing bricks into walls, in his 1911 book, The Principles of Scientific Management: The writer has gone thus fully into Mr. Gilbreth’s method in order that it may be perfectly clear that this increase in output and that this harmony could not have been attained under the management of “initiative and incentive” (that is, by putting the problem up to the workman and leaving him to solve it alone) which has been the philosophy of the past. And that his success has been due to the use of the four elements which constitute the essence of scientific management… First. The development (by the management, not the workman) of the science of bricklaying, with rigid rules for each motion of every man, and the perfection and standardization of all implements and working conditions… Second. The careful selection and subsequent training of the bricklayers… Third. Bringing the first-class bricklayer and the science of bricklaying together, through the constant help and watchfulness of the management… Fourth. An almost equal division of the work and responsibility between the workman and the management (Taylor 1911). This set of principles was applied not only to bricklaying, but also to the creation of the Gilbreth family. First: The management in the family was the married couple, who applied rigid rules for their children’s behavior. Second: The selection process was really the romance through which Frank and Lillian selected each other, and prepared to train their children. Third: They offered “constant help and watchfulness” to their offspring. Fourth: The huge “work and responsibility” of running a big household was shared between parents and children. A 2012 article on the work-family balance challenges faced by scientist-mothers included two photographs that illustrated this particular family’s value of efficiency: “Industrial engineer Lillian Gilbreth was a rare and early career scientist and mother of 12. Above, Gilbreth and some of her children gather at the family’s home office in Rhode Island in 1916. At left is a view of one of Gilbreth’s projects, The Kitchen Practical, designed to save time at home by reducing the need for excess motion. The space could be customized to fit individual women’s bodies, and it included an alcove with a small desk” (Williams and Ceci 2012, p. 139). In his 1909 book, Bricklaying System, Frank Gilbreth advocated training several apprentices simultaneously, as he would do with his children: “Two or more apprentices on the same job work out better than one, as there is a spirit of rivalry between them, and they can be matched against each other in speed contests” (Gilbreth 1909). In her 1914 book, The Psychology of Management, dedicated “to my father and mother,” Lillian Gilbreth advocated Scientific Management of labor, connecting the most advanced version, Ultimate Management, to Taylor’s work (Gilbreth 1914, p. 12). She explained, “Under Ultimate Management, the minds of the workers,—and of the managers too,—will have been studied, and the results recorded from earliest childhood. This record, made by trained investigators, will enable vocational guidance directors to tell the child what he is fitted to be, and thus to help the schools

2en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therblig. 236 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Official Records and colleges to know how best to train him, that is to say, to provide what he will need to know to do his life work, and also those cultural studies that his vocational work may lack, and that may be required to build out his best development as an individual” (Gilbreth 1914, p. 31). In a later expansion on this point, she even used the term family history: “Just as it is a great help to the teacher to know the family history of the student, so it is to the one who has to use time and motion study data to know all possible of the hereditary traits, environment and habits of the worker who was observed” (Gilbreth 1914, p. 110). These books by Taylor and the two Gilbreths are available online, as are many other documents relating to their lives, often connectable directly to a page of Cheaper by the Dozen. One of this book’s ridiculous anecdotes involved a tour of the ocean liner Leviathan: “Dad had taken the boys aboard on a sightseeing trip just before she sailed. He hadn’t remembered to count noses when he came down the gangplank, and didn’t notice, until the gangplank was pulled in, that Dan was missing. The Leviathan’s sailing was held up for twenty minutes until Dan was located, asleep in a chair on the promenade deck” (Gilbreth and Carey 2002 [1948], p. 15). We already web-referenced the Leviathan here in Chap. 3, as the vehicle for a Bainbridge semi- professional home movie. The prominent car in the book and movie of the Gilbreth family was a huge Pierce-Arrow convertible, and the manufacturer’s Wikipedia page reports, “Industrial efficiency expert Frank Gilbreth extolled the virtues of Pierce- Arrow, in both quality and in its ability to safely transport his large family.”3 When driving a distance, Lillian would read directions to Frank from the Automo- bile Blue Book, which he tended ironically to ignore. Published from 1901 through 1929, many editions of this travel guidebook are currently available online at the Hathi Trust Digital Library.4 The chapter of Cheaper by the Dozen titled “Pierce Arrow” begins with a practical joke the father played on his children, concerning a residential move: “When Dad bought the house in Montclair, he described it as a tumbled-down shanty in a rundown neighborhood… We were living at Providence, Rhode Island, at the time. As we drove from Providence to Montclair, Dad would point to every termite-trap we passed… As we entered Montclair, he drove through the worst sections of town, and finally pulled up at an abandoned structure that even Dracula wouldn’t have felt at home in.” Only after a few minutes of horror did the children realize that their prankster father had tricked them. “And then he drove us to 68 Eagle Rock Way, which was an old but beautiful Taj Mahal of a house with fourteen rooms, a two-storey barn out back, a greenhouse, chicken yard, grape arbors, rose bushes, and a couple of dozen fruit trees” (Gilbreth and Carey 2002 [1948], pp. 7–9). Searching online for “68 Eagle Rock Way Montclair New Jersey” turns up real estate sites that indicate the house was built in 1897 and was most recently bought in 2015 for $2,750,000, although the pictures and the Google Maps street view seemed to show a building in modern architectural style. Another search hit was an article from New Jersey Monthly, by Sharon Hazard, “A Dozen Kids, and a Bushel

3en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company. 4catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000048992. 8.1 Human Factors in Family History 237 of Timeless Ideas,” that included a photograph of the Gilbreth family listening to their radio, plus a picture of the outside of their house.5 I was perplexed to see that the pictures of 68 Eagle Rock Way seemed to show totally different buildings, so I searched further. A forum discussion concerning the 2006 death of Ernestine Gilbreth Carey included this comment: “The Gilbreth clan lived at 67 Eagle Rock Way, but the house was torn down years ago and the street has been renumbered, according to Bill Fisher, who works in the local history room of the Montclair Library.”6 So, believing the real estate advertisements would have been an error. Clearly, family historians will need to use information sources with care, and, as we have already seen repeatedly, explore alternative sources when something seems wrong. To develop further insights into this challenge, we will now again use that primary online commercial source of family history data, Ancestry.com, looking for records of the Gilbreth family. A great variety of other online genealogical resources exist today, some with their own extensive histories. Founded in 1845, the New England Historic Genealogical Society pioneered online archiving when it launched its website in 1996, and according to Wikipedia: “More than 15,000 members research on the website every day and an additional 15,000 non-members visit daily.”7 For “Old England,” or Britain more generally, the BBC website has a family history section, including critiques of the various online genealogy services.8 Wikipedia says of Ancestry.com: “The largest for-proﬁt genealogy company in the world, it operates a network of genealogical, historical record and genetic genealogy websites.”9 Its structure and tools are well designed for family history, except that they generally require searching for speciﬁc ancestors’ names, rather than, for example, a town, neighborhood, or a company where an ancestor may have worked. A starting point and reasonable standard for comparison are the names and lifetimes of the Gilbreth family members, posted on Wikipedia: 10 Frank Bunker Gilbreth (1868–1924) Lillian Evelyn Moller Gilbreth (1878–1972) Anne Moller Gilbreth Barney (1905–1987) Mary Elizabeth Gilbreth (1906–1912) Ernestine Moller Gilbreth Carey (1908–2006) Martha Bunker Gilbreth Tallman (1909–1968) Frank Bunker Gilbreth Jr. (1911–2001)

5Sharon Hazard, “A Dozen Kids, and a Bushel of Timeless Ideas,” New Jersey Monthly, August 13, 2014; njmonthly.com/articles/jersey-living/a-dozen-kids-gilbreth-family-montclair. 6baristanet.com/2006/11/growing-up-in-montclair-ernestine-gilbreth-carey. 7en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Historic_Genealogical_Society. 8www.bbc.co.uk/history/0/23493076; Jenny Thomas, “To Pay or Not To Pay? A Guide to Choosing Genealogy Sites on the Internet,” BBC, April 26, 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/history/familyhistory/get_ started/paying_for_research_01.shtml. 9en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestry.com. 10en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bunker_Gilbreth_Sr; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Moller_ Gilbreth; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernestine_Gilbreth_Carey; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bunker_ Gilbreth_Jr; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moller_Gilbreth. 238 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Ofﬁcial Records

William Moller Gilbreth (1912–1990) Lillian Gilbreth Johnson (1914–2001) Frederick Moller Gilbreth (1916–2015) Daniel Bunker Gilbreth (1917–2006) John Moller Gilbreth (1919–2002) Robert Moller Gilbreth (1920–2007) Jane Moller Gilbreth Heppes (1922–2006) After logging into Ancestry.com, one may start a search in Census and Voter Lists by entering “Frank Bunker” into First and Middle Names, “Gilbreth” into Last Name, and “1868” into Birth Year. On May 15, 2018, this produced 41 hits, a few of them seemingly wrong, beginning with Frank B. Gelbretti in the 1910 census. However, the search was set to allow imprecise hits, and in fact this clearly is Frank B. Gilbreth, readily identifiable by all the other information that can be read on the photographic copy of the handwritten census page available just a couple of clicks from the Gelbretti item in the list. In Chap. 1 we reported data from the census from my own family, and here Table 8.1 does so for the Gilbreths, focusing on Frank’s early years. The 1870 census shows Frank not long after his birth living with his parents and two older sisters, in Fairfield, Maine. By 1880, after the death of his father, Frank is living in Boston with his mother and two older sisters, reportedly in a boarding house operated by his mother.11 The US census records for 1890 did not survive, but the 1890 directory of the city of Boston, one of many such sources available through Ancestry.com, lists the survivors of Hiram living at 156 West Chester Park: Mrs. Martha B. Gilbreth, Anne M. Gilbreth, Mary E. Gilbreth and Frank B. Gilbreth. At the beginning of the 1980s, I did research on the Shaker religious communities in Massachusetts, because combining the 1850, 1860 and 1870 US census records with the 1855 and 1865 Massachusetts records offered the unusual opportunity to track membership changes every five years rather than ten (Bainbridge 1982, 1984). Indeed, Massachusetts continued to conduct censuses, which might have told us more about the Gilbreth family, but the state’s census website sadly reports: “State census records of Massachusetts were taken every ten years from 1855 to 1945, but only the original population schedules for the 1855 and 1865 census still exist. All other state census years are lost or destroyed.”12 Table 8.2 reports census data for the years covering the marriage of Frank and Lillian, through 1930, the first census after his premature death from heart failure in 1924. The 1910 US census found Frank and Lillian living on Ravine Road in Plain- field, New Jersey, with four daughters and Frank’s mother, as well as two household employees. By 1915, they had moved to Providence, Rhode Island, and that state’s original census records do still exist.13 Comparing 1915 with 1910, we see that three more children have been born, but one also has vanished, Mary, who died from diph-

11en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bunker_Gilbreth_Sr. 12www.mass-doc.com/census_research_state.htm. 13www.rihs.org/census-records/. 8.1 Human Factors in Family History 239

Table 8.1 Early census records of Frank Bunker Gilbreth Name Relation Sex Age Birthplace 1870 US Census of Fairﬁeld, Maine Gilbreth, Hiram M 36 Maine •Martha F 36 Maine • Annie F 10 Maine •Mary F 6 Maine •Frank M 1 Maine 1880 US Census of Boston, Massachusetts Gilbreth, Martha F 45 Maine • Anna M. Daughter F 20 Maine •MaryE. Daughter F 16 Maine •FrankB. Son M 12 Maine 1900 US Census of Boston, Massachusetts Gilbreth, Martha Head F 65 Maine •Frank Son M 31 Maine Cross, Fred Soninlaw M 41 Connecticut • Annie Daughter F 39 Maine • John Grandson M 2 Massachusetts • Carolyn Granddaughter F 4/12 Massachusetts Bunker, Carolyn Sister F 52 Maine Spillane, Mary Servant F 23 Ireland • Ellen Servant F 23 Ireland

theria in 1912. Thus, there was really no point in time when the Gilbreths had 12 living children. The 1920 census found them at their famous home on Eagle Rock Way in Montclair, New Jersey, and the fact that baby John had been born in Rhode Island and had not yet reached his first birthday indicated that their voyage there was very recent. By 1930, the two eldest daughters had left home, and their father had died. Cheaper by the Dozen refers to both of the employees living in the home in 1920, and at one point young Jack responds to his father’s pressure to do household chores: “‘I think,’ Jack said slowly, ‘that Mrs. Cunningham and Tom should do the work. They get paid for it’” (Gilbreth and Carey 2002 [1948], p. 32). In her preface to the 2002 edition, Ernestine Gilbreth Carey had called Tom “our beloved but inefficient and incompetent jack-of-all-trades” (Gilbreth and Carey 2002 [1948], p. xii). Where was Tom born, in Massachusetts as the 1910 census claims, or Rhode Island as the 1920 census report does? In a 2009 New Yorker article critical of scientific management, 240 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Official Records

Table 8.2 The Gilbreth family at its height Name Relation Sex Age Birthplace 1910 US Census on Ravine Road in Plainﬁeld, New Jersey Gilbreth, Frank B. Head M 42 Maine • Lillian Wife F 32 California • Ann M. Daughter F 5 New York •MaryE. Daughter F 3 California • Ernestine Daughter F 2 New York •MarthaB. Daughter F 6/12 New Jersey •Martha Mother F 76 Maine Brick, Katie Servant F 19 Pol German Christofferson, Emma Nurse F 25 Norwegian 1915 Rhode Island census in Providence Gilbreth, Frank B. Head M 46 U.S. • Lillian Wife F 36 U.S. • Ann M. Daughter F 9 U.S. • Ernestine Daughter F 6 U.S. •Martha Daughter F 5 U.S. • Frank B. Jr. Son M 3 U.S. • William M. Son M 2 U.S. • Lillian Daughter F 8/12 U.S. •MarthaB. Mother F 80 U.S. Trainar?, Mary Servant F 45 Ireland Conway, Florence Servant F 21 U.S. 1920 US Census on Eagle Rock Way in Montclair, New Jersey Gilbreth, Frank Head M 52 Maine • Lillian Wife F 41 California • Annie Daughter F 13 New York (continued)

Jill Lapore reported that Tom was actually Irish, and quoted his distaste for his bosses’ discipline: “‘You know what a Motion Study is, Frankie-boy?’ Grieves once asked Frank, Jr. ‘You study how to get somebody else to make all your motions for you, for Christ sake.’ He refused to work in the Kitchen Efﬁcient; he rejected even a refrigerator; he was unwilling to give up the daily, sociable visits of the iceman, who was a good friend of his” (Lepore 2009). 8.1 Human Factors in Family History 241

Table 8.2 (continued) Name Relation Sex Age Birthplace • Ernestine Daughter F 11 New York •Martha Daughter F 10 New Jersey •Frank Son M 8 New Jersey • William Son M 7 Rhode Island • Lillian Daughter F 5 Rhode Island • Frederick Son M 3 Rhode Island •Daniel Son M 2 Rhode Island • John Son M 8/12 Rhode Island Cunningham, Agnes Housekeeper F 42 England Grieves, Thomas H. Butler M 43 Massachusetts 1930 US Census on Eagle Rock Way in Montclair, New Jersey Gilbreth, Lillian Head F 52 California •Martha Daughter F 20 New Jersey •FrankB. Son M 19 New Jersey • William M. Son M 17 Rhode Island • Lillian M. Daughter F 15 Rhode Island • Frederick M. Son M 13 Rhode Island •DanielB. Son M 12 Rhode Island • John M. Son M 10 Rhode Island • Robert M. Son M 9 Massachusetts •JaneM. Daughter F 7 Massachusetts Grieves, Thomas H. Servant M 51 Rhode Island

Subscribers to Ancestry.com are able to construct family trees, and clicking on each person in a tree goes directly to a document search. In the case of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, their family tree includes all 12 named children, including photographs of all of them, even one of little Mary Elizabeth, dating from 1911, the year before she died. Oddly, the tree reports that Frank had two sisters with almost identical names: Annie S. Gilbreth born in 1862, and a “half-sister” named Anna M. Gilbreth born in 1860, whose father is listed as unknown. But the only source listed for Anna is the 1880 census record reported in Table 8.1, so the theory that Frank had a half-sister may be a simple error, triggered by the fact that no father was alive in 1880, and Annie’s name had matured to a more formal Anna as she aged from 10 to 20. Another rather obvious error was in the metadata to the July 15, 1913 passenger list of the S. S. Arabic that had sailed from Liverpool to Boston, iden- 242 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Official Records tifying Frank, Lillian and baby William as “Race: Native born US citizen (Native American)” and “Nationality: American Indian.” This was a misreading, yet not unreasonable. The form was supposed to be a list of “aliens” (foreigners) entering the United States, signed by the British ship’s doctor who examined them and said they were in good “mental and physical condition.” But he apparently had not limited himself to foreigners, and used the term “native” to describe the US citizens among the passengers. An online encyclopedia says, “After her husband’s death, Lillian Gilbreth moved her family to California, and continued their family business.”14 However, even the 1940 census records, which I found but did not add to Table 8.2, showed her still living on Eagle Rock Way in Montclair, New Jersey, with half of her dozen children. Cheaper by the Dozen reports that she asked a meeting of all her children if they should move to California, or stay in New Jersey and continue the family business, and it was the latter choice they took (Gilbreth and Carey 2002 [1948], p. 206). Ancestry. com links to Find A Grave, but neither Frank nor Lillian was buried after death. The page for Frank, who died June 14, 1924, says “Cremated, Ashes scattered at sea, Specifically: Ashes scattered over the Atlantic Ocean.”15 And the one for Lillian who died nearly half a century later on January 2, 1972, says: “Cremated, Ashes scattered at sea, Specifically: ashes were scattered in the waters off Nantucket.”16 A 2002 biography of Lillian by Jane Lancaster offers more information about Frank’s case: “Frank had wanted to be cremated and Lillian carried out his wishes, though with a slight amendment; he had wanted his ashes scattered on Eagle Rock, near their home, but Lillian decided that this might upset the children, who often played there. She chose to return his ashes to the water—he loved sailing—and finally, accompanied only by her aunt and her sister-in-law, she scattered Frank’s remains in the Hudson River” (Lancaster 2004). Lancaster based this statement and many other details of the Gilbreth’s family history not merely on Cheaper by the Dozen and the extensive library of other popular books by family members, but upon the 48.25 linear feet of documents in the Ernestine Gilbreth Carey Papers archive collection at Smith College.17 Ernestine lived until 2006 at age 98, while her coauthor brother, Frank Jr., was 89 at his death in 2001 (Leimbach 2006; Saxon 2001). Thus two of the most energetic family historians had entered history themselves. Anyone who wants to do research in Ancestry.com can pay the modest subscription cost and use the well-documented Gilbreth family as a tool for exploring how the system works. The family tree facility effectively saves the human judgment of people who checked out various records: Is this Frank Gelbretti or really Frank Gilbreth? As in this case, I do not in fact begin with the family tree, wanting to make my own judgments, and only later check if I had missed something that another explorer had discovered. Family trees do not yet exist for many people and records, and of course they are less likely for people who did not have children and grandchildren.

14www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Frank_and_Lillian_Gilbreth. 15www.findagrave.com/memorial/23863208/frank-bunker-gilbreth. 16www.findagrave.com/memorial/30391704/lillian-evelyn-gilbreth. 17asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss583_main.html. 8.1 Human Factors in Family History 243

The Gilbreth family is a good example precisely because it is frankly quite strange. The books are pleasant reading, but the humor hides what appears to be bitterness. Cheaper by the Dozen is largely a satire criticizing a very strange and dictatorial father, who dies at the end, and its commercial success stimulated all the many similar books produced by or about the family over the following years. It does not describe the context of the death of little Mary, but it does have a section criticizing Frank Sr.’s incompetence dealing with disease in a section about measles. An entire chapter is devoted to the story of how the children were forced to become research subjects in the Gilbreth time and motion research on surgery, having their tonsils removed while under scientiﬁc observation. Tonsillectomy remains a valid medical procedure in some cases, yet has some of the qualities of fad, the numbers rising or falling from decade to decade.18 Performing surgery on children primarily to advance their parents’ professional career seems outrageous. But we know about this not from the public census records, but from personal memories of the children themselves.

8.2 Sociology of the Census

The 1940 census, which found the surviving Gilbreth family still in Montclair, New Jersey, and still assisted by cranky Tom Grieves, is the most recent one currently available to the public. The US census was first carried out in 1790, and was a relatively simple count of household populations until 1850 when each member of the family was named and described in a row of the data. For a while, a copy was posted in the town square so residents could correct errors, but as privacy became an issue, each census was quarantined for 72 years. A few researchers were allowed to come to the central Census Bureau archive, often signing up as one-dollar government employees so they were bound to follow confidentiality regulations. Two decades ago, the National Science Foundation funded the creation of census data centers, geographically distributed around the country. The following extracts from their online grant abstracts offer hints about the value of the data and the confidentiality issues: The Boston Research Data Center (1994): This project greatly expands researchers’ access to confidential longitudinal microeconomic data. Currently, these data are available only to researchers working at Center for Economic Studies (CES) offices at the headquarters of the U.S. Bureau of the Census near Washington, D.C. The project will establish a pilot Research Data Center (RDC) at the Boston regional office of the Census Bureau. This pilot RDC will give researchers a second location where they will be able to carry out research projects, in a manner that serves the needs of the research community and the security concerns of the Census Bureau.19 California Census Research Data Center (1998): The CCRDC consists of two secure sites or laboratories, one at UCLA and the other at UC Berkeley… The Center will have a common governance structure, Executive Director, and Review Board that will work with the Census

18en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonsillectomy. 19www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9311572. 244 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Ofﬁcial Records

Bureau to provide fair and objective access to West Coast researchers while at the same time protecting the confidentiality of the underlying microdata. In particular, the principal and co-principal investigators, an Executive Director, and the Review Board for the CCRDC will work to instill the “culture of confidentiality” at both laboratories.20 Triangle Research Data Center (1999): Census Research Data Centers (RDC) provide secure access to highly confidential longitudinal micro-data from Census surveys of business estab- lishments and firms and from demographic surveys of households and individuals. This project covers part of the start up and operating costs of a new RDC at Duke University to provide data access to the intellectual community in the “Research Triangle.” Duke Univer- sity, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University constitute the intellectual and geographic vertices of the Research Triangle… The proposed Review Board, Faculty Research Coordinator, and an Executive Director work closely with the Census Bureau to ensure fair and objective access to the resources of a Triangle RDC while maintaining the “culture of confidentiality” essential to the success of the RDC program.21 University of Michigan Research Data Center (2001): The RDC would provide researchers access to source data collected by the Census Bureau and other agencies. These confidential data are placed within a secure facility at the Survey Research Center. To gain access to these data, researchers with approved projects would obtain special sworn status within the Census Bureau. Researchers can publish results of analysis carried out within the RDC subject to a rigorous protocol for protecting the confidentiality of the underlying data.22 Chicago Research Data Center (2001): The new data center… would be housed in a secure site at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, in downtown Chicago. The Chicago RDC is positioned to attract large numbers of high-quality projects while adhering to the strict standards of confidentiality required of an RDC. These projects include research on energy and the environment; corporate finance; labor markets; crime; health and childcare; and survey methods.23 New York Research Data Center (2003): This award provides initial support for a consortium of thirteen universities and research institutions to establish two new Research Data Centers (RDC) at Baruch College of the City University of New Yorkand at Cornell University. These RDCs will enable social science researchers in the New York Region to analyze a wide range of confidential Census Bureau data on firms and individuals without the need to establish long-term, long-distance research operations in another city… Notably, highly detailed data allow researchers to link information across time and data sources. For example, RDC users can merge business data with longitudinal geographic information, or combine data on voting behavior with measures of individual economic well-being, or match individual records across Decennial Censuses to further the understanding of racial and ethnic identity.24 Perhaps government centers like these could be established to serve the needs of family historians as well, but following a set of rules that had a more open balance between information sharing and a “culture of confidentiality.” Legalistically, these RDCs were considered appropriate because the data were not released to the public, but only to researchers who were treated as if they were government employees, in a context initially funded by an agency of the US government, namely the National

20www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9812174; www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/ showAward?AWD_ID=9812173. 21www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9900447. 22www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0004322. 23www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0004335. 24www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0322902. 8.2 Sociology of the Census 245

Science Foundation, in pursuit of its official goals. There are so many ways the ethics of this situation could be argued, that no conclusive analysis can be attempted here. Yet, why should not each person whose personal information is represented in a database have full and complete access to all the other data? Yes, I can see my family’s 1940 census data, but I was not born until later in that year, and I am not allowed to see my own data in the 1950 census. One plausible analysis is that the rules were developed to serve the collective purposes of the US government and social scientists, in such a way that they would not immediately trigger political criticism. But today, many people and social movements are expressing concerns about privacy, both pro and con. A legalistic argument can be made that any new rules should apply only to the future, because the citizenry had the equivalent to a contract with the government when it answered the census questions. Yet family historians could make great use of all the data locked up in the government archives, and I doubt I’ll still be alive in 2022 when the 1950 census will be released. Of course the principal of privacy that justifies quarantining official data is to avoid harm to living persons. A profound issue for family history is what privacy rights a deceased person may have. In Chap. 1, the 1900–1920 censuses showed that Lucy Seaman Bainbridge was living with her son on Gramercy Park in Manhattan, and in Chap. 2 we saw that both she and her husband, William Folwell Bainbridge, memorialized their daughter Cleora who died at the age of one. Did William Folwell Bainbridge die before 1900? No, he died in 1915. So where was he in 1900 and 1910? In the 1900 US census, he is oddly listed twice as a boarder in a Brooklyn boarding house, both times identified as unmarried. In 1910, he was living as a boarder in the home of a newspaper photo engraver named John Johnston in Boston, this time listed as married. Chapter 2 noted that he was initially buried at Swan Point Cemetery at Providence, Rhode Island, and in 1917 was moved to New York City’s Woodlawn Cemetery. The full story is extremely complex, because the marriage between Lucy and William fell apart around 1890, they lived a quarter century separated as he wandered around seeking intellectual fame which he never achieved, and only after his death was she able to restore their family relationship by uniting with his corpse. Currently they are buried together under the same gravestone. As partial documentation of his constant questing for glory, Ancestry.com has his January 1915 application for a passport renewal at the American Embassy in London, which claims he was last in the US in 1910, that his current residence was some hotel of Cook’s Tours at Ludgate Circus, and that his next destinations were “Turkey and Roumania.” The De Forest genealogy offers a sanitized version of his later life, beginning around 1890, presumably dictated by his son:

Mr. Bainbridge’s major interest had become the study of archaeology. He wanted to be near John’s Hopkins University in Baltimore, so he accepted the pastorate of the Delaware Avenue Baptist Church, in Wilmington, Delaware. Later he took a church at Allston, Massachusetts, so he might be close to Harvard University. He gave up his position at Allston, and all active church work to devote himself entirely to archaeology. He studied and wrote in London, Paris, Berlin, Egypt and many other places. He learned to read eleven languages. In fact, he devoted twenty-ﬁve years to the compilation of a manuscript which was intended to trace 246 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Ofﬁcial Records

every word of reference in the Bible. When he died suddenly at Cambridge, Mr. Bainbridge was still at work on his subject. After his death his widow and son tried to arrange for the publication of his material but learned that the four great printed volumes which would be necessary were beyond the means of any interested publisher (de Forest 1950). The official death record for William Folwell Bainbridge says he died January 9, 1915, at 51 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard Square, which we can infer was immediately after a quick ocean trip from England. Among the forty- six other residents of this seven-storey apartment building was Dr. Albert August, who had been monitoring William’s health.25 The cause of death was angina pectoris with arteriosclerosis contributory, in other words heart failure, and he was sent the very next day to Swan Point Cemetery. However, not recorded in any known official record, family legend says that his son, Dr. William Seaman Bainbridge, performed an autopsy, specifically dissecting his father’s brain, seeking a biological excuse for his father’s quarter century of eccentricity. As happens occasionally in family history, different explanations for unusual behavior have different ethical or emotional implications. Was Lucy simply such a domineering wife that she drove her husband away? Was the clergyman’s Christian faith so strong that it drove him away from an ordinary life? Prior to mass higher education when many austere academic jobs became available, did intellectualism drive many people toward insanity? Was there a genetic flaw in the family that caused Cleora’s death from water on the brain, her father’s eccentricity, and her brother’s inability to save his own first daughter, Elizabeth, who was born in 1912 without an esophagus? That theory greatly both- ered Dr. Will. Official records seldom raise such issues, and essentially never resolve them. Manuscript schedules of the US census maintained by the National Archives have long been available on microfilm, some of which were manually indexed in 1935–1941 by workers in the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a government social welfare program that provided employment in the later years of the Great Depression.26 Given that the census-takers often wrote hurriedly without asking how people spelled their names, a system called Soundex was applied, to facilitate searches. It coded last names in terms of the apparent first letter, followed by a three- digit number representing the probable pronunciation of the rest (Trajtenberg et al. 2009). For example, writing in The Journal of Family History, Charles Stephenson showed how one could start with a family headed by James R. Clinton in the 1905 New York state census, translate “Clinton” into its Soundex, which is “C453,” search for this code in the Soundex of the 1900 US census, and then use other data such as birth places and the names of other family member to identify the correct match (Stephenson 1980). I learned these methods myself through closely observing a research project conducted by colleagues in the sociology department at the University of Washington

251915 Cambridge Directory (Boston: W. A. Greenough, 1915), pp. 51, 108. 26www.archives.gov/research/census/using-microﬁlm-catalogs.html; Claire Prechtel-Kluskens, “The WPA Census Soundexing Projects,” Prologue, Spring 2002, 34:1, www.archives.gov/ publications/prologue/2002/spring/soundex-projects.html. 8.2 Sociology of the Census 247 at the beginning of the 1980s (Guest 1987). Access to the 1910 census had not yet been provided, but the Soundex index for the 1900 census was rather complete, and a government archive of the microﬁlms was situated just outside campus. In one of the resultant publications, Nancy Landale and Avery Guest explained:

Our data come from the National Panel Study (NPS), a sample of 4,041 white males whose 1880 and 1900 census records were linked. To develop the data set, a representative national sample of white males aged 5 to 14 and 25 to 34 was drawn from the 1880 U.S. census manuscripts. An attempt was then made to locate these men in the 1900 census manuscripts. We were able to link 39.4 percent of the 10,252 males in the original 1880 sample to their 1900 census records. While this rate is hardly ideal by contemporary standards of survey research, it is comparable to other historical studies that have linked individuals over a decade or longer (Landale and Guest 1990, p. 283).

As I recall, this 39.4% linkage rate is optimistic, because men with very common names had been removed from the initial sample. Over the span of two decades, a number of the men must have died, and others would have changed their family structure and other data that might help confirm identity. Thus the 39.4% rate might possibly be a low estimate of what family historians would achieve, given that we are often seeking households rather than individuals, may know their approximate geographic locations, and thus have much more extensive data to verify matches. Services like Ancestry.com that give the general public access to official data are constrained to the somewhat distant past, and yet social scientists have found them to be of value. Writing in the respected journal Demography in 2014, Steven Ruggles described “an explosion in the availability of individual-level population data. By 2018, demographic researchers will have access to over 2 billion records of accessible microdata from over 100 countries, dating from 1703 to the present. Another 2–4 billion records will be available through restricted-access data enclaves. These new resources represent a new kind of data that will enable transformative research on demographic and economic change and the spatial organization of society” (Ruggles 2014, p. 287). Ruggles had been working in this general area for decades, but was now “col- laborating with Ancestry.com to digitize all variables from the 1940 census of the United States and outlying territories, for a total of 134 million persons and 70 variables, including wage and salary income, educational attainment, migration, detailed employment information, and street address. We plan to use the street address information to geocode the location of individual households” (Ruggles 2014, pp. 291–292). Ultimately the goal is to unite all US census data, fully indexed to locate everyone whose data are included. A sense of the vastness of this project can be suggested by the abstract of one of the first grants I managed when I was director of the Sociology Program at the National Science Foundation, with Steven Ruggles as principal investigator:

This project will convert the series of public use samples into a single coherent form, facilitating the use of these data for the study of long-term social change in American society. Large individual-level samples of the U.S. census of population covering the census years 1880, 1900, 1910, 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990 are currently available or in preparation. These data have proven to be a valuable resource, since they allow researchers 248 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Ofﬁcial Records

to make analyses tailored to their specific research questions and to avoid the problems and limitations associated with using the published census data for different years. The availability of these census files has led to some research on the nature of long-term social change in the United States. However, because the data files were created at different times and by different investigators, they have incompatible documentation and a wide variety of record layouts and coding schemes. These differences inhibit the use of the data for the study of social change. The preparation and documentation of an integrated Public Use Microdata Series will provide a valuable data resource for the research community, and will eventually contribute greatly to our understanding of the changes American society has undergone since 1880.27 This grant is definitely not recent, dating from March 5, 1992, immediately before my arrival at NSF. A supplementary grant dating from July 6, 1995, encouraged me to think of this funding as the seventh of five original Digital Library Initiative grants.28 Why the seventh of five? On June 15, 1995, a grant I managed for the Sociology Program that actually got partial funding from the DLI had already been made, small but extending the scope of the original five grants: “This is a prototype Internet service for the General Social Survey employing NCSA Mosaic. The project will develop a system to provide enhanced access to survey data, using the General Social Survey for implementation of these integrated services, which will subsequently be extended to a variety of other survey data sets. These services will provide facilities for hypertext viewing and searching of complete survey documentation, customized and documented extracts from data sets, statistical analysis, and File Transfer Protocol delivery of full or extracted data sets.”29 NCSA Mosaic was the first general-use web browser, and this pioneering questionnaire digital library is still fully functional, containing data from 1972 until the present, thus covering the recent history of American public opinion, and including many family-related variables.30 Researchers with much more narrowly focused goals, in both social science and history, have begun using Ancestry.com data, for example in migration studies. Writ- ing in The Journal of African American History, Marne Campbell explored the relatively small influx of African-American women into Los Angeles over the years 1850–1910 (Campbell 2012). A team of economists has published studies of the era of mass migration to the United States, 1850–1913, in both The American Economic Review and Journal of Political Economy (Abramitzky et al. 2012, 2014). In The Journal of American History, Tyler Anbinder wrote about a narrow but fascinating economic topic, the savings accounts of immigrants who escaped the famine in Ireland (Anbinder 2012). In the very first issue of a brand-new and rather specialized academic periodical, Journal of Austrian-American History, James W. Oberly published a remarkable study, that every family historian should read, apparently finding the detailed, meaningful truth about an immigrant family, despite the fact that most records contained

27www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9118299. 28www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9422805. 29www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9422785. 30sda.berkeley.edu/sdaweb/analysis/;jsessionid=02FD16D97679911EC619904329C2DB73? dataset=gss14. 8.2 Sociology of the Census 249 errors. Chieﬂy using Ancestry.com resources, this study illustrates a diversity of search and analysis methods used in this book, linking to general social issues while focusing on the details of speciﬁc lives, as outlined in the article’s abstract:

In May 1910, the New York Times published an article about an arranged marriage between two migrants from Austria-Hungary. “Hastens to Marry His Mother’s Choice” was written as more than a charming story of love at first sight. Indeed, the reporter considered the love story an example of near instant assimilation of migrants into American culture. A deeper investigation of the life stories of the couple shows that they did understand some things about American life on the first day they met, namely, the need to falsely report the bride’s age as 20 rather than 17. In other respects, the couple retained their ties to Central Europe, choosing to live and work in rural coal-mining villages dominated by migrants from Austria- Hungary. They experienced firsthand the good and bad of life as Americans: the high wages paid to migrant coal miners and the resulting higher standard of living than could be gained in Hungary, but also the violence of management-labor conflicts in the coal fields and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan against Roman Catholic migrants in the American Midwest. Over a lifetime, the couple changed their names from the Hungarian Mihály to “Mike” and from the Hungarian Piroska to “Pearl.” By the time of Piroska’s death, her surviving children were so far removed from Hungarian life that they could not even spell their mother’s maiden name (Oberly 2017, p. 69).

Even for ordinary users, Ancestry.com seems primarily to be an archive of ofﬁcial documents, with relatively less uploading of personal information by users than in Find A Grave, which Ancestry.com purchased in 2013 and that is now rather closely connected inside the user interface. Both are used to memorialize deceased relatives, and the family trees that users can construct in Ancestry.com can link multiple documents that contain data about the same individual. However, user- provided data may be erroneous, and it is hard to see how totally public systems can serve as accurate archives of one’s own family (Willever-Farr and Forte 2014). Technically, it is simple for a family to assemble its own list of links to documents in Ancestry.com or similar commercial services, although only subscribers will be able to access them directly.

8.3 Personal Reﬂections on Legal Records

At his retirement from the practice of law in 1951, my grandfather, William E. Sims, wrote a memo about one of his most perplexing clients, so that the attorneys who took over the work would have the necessary background. I recall him pointing to the desk not far from his favorite chair in his library, and mentioning the memo. Six decades later, realizing I possessed a damaged but still legible copy, I decided to figure out why he had thought it was worth remembering. The first page was missing, but I was able to determine that it was a history of a sugar company called USCOS, founded by Benjamin F. Johnston, who died in 1937, with many references to the forms in which his widow had inherited ownership and avoided taxation. Given such a document, there are two directions one can go in making connections: (1) using it 250 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Official Records to understand more about the author, and (2) seeking generally applicable insights by looking more deeply into the topic. My grandfather Sims was an avid reader of both factual history and murder mysteries, and thus his mental habits very much aligned with the dynamics of death and memorialization via historical records. Indeed, one of his favorite pieces of music was the 1889 tone poem, Death and Transfiguration, by Richard Strauss, about which Wikipedia says: “The music depicts the death of an artist. At Strauss’s request, this was described in a poem by the composer’s friend Alexander Ritter as an interpretation of Death and Transfiguration, after it was composed. As the man lies dying, thoughts of his life pass through his head: his childhood innocence, the struggles of his manhood, the attainment of his worldly goals; and at the end, he receives the longed-for transfiguration ‘from the infinite reaches of heaven.’”31 At one point in the legal memo, attorney Sims mentions that a house Johnston possessed in the Bahamas had been sold, and comments: “In passing, it may be of interest that the purchaser of the house was Sir Harry Oakes, who was later murdered there.” At another point he adds dramatic detail to an inventory of the complex structure of inheritances: “Mr. and Mrs. Johnston had only one child, Sherwood Johnston, who was killed at Mazatlan, Mexico, while making a landing in the company’s plane, which he was piloting.” In describing Benjamin Johnston’s business in Mexico, he reported: “He found, near Los Mochis, a broken-down and bankrupt socialistic experiment in communal sugar raising and manufacture, which he took over and, after various vicissitudes, including one receivership, finally got the company on a stable footing and, with occasional bad years, it has fairly well prospered ever since.” At the time of his death in 1959, the wallet Mr. Sims carried still contained a tiny police document commemorating his personal visit to Los Mochis in 1943. There is a Wikipedia page for Sir Harry Oakes, and it says this about his demise: “The cause of his death and the details surrounding it have never been entirely determined, and have been the subject of several books and four films.”32 A suspect in the murder was tried but acquitted, because the chief evidence was a dubious fingerprint. Murder mysteries concern puzzles about the meanings of life events, thus representing a kind of thinking that will be important for the construction of more mundane life stories via information technology. My grandfather once explained to me that the legal concept of corpus delicti did not refer to the corpse in a murder mystery—but to the body of evidence proving that a crime had been committed. Ideally, every human being should have the equivalent of a Wikipedia page, and every obituary should be long, detailed, and universally accessible, thus a corpus personae. Googling “Sherwood Johnston Mexico” back in 2013 turned up a newspaper article accusing him of being the ringleader of smugglers, “Millionaire Claimed Head of Liquor Ring,” on the front page of The Palm Beach Post, March 20, 1936. One would need many additional reports to put this accusation in a meaningful context.

31en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_Transﬁguration. 32en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Harry_Oakes. 8.3 Personal Reﬂections on Legal Records 251

Articles concerning his accidental death were available from an online commercial service called NewspaperARCHIVE.com, but the required cost of membership could discourage integrating the articles into a unified, universal-access system about the Johnston family. A page of the government website of the Sinaloa state in Mexico offers an article written in Spanish by Herberto Sinagawa Montoya, “El Mar de Oro Líquido: Sherwood Johnston,” which dated the crash in 1939 and described its victim as “caprichudo, arrogante, frívolo.”33 Using the Chrome browser allowed an instantaneous automatic translation into English: “capricious, arrogant, frivolous.” The translation of the entire article included this lucid eye-witness description of the fatal plane crash: “I saw him fall. He made some stunts in the air. We thought it was a circus acrobat. Along with other plebes [we] were playing baseball on a plain. I saw him fall into a spin, bursting the small plane on fire crashing brutally.” Many online sources provide information about the life of Sherwood’s father, Benjamin, and he is cited prominently in both the Spanish and English Wikipedia articles about the city of Los Mochis, which he largely created. The website of the History Department of the Sinaloa Autonomous University offers an article titled “La Actividad Empresarial de Benjamin Francis Johnston” by a local historian, Maria Elda Rivera Calvo, but it is a PDF file of the sort in which the text is a graphic image that thus cannot be processed directly by today’s language translation systems. As an experiment, a printout was scanned into an optical character reading system, the result was reset in HTML, opened into Chrome, and translated into English with fair success, most problems being caused in the OCR stage. Searching again in 2018 identifies the essay as a 1995 article from the Spanish-language history journal, Clío (Rivera Calvo 1995). To provide more context for understanding the Johnston activities in Mexico, an online search about the “bankrupt socialistic experiment” quickly found an 1885 book by its founder, Albert K. Owen, available at OpenLibrary. com both as PDF images and raw text, plus a modern book about the commune that could be purchased but not freely read online (Owen 1885; Reynolds 1996). In 2018, I returned to the memo to see what could be learned about other members of the Johnston family who were listed as inheritors of the remaining wealth. Attorney Sims had written: “Mrs. Benjamin F. Johnston (Agnes Sherwood Johnston) is… the widow of Benjamin F. Johnston. Her summer address is Pine Island, Rye, New York, and her winter address is 895 Park Avenue, New York21, N. Y.Mr. and Mrs. Johnston were married, as I recall, in the late 1890s or the very early 1900s.” A very quick search in Ancestry.com reveals that their marriage took place in Chicago on June 2, 1897, this precise date indicating the value of today’s online family history resources. The memo also notes: “Mrs. Johnston was Mr. Johnston’s second wife, his first wife having been Mrs. Johnston’s sister.” Finding information about the sister will not be quite so easy. Ancestry.com had a March 4, 1918 passport application for Agnes Sherwood Johnston, reporting she was born in Chicago on October 7, 1876, was married to

33laipsinaloa.gob.mx/index.php?view=items&cid=21%3Acga&id=1948%3Ajul08-libros-y-cult- el-mar-de-oro-liquido-sherwood-johnston&pop=1&tmpl=component&print=1&option=com_ ﬂexicontent. 252 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Ofﬁcial Records

Benjamin Francis Johnston, and has resided at Los Mochis, Sinaloa from 1897, “making trips to the United States every year.” A photograph was attached, and her physical description was stated to be: “Stature 5 feet 5 inches, Forehead high, Eyes blue, Nose straight, Mouth regular, Chin square, Hair light, Complexion fair, Face oval.” Find A Grave says that an Agnes Sherwood Johnston born in 1876 and buried at Greenwood Union Cemetery in Rye, New York, died April 7 1953. A standard step in using Find A Grave is to check which other people having the same last name are buried at the same location, and there is a memorial for Sherwood Johnston who died in 1939, and one for Benjamin Francis Johnston with a birth date of 1865 but no death date. Johnston is a common name, but these three graves are in the same plot, so these are clearly the couple and their son.34 The place of burial of deceased family members is often very meaningful, especially when it is not simply in the graveyard nearest the place of death. Here the obvious meaning is that Agnes wanted her son and husband to be with her in death. In my historical research on the Oneida community, one focus was on the main rival to its leader, John Humphrey Noyes, who was named James W. Towner (Bainbridge 2017). When Oneida disintegrated in 1880, Towner went west to California, where he became a prominent judge and acquired a considerably positive reputation in conventional elite society. And yet his burial place is back in the Oneida cemetery, indicating that his connection to it had endured. When William E. Sims died in 1959, there was no question where he would be buried, not near his home for two decades in Monroe, New York, but with his parents back in Canton, New York. The Sims legal memo also reported: “Mrs. Johnston has two nieces, Mrs. Ary J. Lamme, of Westminster, Maryland and Mrs. John Steel, of Los Mochis, the wife, of John Steel, the chief engineer of Uscos.” The maiden name of Mrs. Lamme was also Agnes Sherwood, and ample documentation exists on Ancestry.com because members of her family have actively contributed materials. There is also a 1924 passport application for this younger Agnes, which Benjamin F. Johnston signed in order to authenticate her identity, describing himself as her uncle. She was the daughter of Marc Raimond Sherwood, her aunt’s brother, and lived with the Johnstons in Rye for a while, showing up there in the 1925 New York state census. In addition to young Agnes, Marc had two other daughters, Kathryn M. Sherwood and Joye Sherwood, and the passenger list for the S. S. President Pierce, March 8–14, 1923, reveals that Kathryn went to Hawaii at age 25 with her aunt Agnes and Benjamin Johnston. Another record reports that when she died on December 30, 1991, her last name was Steel. So, the two nieces referred to in the memo were Agnes Sherwood Lamme and Kathryn Sherwood Steel. They were mentioned only in passing by attorney Sims, which may explain why their sister Joye was not mentioned. The Ancestry.com family tree for the Sherwoods tells us that the sister of Marc and the older Agnes was named Katie E. Sherwood, who seems therefore to have been the ﬁrst wife of Benjamin F. Johnston. The census records for 1870 and 1880 give her ﬁst name simply as Katie, rather than Katharine, for example, and the family tree cites

34www.findagrave.com/memorial/135762980; www.findagrave.com/memorial/164610575/ benjamin-francis-johnston; www.findagrave.com/memorial/164610386/sherwood-johnston. 8.3 Personal Reflections on Legal Records 253 no further record of her, other than stating she had been born in 1867, compared with 1871 for Marc and 1876 for Agnes. Indeed, Katie E. Sherwood married Benjamin F. Johnson on October 18, 1887 in Chicago, according to one of Ancestry.com text references to the Cook County, Illinois, Marriages Index. The memo also reported: “Mrs. Charles D. Tandy… is the widow of Sherwood Johnston. Some three or four years ago she married Charles D. Tandy, who is in his father’s leather business, in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, and other places in the Southwest. Mrs. Tandy lives at 3529 Bellaire Drive, North, Fort Worth.” Looking up Charles D. Tandy in Ancestry.com turns up a 1978 death certificate giving his wife’s name as Anne Burnett Tandy, and various online obituaries say he had a stepson named Sherwood Johnston.35 So, was Anne the widow of the Sherwood Johnston who died in the plane crash, and mother of his same-named son? No. Irvin Farman published a detailed biography of Charles, with the evocative title, Tandy’s Money Machine: How Charles Tandy Built Radio Shack into the World’s Largest Electronics Chain, which was an outgrowth of his father’s leather business, and reports that Anne was the second wife, the first wife having been Gwendolyn Purdy Johnston (Farman 1992). A Massachusetts death index lists a Gwendolyn Purdy Tandy who died in Boston at age 62 in 1967, and Farman’s book agrees that was she. So Gwen had died but Charles was still alive when Tandy Radio Shack marketed the briefly influential TRS-80 personal computer in 1977.36

8.4 Medical Records

Birth and death records tend to be public, but records concerning the diagnosis and treatment of medical problems during a person’s life are almost always private. How- ever, that walls the historian off from important facts about a person’s life challenges, and may cloak our understanding of the past in a beautiful disguise. I happened to inherit a document that provides excellent examples, not merely of horrendous medical and psychiatric problems that particular people of the past suffered, but also insights into how we could reconsider such dark episodes in a human life. It is a pamphlet version of “The Inter-Relationship of Psychiatry and Surgery,” by Dr. William Seaman Bainbridge, published in several contexts in 1927, that refers to horrendous cases involving ten of his patients, identified only by their initials (Bainbridge 1927). However, pasted inside the font cover of this copy is a list of their actual names. Here we will consider two of them: E.W.Ekin Wallick and K.E. Katherine Esteb. I had first read a different copy that lacked the identifications, and had speculated that “E.W.” might have been the doctor’s brother-in-law, Ernest Wheeler, whose personality seemed to fit the story, yet another example of how attractive errors must be avoided.

35“Charles Tandy Dies at 60,” The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, November 16, 1978, page 23. 36“Charles Tandy Dies at 60,” The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, November 16, 1978, p. 23. 254 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Ofﬁcial Records

The theme of this theoretically rich essay by Dr. Will is how physical diseases can cause psychiatric problems, potentially cured by medical treatment of the precipitat- ing cause, and gentle care while the person recovers his or her sanity. In the case of Ekin Wallick, a seriously infected leg required surgery, with this consequence: Following operation, the patient showed marked mental symptoms. He became restless and sleepless to such an extent that he resisted hypnotics, even one-third grain of morphine- sulphate, as well as other hypnotics, proving ineffective. He was unmanageable, his symptoms strongly indicating a sex complex. At this point it was decided to have a psychiatrist and Dr. C. Floyd Haviland, superintendent of Manhattan State Hospital, was called in. Dr. Haviland’s report, in part, follows: “When the patient was first seen he was in a state of muscular rigidity: depressed and mildly apprehensive. The patient was of artistic temperament; was active and a good worker; pleasure loving and denied himself nothing. He humored himself and avoided adult responsibility. The patient’s mental condition, following operating, was in the nature of a panic reaction to a situation wholly beyond his control.” Treatment consisted of establishing the patient’s confidence in his ability to successfully cope with his impulses. Through the use of suggestion only, muscular relaxation and sleep were secured without the use of hypnotics, and at the present writing, the patient is well on the way to mental and physical recovery. In the judgment of the surgeon, there is a very serious question as to whether this grave type of infection would not have proved fatal in this instance if the aid of the psychiatrist had not been secured as it was. April, 1927, the patient is in splendid condition, mentally and physically. Yes, Ekin Wallick “was of artistic temperament.” He was the author of popular books on home decoration, and Google Books offers a downloadable file of Inexpen- sive Furnishings in Good Taste, published in 1915, for which Wallick drew many pictures as well as writing the text (Wallick 1915). The 1920 US census shows Wal- lick, a “decorator” by occupation, born in Indiana and 38 years old, living with another decorator, Chamberlain Dodds age 40, and three other male “friends,” at 28 East 52 street in Manhattan, supported by four servants, two of them being Japanese immigrants. According to an article in the New-York Tribune online in the Chroni- cling America collection from the Library of Congress, Dodds held an exhibit there in 1922, displaying 21 paintings by Claggett Wilson, following the erotic but biblical theme of The Song of Solomon.37 Ancestry.com has a two-page catalog describing the works with quotations, ending: “His left hand is under my head, his right hand doth embrace me… I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem by the roes and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up my love nor awake him till he please.” Some of the pictures can be seen today at a website devoted to Wilson.38 The other psychiatric-surgery patient to be considered here, Kathryn Esteb, was also easy to identify, given the reference to Korea in her case: K.E. Female; 37 years of age; single. In March, 1916, the patient had an attack of amoebic dysentery in Korea. Her trouble seemed to date from that attack. In June, 1916, she began to have a great deal of abdominal soreness and in September, she discovered a rapidly growing mass in the abdomen. Within a few weeks, she lost twelve pounds in weight and at times

37Solomon’s Song Illustrated,” New-York Tribune, February 02, 1922, p 11. 38www.claggettwilson.com. 8.4 Medical Records 255

had marked obstruction of the bowels. During these attacks it was necessary to use opiates for the severe pain. After reaching the United States, some preliminary treatment to get her ready for operation was instituted; and operation was performed February 7, 1917… She was in a state of severe depression for many weeks following the operation. A confusional state and hallucinations were present. It was necessary at times to restrain the patient. For 21 days it was necessary to feed her by tube through the nose. After many weeks of care, the mental condition cleared and, eventually, the patient became perfectly well mentally and physically. This case was one of an infection-exhaustion psychosis which was the direct result of superimposing the operative shock upon a nervous system already unstabilized by years of absorption of toxins from the alimentary canal. The patient was evidently able to carry the toxic infection with a certain margin, but when the surgical shock was added, she collapsed mentally. On April 15, 1927, patient was in good condition.

Googling “Katherine Esteb Korea” we find that in 1915, Woman’s Work:A Foreign Missions Magazine reported: “From San Francisco, March 27, Miss Kathryn Esteb, to join the Korea Mission.”39 Entering “Kathryn Esteb” into Ancestry.com finds an 1895 marriage between Catherine Fannie Esteb and Lewis M. Drumm, but this is not the right person because the 1920 census has them living together on a farm in Missouri. That search also locates in the 1905 New York state census a Kathlyn Esteb, whose occupation is listed as a “trained” nurse and a “lodger” who is not living with family members, which seems a far more likely hit. That identity is confirmed by a 1918 passport application from Kathlyn M. Esteb in Seoul, Korea, who says she last left the United States on October 23, 1917. The confusion of name spellings—Katherine, Kathryn, Kathlyn—is indirectly explained by documentation attached to the application asserting that her date of birth was not December 25–27, 1877, as indicated on her earlier passport, but really December 29, 1879: “In lieu of a birth certificate at the time of making that application she presented an affidavit from her aunt, Miss Alice Esteb, of Kingston, Missouri… Miss Esteb further states that her aunt is now eighty years of age or more, and that her memory is notoriously poor.” The 1910 US census lists an Alice Esteb living in Kingston, but she would have been only 70 years old in 1918. Absolute certainty is never possible in historical research, but despite all these marginal contradictions, I believe we have located the patient who name was concealed by “K.E.” After her recovery from the surgical-psychiatric trauma, she returned to her medical missionary work, and the 1920 annual report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the USA said she was working in Severance Hospital: “So constantly has the capacity of the hospital been taxed that for some time the need of a convalescent ward has been emphasized. In addition, Miss Esteb mentions the great need of a receiving ward of 10 beds, where patients upon entering could be bathed and disinfected and made fit for entrance into the wards. She also mentions the need of a hospital book keeper, interpreter, recorder of histories; one who can attend to death cases, summon relatives, report to officials; one who can help manage

39Woman’s Work: A Foreign Missions Magazine, 1915, 30(5): 116. 256 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Official Records the hospital force of assistants.”40 According to Wikipedia, Severance Hospital is the oldest Western-style hospital in Korea, dating from 1885.41 A brief 1925 article in a local New York newspaper announced the upcoming annual meeting of The Women’s Society of the Huguenot Memorial Church, saying: “Miss Kathryn Esteb, the medical missionary whom the Society supports on the foreign mission field will be present and tell about her work among the Koreans. She is stationed at Chung-Jun, Chosen [Korea], as head of a hospital for women. Miss Esteb returns to her work in the early spring.”42 A note in Ancestry.com reports that Kathryn M. Esteb, born in Missouri on December 29, 1880 (not 1879) died in Los Angeles on September 2, 1960. A very different example of how records of medical cases may connect to psychological conditions concerns a different form of craziness, not psychiatry but comedy. It involves comedic journalist Irvin S. Cobb, whom Wikipedia says had “a round shape, bushy eyebrows, full lips, and a triple chin, with a cigar always hanging from his mouth.”43 A term like “self-indulgent” or “obese” might appear in a psychiatric medical diagnosis, but a more precise literary descriptive might be “clever” and “sarcastic.” The medical definitions took precedence after Cobb over-indulged at a fancy banquet in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel, April 26, 1915. The pain of his stomach ache steadily increased, and became a medical emergency.44 In deeply humorous language he described what happened in one of his most popular essays, “Speaking of Operations” (Cobb 1923). currently available for free at Gutenberg.45 In sequence, he described three different doctors, whose names he concealed with X, Y, Z:

I reached an inner room where Doctor X was. He looked me over, while I described for him as best I could what seemed to be the matter with me, and asked me a number of intimate questions touching on the lives, works, characters and peculiarities of my ancestors; after which he made me stand up in front of him and take my coat off, and he punched me hither and yon with his foreﬁnger. He also knocked repeatedly on my breastbone with his knuckles, and each time, on doing this, would apply his ear to my chest and listen intently for a spell, afterward shaking his head in a disappointed way. Apparently there was nobody at home. For quite a time he kept on knocking, but without getting any response. He then took my temperature and ﬁfteen dollars, and said it was an interesting case – not unusual exactly, but interesting – and that it called for an operation… “I never operate,” he said; “operating is entirely out of my line. I am a diagnostician.”

40The Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (New York: Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Foreign Missions, 1920), p. 195. 41en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_Hospital. 42The Pelham Sun, January 16, 1925, p. 6. 43en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvin_S._Cobb. 44“Irvin S. Cobb Ill,” New York Times, May 13, 1915, p. 15; “Cobb to Take Long Rest,” New York Times, May 14, 1915, p. 10; Fred G. Neuman, Irvin S. Cobb: His Life and Achievements (New York: Beekman, 1974), p. 146; Anita Lawson, Irvin S. Cobb (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1984), p. 131. 45www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1890/pg1890.txt. 8.4 Medical Records 257

I asked whether he was acquainted with Doctor Y – Y being a person whom I had met casually at a club to which I belong. Oh, yes, he said, he knew Doctor Y. Y was a clever man, X said – very, very clever; but Y specialized in the eyes, the ears, the nose and the throat. I gathered from what Doctor X said that any time Doctor Y ventured below the thorax he was out of bounds and liable to be penalized; and that if by any chance he strayed down as far as the lungs he would call for help and back out as rapidly as possible.

Doctor X sent Cobb to Doctor Z, whose identity the author kept secret, yet we can here report that it was Dr. William Seaman Bainbridge. Doctors X and Y were specialists, and Cobb’s humor often played with the often superficial roles that people timidly play, or that society imposes upon them. What was Dr. Will’s specialty? With the assistance of a colleague, in 1906 he had published a textbook, A Compend of Operative Gynecology, so perhaps he was a gynecologist, but Cobb was not a woman and thankfully did not analyze the perverse humor of a 36-year old single man operating on the reproductive organs of hundreds of women (Bainbridge and Meeker 1906). In 1914, after his marriage, Dr. Will had published an influential textbook, The Cancer Problem, and he was widely considered a leading cancer surgeon, but the word “cancer” is not contained within “Speaking of Operations” (Bainbridge 1914). In fact, Dr. Will did not accept the spineless notion that ambitious people should limit themselves, or be limited by narrowly-defined social roles, but should seek their own destinies across as many dimensions as they wished. Before meeting Dr. Z, while being interviewed by his receptionist, Cobb expressed a similar independence, but relating to family history in contrast to medical diagnosis:

In common with Doctor X she shared one attribute – she manifested a deep curiosity regarding my forefathers – wanted to know all about them. I felt that this was carrying the thing too far. I felt like saying to her: “Miss or madam, so far as I know there is nothing the matter with my ancestors of the second and third generations back, except that they are dead. I am not here to seek medical assistance for a grandparent who succumbed to disappointment that time when Samuel J. Tilden got counted out, or for a great-grandparent who entered into Eternal Rest very unexpectedly and in a manner entirely uncalled for as a result of being an innocent bystander in one of those feuds that were so popular in my native state immediately following the Mexican War. Leave my ancestors alone. There is no need of your shaking my family tree in the belief that a few overripe patients will fall out. I alone – I, me, myself – am the present candidate!”

On May Day 2015, while other Americans were dancing around Maypoles, Dr. Z (Dr. Will) repaired Cobb’s hernia. As we noted in the previous chapter, Dr. Will had become fascinated with the adventure and the medical implications of the war that had broken out in Europe, and he was consciously building a reputation that would give him access to the medical facilities of nations on both sides of the western front. Cobb gave him letters of introduction, saying Will was “one of the foremost surgeons of the United States who is abroad to study hospital methods within the military lines.” Thus, medical records reveal facts not only about the patients, but also about the doctors, and people playing either of these two roles may have self-centered perceptions of the other. 258 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Ofﬁcial Records

8.5 Church Records

Given the prominence of churches in their local communities, much information about their events, challenges, and revivals are recorded in local newspapers, while depending on the history of the church itself, many valuable documents may be stored in the archive of the organization. Connected to Ancestry.com is Newspapers. com, and recalling what I had found years before in the Delaware Historical Society about Dr. Will’s eccentric clergyman father, I entered “William Folwell Bainbridge” into the search ﬁeld, selecting Wilmington, Delaware, and the 1890s. The ﬁrst hit was a November 5, 1893, front-page report of his “surprise” resignation from the Delaware Avenue Baptist Church, including his resignation letter, that began:

God has graciously enabled me to lead you out of a heavy debt of over $20,000; but He does not appear to me to require that I should accompany you again into debt. The hard times which have dragged so long and are still upon us make me assured, from what I know of your resources, that you are unable at present to carry more than a pulpit supply from Sunday to Sunday. As, therefore, I have other and very pressing work upon my hands, I believe that I ought to lessen your ﬁnancial burden in church support, and therefore I feel it my duty to give you this notice, that my services will close with you at the end of the present month.46

The term “pulpit supply” refers to a widespread system that provided clergy to preside over Sunday church services, often rotating this duty among clergy or respected church members at other branches of the same denomination. “The present month” was November 1893, and the “hard times” referred to the Panic of 1893, marked by a stock market crash six months earlier. Indeed, the four-year economic disaster that followed was the worst between the 1840s and the 1930s, often called a depression (Hoffman 1970). Earlier news articles had reported the campaign to pay off the church’s debt, including a remarkable description of a ritual in May 1892 in which the paid-off mortgage was burned in the symbolic equivalent of a funeral pyre:

Dr. Bainbridge, after relating how a deficit of $1500 resulting to him through his work here was made up by his wife, by her tongue and pen, called Mrs. Bainbridge to the platform to apply the torch to the papers. She started the cremation after speaking of the church’s indebtedness to those who need the Gospel. Some difficulty being met in lighting the taper Mrs. Bainbridge said that at home there appeared to be enough in her appearance to light all the gas in the house. The pile of papers was ignited about three minutes after 10 o’clock, and while it was burning the people first applauded and then sang the long metre doxology.47

The “Dr.” part of this clergyman’s name referred to “Doctor of Divinity,” and after the document cremation the church issued a formal proclamation saying in part, “Resolved, That we regard the coming of Doctor Bainbridge to us at a most critical time in our history as a special manifestation of Divine providence.” In this case, Divine providence had begun with a series of arguments William Folwell Bainbridge

46“A Pastor Resigns,” The Morning News, Wilmington, Delaware, November 5, 1893, p. 1. 47“Burning Mortgages,” The Morning News, Wilmington, Delaware, May 6, 1892, p.1. 8.5 Church Records 259 had with colleagues at the Brooklyn City Mission and Tract Society, where he had been superintendent since early 1885.48 Despite widely shared hopes that religion will soothe or even cure human conflict, inter-personal and inter-group conflict is common within and between churches. William Folwell Bainbridge had earned his degree from Rochester Theological Sem- inary in 1865, and the classmate listed alphabetically right after him in its history is Adolphus Julius Behrends, who became famous for arguing the scholarly case that Christianity was the best way to achieve the social justice sought by secular Socialism (Stewart et al. 1910; Behrends 1886). In 1876, Behrends applied for pastorship of a Congregational Church in Providence Rhode Island, where Bainbridge was pastor of First Baptist, and Bainbridge argued strenuously in public against this appointment, given that Behrends would be betraying their shared Baptist affiliation. Behrends won the job, with a salary of $5,000 a year, nearly twice what Bainbridge was earning.49 A decade later, Behrends was pastor of Brooklyn’s Central Congregational Church and a chief supporter of the city’s Mission Society. We cannot be sure how much a rivalry with Behrends drove William Folwell Bainbridge, but as the son of an intellectual father, he invested much of his self-esteem in religious scholarship. He had been writing a spiritual travelogue of his 1867 and 1880 expeditions through the Middle East, titled from Eden to Patmos. Eden, of course, is where the Bible begins, and Patmos is where it ends. William had sailed past Patmos, the insignificant Mediterranean island where St. John the Divine received his revelation, and he believed he had been to Eden, “at the southern extremity of Mesopotamia, where the Kerkha, Euphrates, and Tigris unite in forming the Shat-el-Arab” (Bain- bridge 1882). However, he could not find a publisher, in part because he faced stiff competition. William McClure Thomson was right then publishing the three volumes of his popular guide, The Land and the Book (Thomson 1880, 1882, 1885). Back in 1876, John Philip Newman had already published The Thrones and Palaces of Baby- lon and Nineveh From Sea to Sea, which takes the reader along exactly the route William followed four years later (Newman 1876). In the spring of 1889, William Folwell Bainbridge resigned from his position with the Brooklyn City Mission and Tract Society, probably after increasing arguments with its staff and supporters, devoting his energies to expansion of his book project. A relative of his mother, George W. Folwell had been the first pastor of the Delaware Avenue Baptist Church from 1866 until 1874 (Cook 1880). That position was open again, as the full-time pastor had resigned July 1, 1889. Three days after reporting on the 1892 cremation of the mortgage, the local newspaper published a rather full history of the church, ending: For nine months there was no regular pastor and in that time there were about thirty preachers in the pulpit. In the latter part of April, 1890, the Rev. W. F. Bainbridge, D. D., came to the church, preaching his first sermon on the last Sunday of the month. He is still acting pastor.

48Rochester Theological Seminary General Catalogue (Rochester, New York: E. R. Andrews, 1900), p. 70. 49Manual of the Union Congregational Church in Providence, R. I., printed by order of the church, 1894, pp. 11, 65. 260 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Ofﬁcial Records

Last night the concluding exercises in the debt-deliverance jubilee were held. Dr. Bainbridge preached the sermon on the text, Exodus 14, 15: “Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.”50 The paragraph describing the mortgage cremation included this perplexing fact: “a deficit of $1500 resulting to him through his work here was made up by his wife, by her tongue and pen.” What does this mean? Several things, on several levels. First of all, how much money is $1,500? Over the years, the value of currency may go up (deflation as prices decrease) or go down (inflation as prices increase). What was the economy doing around the time of that $1,500 transfer from Lucy Seaman Bainbridge to William Folwell Bainbridge? Wikipedia says, “The Great Deflation or the Great Sag refers to the period from 1870 until 1890 in which the world prices of goods, materials and labor decreased, although at a low rate of less than 2% annually. This is one of the few sustained periods of deflationary growth in the history of the United States.”51 Economists debate exactly when the economy switched to inflation, but probably a little later than 1890 (Delong 2000; Hanes and James 2003). For our purposes here, I took a reasonably standard model in which deflation reduced the costs of goods and services by 1.1% per year from 1879 until 1896 when inflation set in and the costs increased about 2.0 per year until 1913 (Barsky and de Long 1991). Going year by year in a spreadsheet revealed that $1,500 in 1892 was worth about $2,000 in 1913. That year is the first for which the online inflation calculator of the Bureau of Labor Statistics can be used, and it reported that $2,000 in 1913 was worth $51,000 in 2018. Frankly, that is a lot for a wife to give her husband to make up for the fact he lacks a paying job. In his 1893 resignation statement, he reported, “I have other and very pressing work upon my hands,” but that work was his scholarly project, analyzing the Bible on the basis of his 1879–1880 tour of the Holy Land, which probably earned him not a penny. Beginning October 22, 1893, just days before his resignation, he began a series of lectures at Delaware Avenue Baptist Church, where he described his project in grandiose terms: “He is engaged in the preparation of several volumes, covering all the light thrown upon the sacred record by the geography, topography, ethnology, philology, manners and customs, botany, zoology, mineralogy, meteorology, & c., of Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Babylonia, Assyria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Asia Minor, Greece and other countries of the Orient.”52 Although Lucy joined him in the mortgage cremation ritual, in fact the two had separated already, she remaining in the New York Area with her son William and daughter Helen. I checked the Wilmington City Directory for the years 1891–1894, finding him living as a boarder at two different addresses in 1892 and 1893, described as “acting pastor” of the church in 1891 but without any residential address, and entirely missing in 1894.53 Lucy had taken a very respectable full-time job. In a pic-

50“History of a Church,” The Morning News, Wilmington, Delaware, May 9, 1892, p. 9. 51en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation. 52“Talks on Bible Lands,” The News Journal, Wilmington, Delaware, October 21, 1893, p. 1. 53Wilmington City Directory (Wilmington, Delaware: W. Costa, 1891), p. 25; Wilmington City Directory (Wilmington, Delaware: W. Costa, 1892), p. 25; pp. 25, 67; Wilmington City Directory 8.5 Church Records 261 ture history of her employer, which includes two portraits of her from this period, Paul Romita summarizes: “Lucy S. Bainbridge was the superintendent of the Women’s Branch of the New York City Mission and Tract Society from 1891 to 1908. Her name comes up frequently in New York City Mission Society history. In 1892, she organized the Baby Fold, a nursery for children whose mothers were sick, deceased, or otherwise unable to care for them” (Romita 2003). Her son completed his medical degree at Columbia University, did a series of residencies until 1896 when for two years his primary patient was John Sinclair, then fully established his private practice at Gramercy Park in 1898. Starting some time in the 1890, until 1915, the chief source of financial support for William Folwell Bainbridge was his son. At the present time, internal church records are generally not available to the public, but in the 1980s I visited three of the churches where the eccentric clergyman had been minister, finding no original records at the Delaware church, some at the Providence church including the October 6, 1878, letter with which he resigned his pastorship in preparation for his world-circling quest for glory, and several at his last location, Hill Memorial Baptist Church. At this last location, which is at 279 North Harvard Street in Allston Massachusetts, a short ride or medium walk from Harvard Square across the Charles River in Cambridge, I photocopied the handwritten summaries of church business meetings in 1906 and 1907, and here are a few references to William Folwell Bainbridge, which apparently document the only paid employment he experienced from 1893 until his death in 1915: January 26, 1906, Regular Monthly Meeting: Dr. Bainbridge intimated that he had procured a stereopticon and would deliver a course of three lectures on “Mission Work around the World.” March 2, 1906, Special Meeting: The clerk read the call for meeting after which the moderator explained that the reason for the special meeting was that if we wanted to clear the Hill Memorial Baptist Church of all the indebtedness, and also receive the backing of the Baptist State Missionary Society, it was essentially necessary to have a recognized pastor. After a somewhat lengthy discussion as to our ability to pay a pastor and to the work of the future… The entire membership present voted as a unit, and it was thereupon decided to request Dr. Bainbridge to assume the duties of pastor of Hill Memorial Baptist Church on April the 1st 1906. May 18, 1906, A Short Business Meeting at the Close of the Prayer Meeting: Dr. Bainbridge, the moderator, presided and stated that he had called the meeting for the purpose of hearing Prudential Committee’s report on several candidates for baptism, and also to hear the Chris- tian experiences of candidates. Chester Bellen expressed his desire to be baptized, stating that he wished to be a better boy and live a better life, and he knew that if he asked God he wouldhelptotheendinview. July 2, 1906, Board of Trustees Monthly Meeting: On motion of Deacon Tedford it was unan- imously voted that the treasurer pay Rev. Dr. Bainbridge five dollars a Sunday, commencing first Sunday in June. September 26, 1907, Special Business Meeting: The Clerk had a communication which should be made known to the members with as little delay as possible. The following letter was then read by the Clerk: “Dear brothers and sisters of the Hill Memorial Church, Allston: Yesterday morning, I experienced a sudden physical weakness, which indicates unmistakably

(Wilmington, Delaware: W. Costa, 1893), pp. 26, 68; Wilmington City Directory (Wilmington, Delaware: W. Costa, 1894). 262 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Ofﬁcial Records

that I must for a few months now at least release myself from some of the extra burdens I have been carrying. I therefore resign your pastorate to take effect at our association’s meeting here with us a week from next Wednesday. May the richest blessings of God rest upon you and lead you out into a large place in His Kingdom of love and service. And may your prayers follow me in the continued greater work of my life to which I have devoted twenty-one years, of at as a rule ten hours per day, which must not be over eight hours after this. Evidently I have been passing beyond the reasonable limits of physical strength at my time in life. Please, as per the enclosed, to accept a parting gift of $25. Affectionately your Pastor, W. F. Bainbridge.” Earlier in this chapter, we noted that his son and estranged wife could not ﬁnd a publisher for his still-unﬁnished vast writings. What did they do with the manuscript? Except for a small sample which has since been lost, they destroyed it, presumably so they could stop worrying about it. Had they sealed it in a strongbox, labeled “open in a century,” I might have inherited it, opened it in 2015, and begun uploading especially interesting sections. Had William Folwell Bainbridge been born a century later than 1843, when he resigned from Hill Memorial (hypothetically in 2007) he could have started adding his best excepts to various Wikipedia pages, such as the currently rather short current pages for Patmos and John of Patmos.54 In fact, the only real information we have about the content of his life’s work is the series of articles in Wilmington newspapers, October and November 1893, that summarize his public lectures.

8.6 Conclusion

The particular families used as examples for this chapter seem to have been rather unusual people, often more prosperous than the average, and containing ambitious members who wanted to make their mark on history. Yet comparable government, medical, and religious records exist for a large fraction of the populations of industrial societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not to mention the twenty-first. The obvious challenge for family historians assembling information from previous decades is that access to official archives is often limited. It is possible to request medical records for close deceased relatives, and I have indeed done so. However, the usual justification is gaining information about parents and siblings with whom one may share genetic predispositions for particular health problems. Here we have used the term “official record” to refer to information stored by formal organizations, but as the beginning of the following chapter will illustrate, it also can be very rewarding to request copies of records held by other family members, such as cousins, given how easy it is to photocopy or scan most kinds of records today. Several other kinds of official records may exist, increasingly as we live our lives online, as in the social media explored in the following chapter. When I searched for myself in Ancestry.com, as explained above I could not find any census records, but I was listed in a few city directories. I was surprised to find a photo of myself

54en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patmos; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Patmos. 8.6 Conclusion 263 standing among the 10 members of the Astronomy Club in 1956 at Choate School, Wallingford, Connecticut, and read the rather compelling explanation of why Ances- try.com has begun to add materials from school yearbooks: “Yearbooks are one of those home sources, usually found in an attic or basement, which many people don’t think of as a family history source. While yearbooks may not provide information about the vital events that are usually associated with genealogical research, they do provide other information about individuals’ lives. This information helps place people in historical context as well as provides detail that helps turn individuals, sometimes only known by names and dates, into actual people.” Wikipedia refers to a specialized social medium that primarily seeks to keep classmates in contact with each other, but does so by archiving materials of use to family historians: “The Classmates website has an online archive of over 300,000 yearbooks, accessible with a free Classmates membership. This represents the world’s largest (and continually growing) digital yearbook collection.”55 More generally, several of today’s social media, and presumably new ones yet to be invented, serve multiple functions and have the incidental ability to gather information for family historians.

References

Abramitzky R, Boustan LP, Eriksson K (2012) Europe’s tired, poor, huddled masses: self-selection and economic outcomes in the age of mass migration. Am Econ Rev 122(3):467–506 Abramitzky R, Boustan LP, Eriksson K (2014) A nation of immigrants: assimilation and economic outcomes in the age of mass migration. J Political Economy 122(3):467–506 Anbinder T (2012) Moving beyond ‘rags to riches’: New York’s Irish famine immigrants and their surprising savings accounts. J Am Hist 99(3):741–770 Bainbridge WF (1882) Around the world tour of Christian missions. Blackall, New York, p 379 Bainbridge WS (1914) The cancer problem. Macmillan, New York Bainbridge WS (1927) The inter-relationship of psychiatry and surgery, pamphlet. Reprinted from South Med J 20(5):357–364 Bainbridge WS (1982) Shaker demographics: an example of the use of U.S. census enumeration schedules. J Sci Study Relig 21:352–365 Bainbridge WS (1984) The decline of the shakers: evidence from the United States Census. Com- munal Soc 4:19–34 Bainbridge WS (2017) Historical research: Oneida online. In: Finke R, Bader C (eds) Faithful measures. New York University Press, New York, pp 227–259 Bainbridge WS, Meeker HD (1906) A compend of operative gynecology, Grafton, New York Barsky RB, de Long JB (1991) Forecasting pre-World War I inﬂation: the Fisher effect and the gold standard. Q J Econ 106(3):815–836 Behrends AJF (1886) Socialism and Christianity. Baker and Taylor, New York Burning Mortgages (1892) The morning news, Wilmington, Delaware, 6 May 6 1892, p 1 Campbell ML (2012) African American women, wealth accumulation, and social welfare activism in 19th-century Los Angeles. J Afr Am Hist 97(4):376–400 Cherlin A (1981) Marriage, divorce and remarriage. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts Cobb IS (1923) Irvin Cobb at his best. Sun Dial Press, Garden City, New York

55en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classmates.com. 264 8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Ofﬁcial Records

Cook RB (1880) The early and later Delaware Baptists. American Baptist Publication Society, Philadelphia de Forest LE (1950) Ancestry of William Seaman Bainbridge. The Scrivener Press, Oxford, p 23 Delong JB (2000) America’s historical experience with low inflation. J Money, Credit Bank 32(4–2):979–993 Elder GH (1978) Approaches to social change and the family. Am J Sociol 84:S1–S38 Farman I (1992) Tandy’s money machine: how Charles Tandy built Radio Sack into the world’s largest electronics chain. Mobium Press, Chicago Gilbreth FB (1909) Bricklaying system. Myron C. Clark, New York, p 1 Gilbreth LM (1914) The psychology of management. Sturgis and Walton, New York Gilbreth FB, Carey EG (2002) [1948] Cheaper by the dozen. HarperCollins, New York Guest AM (1987) Notes from the national panel study: linkage and migration in the late nineteenth century. Hist Methods 20:63–77 Hanes C, James JA (2003) Wage adjustment under low inflation: evidence from U.S. history. Am Econ Rev 93(4):1414–1424 Hoffman C (1970) The depression of the nineties: an economic history. Greenwood, Westport, Connecticut Juster SM, Vinovskis MA (1987) Changing perspectives on the American family in the past. Ann Rev Sociol 13:193–216 Lancaster J (2004) Lillian Moller Gilbreth—a life beyond cheaper by the dozen. Northeastern University Press, Lebanon, New Hampshire, p 15 Landale NS, Guest AM (1990) Generation, ethnicity, and occupational opportunity in late 19th century America. Am Sociol Rev 55(2):280–296 Laslett P (1965) The world we have lost, Methuen, London Lawson A (1984) Irvin S. Cobb. Bowling Green University Press, Bowling Green, Ohio, p 131 Leimbach D (2006) Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, 98, author of childhood memoir, dies. New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2006/11/06/books/06carey.html Lepore J (2009) Not so fast. The New Yorker. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/12/not-so- fast Moen P,Wethington E (1992) The concept of family adaptive strategies. Ann Rev Sociol 18:233–251 Neuman FG (1974) Irvin S. Cobb: his life and achievements. Beekman, New York, p 146 Newman JP (1876) The thrones and palaces of Babylon and Nineveh from sea to sea. Harper, New York Oberly JW (2017) Love at first sight and an arrangement for life: investigating and interpreting a 1910 Hungarian migrant marriage. J Aust-Am Hist 1(1):69–97 Owen AK (1885) Integral co-operation. Lovell, New York A Pastor Resigns (1893) The morning news, Wilmington, Delaware, 5 Nov 1893, p 1 Reynolds R (1996) Catspaw utopia. Borgo Press, San Bernardino, California Rivera Calvo ME (1995) La actividad empresarial de Benjamin Francis Johnston. Clío 3(14):9–30 Romita P (2003) New York City Mission Society. Arcadia, San Francisco, p 43 Ruggles S (2014) Big microdata for population research. Demography 51(1):287–297 Saxon W (2001) Frank Gilbreth Jr., 89, Author of cheaper by the dozen. New York Times. www. nytimes.com/2001/02/20/arts/frank-gilbreth-jr-89-author-of-cheaper-by-the-dozen.html Stephenson C (1980) The methodology of historical census record linkage: a user’s guide to the Soundex. J Fam Hist 112–115. Spring Stewart JWA, Henderson JR, Ramaker AJ (eds) (1910) Rochester theological seminary general catalogue 1850 to 1910. Andrews, Rochester, New York, p 49 Taylor FW (1911) The principles of scientific management. Harper & Brothers, New York, pp 84–85 Thomson WM (1880, 1882, 1885) The land and the book, three volumes. Harper, New York Trajtenberg M, Shiff G, Melamed R (2009) The ‘names game’: harnessing inventors, patent data for economic research. Ann Econ Stat 93/94:79–108 References 265

Wallick E (1915) Inexpensive furnishings in good taste. Hearst’s International Library, New York Willever-Farr H, Forte A (2014) Family matters: control and conﬂict in online family history production. In: Proceedings of CSCW ‘14. ACM, New York Williams WM, Ceci SJ (2012) When scientists choose motherhood. Am Sci, 100(2):138–145 Chapter 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through Social Media

Abstract Starting with the remarkable example of a now-vanished webring that in 1999 connected 584 amateur websites commemorating deceased children, this chapter expresses clear awareness that today’s social media are potentially unstable, despite the fact they have become tremendously influential in modern culture. As a simple demonstration project, a secret Facebook group called Bailiwick Archives was created to share among living family members pictures and documents belonging to the particular family whose history this book has used as its primary example. The content of the archive included a great variety of materials, including a 546-line poem about the contrasting forms of families dating from 1874, a lecture about the plight of poor urban mothers given at the 1897 meeting of the National Congress of Mothers, and a reminiscence by a son about the process of publishing a novel written by his deceased mother, that was a fictionalized version of their own real family history. The chapter then uses Facebook and other online communication media in search for all the former homes of a particular married couple, discovering that one unexpectedly was now at the very center of a radical religious community with an intense focus on building families, and that four competing Facebook community groups were debating the intense cultural conflict around that utopian experiment. Other examples show how towns vary greatly in the extent to which there are Facebook groups oriented to their history, based on factors as diverse as culture conflict, enthusiasm by amateur community historians, and tourism advertising. The chapter concludes with examples showing that distinct wikis can be created to organize information about particular families, serving as encyclopedia-style social media.

Social media such as Facebook and wikis are already being extensively but inco- herently used to share family history information. Earlier chapters have suggested that family information can be shared through a specialized wiki, whether public or private, and here I will explain the relatively simple steps required to do that in a more obvious one of the social media, Facebook. Of course, principles identiﬁed in either medium could transfer to some new social medium over the horizon, and the reader is free to think about ordinary personal websites or other well-established or innovative systems that could be used instead. Then other aspects of Facebook and

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 267 W. S. Bainbridge, Family History Digital Libraries, Human–Computer Interaction Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01063-8_9 268 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through … similar social media are explored through extensive efforts to ﬁnd all the homes that had belonged to a particular generation of the Sims family, 1910–1959. The concluding section reports on a set of wikis that family historians might wish to explore themselves, to see not only what aspects of the lives of family members might be described in a wiki that themselves will create, but also to contemplate the issue of how to handle intra-familial conﬂict. A set of examples from Wikia.com are ideal for these purposes, because they concern families, but not real ones, because they are about radio and television soap operas.

9.1 Creating a Family Archive in Facebook

In 1999, at a meeting in Ottawa, Canada, organized for the international Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, I warned that the social media of the future could be quite revolutionary, eroding privacy and the integrity of existing societal institutions, with unpredictable and probably uneven benefits. I noted that ordinary people had begun putting up websites to memorialize deceased children, and fully 584 of them were connected in a webring called emptyarms.org, which no longer exists two decades later (Bainbridge 2000). Wikipedia reports the history: “Webrings are mainly viewed as a relic of the early web of the 1990s. When the primary site that managed web rings, webring.org was acquired by Yahoo, ‘ring masters’ lost access to their webrings and the web ring hubs were replaced by a Yahoo page. By the time Yahoo stopped controlling webring.org in 2001, search engines had become good enough that web rings were no longer as useful.”1 Note that an amateur social medium created by the users themselves was first captured by a big company, then killed by a technology promoted by other big companies, before social media themselves were controlled by big companies, Facebook notable among them. On March 4, 2018, at no dollar cost and relatively little effort, I created a secret Facebook group called Bailiwick Archives, “secret” meaning that people could not find it, let alone post on it or download materials from it, unless I intentionally made “friends” with them and invited them to join. While intended to serve the interests of my first cousins and our children and grandchildren, I made sure they understood that what I learned would contribute to this book, so here is the text from the group’s formal About-Description: Bailiwick is the prototype of a family history communication hub, set up as a secure Facebook group that can be seen only by members of the family who have joined the Bailiwick group. One immediate goal is exploring the potential of this approach for a chapter on social media in the forthcoming book, Family History Digital Libraries by William Sims Bainbridge, but specific information and materials you post would be confidential unless you give formal permission for publication. The name “Bailiwick” refers not only to the social territory or shared interests that belong to our family, but also to the antique house where the Bainbridge and Sims families joined in the marriage of Barbara Elizabeth Sims and William Wheeler

1en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring. 9.1 Creating a Family Archive in Facebook 269

Bainbridge. Built about 1743, it was their home in 1939-1950, and was named “Bailiwick” by Barbara Sims Bainbridge. As it developed over the following months, it did serve as an archive, but it also helped members develop friendship ties with more distant relatives, so that more of us would see the news posted on our personal Facebook pages, including such historical information as old photographs posted by more than one person to celebrate Father’s Day, and share comments about our daily lives. Most but not all of the historical materials uploaded in the first few months of Bailiwick Archives came from the research for this book, either as files saved in the archive that any member could download, or as pictures with associated comments visible on the discussion page of the group. Figure 9.1 shows the top of the Discussion page, seen from the perspective of my own account, April 17, 2018. The picture at the top of the image is the house, Bailiwick itself, seen from an angle that shows how complex the structure was. Initially, when it was built around 1743, the house was approximately three rooms around a fireplace used for cooking as well as heating, probably with another room above under a roof the inhabitants called New England “saltbox” style, but more symmetrical than the rooves to which Wikipedia today applies the “saltbox” term.2 The taller section of the house on the far side was more recent and had a basement with coal-fire furnace, which was not true for the original house, The tiny kitchen to the left was a “recent” addition, meaning not much more than a century ago. The metaphors are multiple. It is an antique, thus appropriate for an historical archive. Its ad hoc complexity suggests a developing ontology of irregular categories describing different kinds of historical materials. It was the place where the Bainbridge and Sims families joined, as historic homes housed many familial unions. Many details will not be fully intelligible in this reduced image of Fig. 9.1,but deserve mention. The upper left corner is a set of display choices: About, Discussion, Members, Events, Photos, Files, Manage Group. The discussion is the middle section below the picture, that extends far down beyond the bottom of the page, and the newest post appears at its top. Clicking the word Members would open a list of the membership of the group, which at that point in time consisted of 23 family members. The individual members are represented by their names and by tiny circular face pictures that the individual selected on his or her personal page. For my face image I selected a photograph of my real face, but dating from perhaps 1946. Clicking on an ID name or icon offers the option to visit the corresponding personal page. Selecting Photos in this group shows just the full set of photographs that had been posted in the discussion. Events would go to specially scheduled activities, but this particular group had not yet staged any. The Files option was especially important, because it opens a list of all the files that had been uploaded for sharing, which will be described in some detail below. The final option, Manage Group, was available only to me, because at that point I was the only Administrator of the group. Among the management displays was one that tallied actions such as adding a person to the group, allowing me to see when

2en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltbox. 270 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through …

Fig. 9.1 A view of the Bailiwick Archives Facebook group and by which existing member each new member had been recruited. Below those action options is a long list, extending far beyond the bottom of the image, of all the groups I had joined, which was very many given that I had been doing social movement research in Facebook over the preceding 3 years. A different and probably shorter list of groups would be in the display seen by other members. The right-hand column begins with some icons of members, followed by the group Description 9.1 Creating a Family Archive in Facebook 271 quoted above, a list of the three most recent files that had been uploaded, and the three most recent photos. Information related to group members is distributed in several places, both on the main page and on various secondary pages and windows. Notably, a tiny message in the Discussion area says, “Seen by 9,” which means that 9 members had seen the most recent post that had been added the previous day, and mousing over it revealed a list of their names. One of the other members reported that they did not know that as administrator I had access to a list of all the members who had viewed the most recent post. The most recent pair of posts can be seen in the image, at the bottom center, linking to a file that had been uploaded, George Ernest Sims Obituary, with the comment, “The 1936 obituary of George Ernest Sims, the father of William E. Sims and grandfather of Barbara and Audrey Sims.” The most recent non-file post was the picture near the center of the image with this comment: “This is the photo of G. E. Sims in Egypt that was mentioned (but not published) in his obituary.” The file was a text version of a newspaper article derived via an online newspaper archive from the newspaper Commercial Advertiser, Canton, New York, Tuesday, March 10, 1936, pages 1–2: “G. Ernest Sims Dies Suddenly in Sleep, Native of Canton and Long Prominent in Affairs of Village.” In sharing an online family history resource like this, one has multiple options, including simply providing the title and URL link. The online newspaper archive was not one of the most prominent ones, such as Newspapers.com which requires a subscription, or Chronicling America on the website of the Library of Congress, which does not, and I worried that it might vanish. I could have simply shared the download which I had already done a couple of years before with two family members via email. It was a searchable PDF file, but the image was poor quality, so I extracted as much of the text as I could, and then invested an evening editing a clear word processing document, which was added to Bailiwick Archives. From there, any member could download and share any of the files. Most deceased people do not have newspaper obituaries, let alone extensive ones like that of “Ernie” Sims. Key factors earning him a 2,200-word obituary was that he had an interesting life that was deeply embedded in a relatively small community that had its own newspaper, with the slightly blatant title Commercial Advertiser, and to which he had personal connections. Today, an extensive online obituary requires only a good writer in possession of the necessary information and the motivation to be accurate as well as interesting. Late in life, Ernie invested in real estate, but this paragraph from the obituary summarizes how he gained the capital to invest: George Ernest Sims was born in Canton on Sept. 3, 1861, the son of the late William and Jane Dodge Sims. His father died when he was quite young and his mother married Wm. E. Tannerof Canton who was sheriff of St. Lawrence County in the seventies. His mother , Mrs. Jane Tanner was for long years engaged in business on Main Street and in the little white shop that stood just east of what is now the Commercial Advertiser office, she did business while her son, then in his early twenties opened a music store and sold pianos, organs and other musical instruments. From a piece of stationary that survived, we can know that the slogan of the Sims store at its height emphasized diversity of goods: “From pins to pianos.” The obituary tells in some detail how a parallel career in late childhood and early adulthood gave 272 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through …

Ernie a central place in the social network of Canton, which was a huge advantage for commercial business, as well as providing his early income: G. Ernest Sims, or Ernie Sims, the boy, was full of business. A small printing press turned out many jobs from which he was able to save money. He used to tell of his experience as a printer. In those years his brother, Charles Glenn Sims, was engaged in the Plaindealer office where he was foreman for many years. The youth in his early teens had a desire to learn to play band instruments. Those were the days when the brass band was found in every community, and marching bands, sometimes two or three of them were at Fourth of July celebration, County Fair, firemen’s tournament. He was able to secure a cornet from money earned and he proved an apt pupil. At the age of fourteen or fifteen he was playing with the Canton Firemen’s Band. The old band men of those days, now all gone, were struck with wonder by the ability the Sims boy showed in blowing a horn. One day a minstrel show came to Canton and the boy met a talented cornetist who could tripple [sic] tongue his horn. “Show me how you do it,” appealed the Sims boy, and before the company left Canton the following day the boy was able to tripple [sic] tongue with his instructor. It is hard to imagine a more specialized ability than triple tonguing, yet individual lives often have distinctive elements. We are not all just hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and calcium, some of us also incorporating platinum. For a time, Ernie performed on the regional vaudeville circuit, and pictures of him playing on the stage have been preserved in the shared family archive. Clearly, a central topic for social science, and for family history as well, is the social organization of the surrounding community. Classic examples include many contrasting examples, such as Nels Anderson’s 1923 book about “Hobohemia,” a poor and socially disorganized neighborhood of Chicago, and William Foote Whyte’s 1943 book about the emergence of social organization in an immigrant neighborhood of Boston (Anderson 1923;Whyte1943). To the extent that family historians can include connections to the immediately surrounding community in their archives and narratives, then their work may have wider audiences as well as deeper meaning.

9.2 The Content of a Family History Archive

The obituary of George Ernest Sims was not the only document adapted from an old newspaper that was placed in the ﬁles section of Bailiwick Archives. Another, which was in a very different form, was the full series of articles in Wilmington newspapers, October and November 1893, that summarize the public lectures given by Reverend William Folwell Bainbridge that were mentioned in the previous chapter. Each article was copied as one or more very clear JPG images, on a couple of which I carefully increased the contrast. These were pasted into a Word document that eventually totaled 3 MB, each article preceded by text giving the publication citation. They were arranged in chronological order, and thus do represent a summary of his narrative, although his series of speeches ceased long before the end of the story he had planned to tell. Another pair of documents suggesting how different formats and related themes may ﬁt together, were two lectures on roughly the same topic by mother and son: 9.2 The Content of a Family History Archive 273

“Mothers of the Submerged World” by Lucy Seaman Bainbridge and “The Common Disease of the Avenue and the Alley” by William Seaman Bainbridge. To convey a sense of the technical affordance, at the moment I have the Facebook group open to the list of files, and have opened up through the browser both of these lectures, which happen to be in Word files. Lucy’s lecture was given at the 1897 meeting of the National Congress of Mothers in Washington, D.C. Wikipedia reports that this was the foundational meeting of an influential group that still exists today, but under the name National Parent Teacher Association.3 Its current website says: “For more than 100 years, National Parent Teacher Association (National PTA®) has worked toward bettering the lives of every child in education, health and safety. Founded in 1897 as the National Congress of Mothers by Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst, National PTA is a powerful voice for all children, a relevant resource for families and communities, and a strong advocate for public education.”4 Lucy’s topic was how impoverished mothers struggled to care for their children, and how more prosperous citizens could offer aid: WHEN the arm is wielded by a brain trained in the schools, or when it is matured by all the culture of a beautiful home, it is very easy for us to say, “The arm that rocks the cradle rules the world.” But when that arm has been roughened by toil, and the cradle is a dilapidated rocking-chair, it is not so easy to realize the power of the mother behind it. The immortal Lincoln said, as you, of course, remember, “All that I am, and all that I can hope to be, I owe to my mother”; and that mother lived in a cabin, and was a woman of toil. What are the conditions existing in the submerged world - among the mothers of that underworld, the world of poverty? (Bainbridge 1897, p. 47) Lucy’s speech is actually available online at the present time, so I could simply have placed a link in a bibliography of many currently public family documents. But it is rather well buried in a larger publication, so it seemed useful to extract and share it inside Bailiwick Archives. Her son’s speech was delivered August 12, 1905, at the amphitheater of the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, which Wikipedia calls “a non-profit education center and summer resort for adults and youth.”5 Dr. Will’s family had taken him there several times when he was a boy, and as an adult doctor he spent many summers there providing medical care for the staff and visitors. Some of his Chautauqua lectures were combined in his rather fascinating 1909 popular book, Life’s Day, which he had dedicated to “my life’s guide and inspiration - my mother” (Bainbridge 1909). But this lecture and a few others were different in style or topics, and thus were never published, but I inherited typescripts that may have partially been transcribed as he was speaking. The lecture referred to a series of pictures, that seem to have been images he projected during the talk, because for many years he had an electric projector that projected postcard-size images, and had an archaic electric plug that would screw into a light socket rather than having prongs for a floor plug or extension chord. The model he owned that

3en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parent-Teacher_Association. 4www.pta.org/home/About-National-Parent-Teacher-Association/Mission-Values/National-PTA- History. 5en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chautauqua_Institution. 274 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through … survived into the 1950s, and which I inherited, was a Radioptican, but exploring newspaper advertisements in Newspapers.com suggests that it was not sold before 1910. Like his mother’s 1897 speech, Dr. Will argued that prosperous people need to provide help to poor people, and the story he told around his first picture explained his logic and expressed his sentiment: Two girls, both in their teens, the one in the avenue, the other in the alley. It is early afternoon. A pretty girl in the poor alley home is bending over some intricate trimming such as ladies wear, of beads and silk. The room even on a bright day is almost dark. An oil lamp adds light to that from the court. As the girl works in the tenement there is evident poverty - poverty of food, poverty of everything. She coughs, clasps her hand to her side in pain. But she must push on with her work because there are many dependent upon her and her labor. She breathes hard at times, works and coughs, coughs and works! The wages are small. There are others to feed. But soon the tired fingers can work no longer. “Big sister” passes on. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, oh, so weak! The trimming goes, in turn, to the store, and is handled by the wornout, tired shop girls - good soil for disease. We pass on up to the avenue till we reach the mansion. Here is another girl in her teens, also worn out physically by her life. She began life with diminished vitality, and hers has been a gay social existence - cold drafts, late suppers after dances, etc. Amidst the elegance and comfort a bit of fragile human china is being dressed for a grand function, with some of these trimmings. The girl wears them and soon begins to cough and is doomed. Related in theme as well as family connections, another document in the Bailiwick Archive files is the poem “Weddings at the Parsonage” written by William Folwell Bainbridge, dating from 1874 (Bainbridge 1874). He read the poem aloud, which could have taken an hour, at the convention of Delta Upsilon Fraternity, which published it and much other material in an annual volume that is hard to find today. Early in the 1990s, I obtained a very poor quality photocopy, probably from the Brown University library.6 In 2018 I scanned it with OCR, which proved very error-prone, and spent about two work days producing a corrected Word document; the poem is fully 546 lines long, and both to assist my editing and to facilitate discussions, I added line numbers throughout. It is a rather remarkable work of sociological family theory, in verse form, organized around the metaphor of various couples coming to a parsonage to be married, and the parson analyzing why the marriage was likely to succeed or fail. The style varies, very poetic in places, intellectual elsewhere, but sometimes dramatic and even comic, as in the first example of a couple, whom the parson refuses to marry: 119 “Good evening, Sir; your little daughter too; 120 Step quickly in, such stormy nights are few. 121 Your hat upon the rack; and, little dear, 122 Undo that tippet, or a cold I fear,” 123 “A job, sir, can you do for me at once 124 They told me this the parson’s residence.” 125 “Yes, bring your lady soon as e’er you please,

6www.worldcat.org/title/weddings-at-the-parsonage-the-poem/oclc/13468022. 9.2 The Content of a Family History Archive 275

126 Your loves in one this night can quickly freeze.” 127 “This is my lady, sir!” “Your lady sir? -- 128 Can it be possible you marry her? 129 How old?” “Thirteen.” “Rascal, she stays to night 130 As far as possible from your selﬁsh sight. 131 Begone; - we’ll keep her till the morrow breaks, 132 And then, for her and for her parent’s sakes, 133 I will restore her to home’s sacred place, 134 From which you’d hurl her to such deep disgrace.” 135 Policeman passing helps the argument, 136 And off he ﬂies as from a cannon sent.

The second couple is too poor even to pay the parson, but the third couple seemed well-established. However, the parson senses that the groom is slightly inebriated, and conducts the ceremony but refuses the fee, asking the groom to swear to avoid drinking alcohol, and to return and pay the fee only years later, after proving the reliability of his promise. But that verse ends sadly:

255 Years since have passed, he ﬁlls a drunkard’s grave, 256 After long service as the demon’s slave; 257 While she, heart-broken, in asylum bound, 258 Waits for her peaceful slumber in the ground.

The fourth couple is an obvious failure, because they only just met and have not invested the time to know each other well, and to build a relationship. The ﬁfth couple is a blind man and a deaf woman, whose union proves perfect, despite their disabilities, because in partnership they possess all human senses. The poem then digresses into an analysis not merely of how opposites attract, but how they most forcefully combine. That section even refers, slightly obliquely, to his judgement that his own wife, Lucy Seaman Bainbridge, is his own personal opposite:

396 If you would win the richest nuptial prize. 397 Two positives or negatives repel, 398 Nor in magnetic brotherhood can dwell: 399 There must be opposition poles between, 400 To make the metals lovingly demean. 401 So in this other force, this force of soul, 402 Contrasts are better, take it on the whole 403 A giddy temperament let ballast seek 404 And sluggish natures liveliness bespeak; 405 Let passionate the self-restraining ﬁnd, 406 And digniﬁed select the unctuous mind.

411 And even I’ve noted that the opposite 412 In color of the eyes is beneﬁt, 276 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through …

413 And that the light with darkened countenance 414 Is often a most fitting circumstance. 415 And when I sought the wide world o’er for her, 416 Fitted to all my wants administer; 417 I hunted round, till, in the Buckeye State, 418 Golden-haired maiden sealed my marriage fate. The remainder of this long poem urges couples to take their time, investing years in their mutual courtship. The courtship he and Lucy experienced did take about three years after their meeting in Virginia in 1864, but in the context of a poem written seven years after their marriage the process did not really fit his good advice. Lucy lived with her parents in Cleveland, Ohio, while William initially was still a student at Rochester Theological Seminary, in New York state. He became the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Erie, Pennsylvania, in July 1865, and the pewter communion cup inscribed with that date is one of the family artifacts in the author’s possession.7 Erie lies about a hundred miles from Cleveland, and William could easily travel by train to visit Lucy. The Cleveland and Erie Railroad sent five trains a day in each direction, and the express took 3 hours and 5 minutes, compared with 4 hours for the local.8 But his duties to the church and the cost of travel would have kept them separate for most of their courtship. The Files storage space of Bailiwick Archives was the place I put documents generated in this research study, for family members to download, but several pictures were posted in the Discussion, by me and in the early days also by two of my cousins. Especially relevant here is a message posted by fellow historian, and the elder son of my aunt Barbara McIntosh, Christopher McIntosh, who wrote: I would just like to remind family members and anyone else who might be interested that Mustard Seed, my mother’s family history in fictional form, is available via Amazon in the edition that I prepared. The central figure is my grandmother June Bainbridge, but it covers a wide swathe of family history going right back to the Pilgrim Fathers. Particularly interesting is the account of June’s father Thomas Wheeler (Bart Pullen in the story) going out to California in 1855 to look for gold and having all kinds of dangerous adventures. Here’s the cover of the book with a charming painting of June on a swing being pushed by her brother Ernest. Figure 9.2 is a scan of the book cover, published here with the explicit permission of Christopher McIntosh, as well as of his brother, David McIntosh, who possesses the original. The nearly life-size and beautiful painting on the cover has tremendous emotional impact for me, because it had a twin, but in which our grandmother was gazing up at her brother, that was destroyed by the same 1965 home fire that killed my parents and sister. In this modern era of “print on demand” technologies, it has become practical for family historians to produce paper versions of narratives they have written or

7“Fourteenth Annual Catalogue of the Ofﬁcers and Students of the Rochester Theological Seminary” (Rochester, New York: Benton and Andrews, 1865); Rochester Theological Seminary: General Catalogue, 1850 to 1910 (Rochester, New York: E. R. Andrews, 1910), p. 49. 8Cleveland Leader, advertisement, January 4, 1866, p. 3. 9.2 The Content of a Family History Archive 277

Fig. 9.2 The cover of a novelized family history documents they possess that are not covered by copyright. With that in mind, in the Discussion section of Bailiwick Archives, I asked Christopher, “How were you able to publish Mustard Seed in such a professional edition, both in terms of the work you had to do and the publishing systems available today?” He replied into the Discussion:

The publication of Mustard Seed has taken many decades and involved several mutations and much work. My mother’s original manuscript was typed out by a typing bureau in Edinburgh. While I was living in New York in the 1990s I worked on editing the book after having it keyed into a word processing programme. It was a difﬁcult task for me both emotionally and 278 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through …

editorially, as the book contained a number of mistakes, and I was unsure whether to correct them or not. In the end I corrected the more serious ones, as I was sure that was what my mother would have wanted. The family were keen to have it published, but it was clearly not a book that any commercial publisher would take, and that was before the days of easy self-publishing. So I had a few photocopies nicely bound for some of the family members. When self-publishing became easy through ﬁrms like Amazon I decided the time had come for a proper printed edition of Mustard Seed, but by that time the ﬁle was in an out-of-date form, so the pages had to be scanned in using Microsoft Word. My granddaughter Abigail deserves the family’s gratitude for carrying out this painstaking job. In 2014 my wife Donate and I and our friend Judith Kraus started a small publishing operation called Vanadis Texts, using Amazon’s self-publishing programme, and I decided that this would be a good vehicle for publishing Mustard Seed. Accordingly the book appeared under this imprint in 2016 with a beautiful cover showing a charming painting of my grandmother as a child sitting on a swing and being pushed by her brother Ernest. At last the book is available in a form that does justice to my mother’s remarkable work.

Thus, Bailiwick Archive not only illustrates how members of a family can cultivate their history in a private online environment, but also how it may connect to other social media and forms of communication made possible by computers and Internet. To what extent can family historians use social media to expand the scope of their explorations and gather more diverse information? Looking for old family homes will provide examples.

9.3 Seeking Green Hollow Farm in Facebook

As this book has emphasized throughout, the key strategy for doing family history is connecting themes and information sources, and here we shall connect Facebook with personal memory, censuses, and Google Maps. In a variety of projects, not family history alone, I have found it useful and even fascinating to “drive by” specific locations in the streetview of Google Maps. The system allows one to toggle between 360° photos of multiple steps along a road comparable to driving a car, an isometric view looking downward similar to the view from a helicopter, and an abstract map. The coverage is somewhat uneven, and it was not possible to drive immediately past my parents’ two Connecticut houses, in Bethel, where they lived 1939–1949, or Old Greenwich, 1950–1965. I could however drive past the summer home of my father’s parents, a short walk from my parent’s home in Bethel, and of course past 34 Gramercy Park in Manhattan. I assigned myself the interesting task of finding the homes of my mother’s parents, starting here with one I remember well. The unofficial name of the Monroe, New York, home was “Green Hollow Farm,” and its mailing address was R.F.D. 2 (Rural Free Delivery zone 2), neither of which is of much use today. However, an article published in Middletown Times Herald on August 12, 1939, titled, “Built with Stone Quarried and Cut on the Place,” outlines the history, offers a photograph of this large stone house, mentions the owner is William E. Sims, and reports that he has named it Green Hollow Farm. Rather helpfully, it describes the location as “at the foot of the steep climb toward Seven 9.3 Seeking Green Hollow Farm in Facebook 279

Fig. 9.3 The environment of Green Hollow Farm in Monroe, New York

Springs Mountain House.”9 Given that I also recalled the general path we drove to the house, and the different route between it and the town of Monroe, it seemed a simple matter to find it in Google Maps. Figure 9.3 shows what I was looking for, in digital screenshots from analog videos made from deteriorated 16 mm home movie films. The upper left is William Sims in the cornfield across the road from the house; upper right is Mildred Sims at the pool behind the left side of the house; lower left is William entering his greenhouse to the left of their home; the home itself. However, repeated virtual drives along the rural country roads north of town, especially along Seven Springs Mountain Road, failed to find it. Then I discovered that Monroe had a public Facebook group, Growing up in Monroe, where current and former residents shared their memories. Towns vary greatly in the extent to which people have created Facebook groups of this kind, and in most cases I have seen they apparently focused on prosperous places and were set up by people whose business might benefit. In general, the history of topic-oriented Facebook groups is complex, extremely uneven, and of highly uncertain future. This particular case was not commercial in origin, but family-oriented, as its own description explains: “The creator of this group was Laura Brownsey-Duggan, a lifetime resident of Monroe and forever loved this area. She passed away from cancer on Friday August 28th, 2015. Her daughter Jeanine will try her best to monitor this page to keep it going for

9“Built with Stone Quarried and Cut on the Place,” Middletown Times Herald, August 12, 1939, p. 5. 280 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through … everyone to enjoy.”10 In 2018 I entered the search term “Sims” into the discussion search, and was astounded to discover a conversation dating from 2010: Owen Ridgeley Jr.: Who were the farming families that either worked or owned the dairy farms that KJ is predominately built on? Bonus question…..who owned them? Dale Van Etten Temmel: I know I know but my lips are sealed. Going to sit out in the sun for awhile. Ralph Smith: I’m only guessing but I remember DeVos with Barrett owners and Forest Rd & Acres Rd owner was Sims? Owen Ridgeley Jr.: You’re absolutely right!!!! I became Facebook friends with Owen and thanked him for his historical help. Indeed, Green Hollow Farm included that good-sized dairy farm, operated by a tenant farmer, immediately across the road from the house, which we saw in Chap. 6. What does the reference to “KJ” mean? The Facebook group contained many intense, extensive discussions about KJ, and the most recent post that used the full name rather than this abbreviation had been posted in 2013 by Laura Brownsey-Duggan herself, primarily a link to a news article titled “Charter Now Excludes Kiryas Joel Residents from Using Monroe Library,” including a picture of the Monroe Free Library. She commented, “Until Kiryas Joel pay taxes for the Library, they should not use the Library… totally agree!!” Later in the discussion, she quoted, “Kiryas Joel residents have not paid taxes toward the library, or voted on library issues, since 2005, when they entered into a contract exempting them from those taxes so that they could direct funds toward the construction of their own library, an initiative that never materialized.” The conversation then became rather intense, members writing: OK people, where have you been, Kiryas Joel have never paid a dime in taxes or anything else. Ever since they started building they never paid, and they pushed people out in Highland Mills, and I have been gone since 86, and went back a few yrs. ago and they own almost everything. I hear they are running a water pipeline directly to their “village” then they can build as many buildings as they want without paying for or needing Monroe’s water. Soon they will be taking over Monroe and pushing everyone out there also. Normally I would say everybody has a right to live and grow wherever they please BUT yes I think they are trying to buy EVERY piece of Monroe that can with intentions of taking over, while crying poverty. They don’t work they almost all live on public assistance. Haven’t been in Monroe in years but when use to go to Shop Rite they were always paying with food stamps. Please note that this has ABSOLUTLY nothing to do with religion for me, it’s about bad intentions. Lying, collecting welfare that they don’t need or qualify for and breaking every and any zoning/health laws without penalty. Without any premonition, I had stumbled into one of the most interesting family- related community controversies in America today, worthy of intensive social- scientiﬁc study, far beyond my current capability to fully comprehend. An extensive introduction is the Wikipedia page for Kiryas Joel, although I cannot judge the accuracy of its information, which describes KJ as something like a Utopian religious

10www.facebook.com/groups/71627492448/about. 9.3 Seeking Green Hollow Farm in Facebook 281 community which seeks social separation from its neighbors and that has extremely atypical social characteristics relevant to family life: The majority of its residents are Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jews who belong to the worldwide Satmar Hasidic sect… According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Kiryas Joel has by far the youngest median age population of any municipality in the United States, and the youngest, at 13.2 years old, of any population center of over 5,000 residents in the United States. Residents of Kiryas Joel, like those of other Haredi Jewish communities, typically have large families, and this has driven rapid population growth. According to 2008 census ﬁgures, the village has the highest poverty rate in the nation. More than two-thirds of residents live below the federal poverty line and 40% receive food stamps. It is also the place in the United States with the highest percentage of people who reported Hungarian extraction, as 18.9% of the population reported Hungarian descent in 2000. As of 2020, the village of Kiryas Joel will separate from the town of Monroe to become the Town of Palm Tree, New York.11 Entering Google Maps again, and going to the intersection of Forest Road and Acres Road, I indeed found the old Sims home, apparently in perfect condition, but tightly surrounded by many of the large buildings of the Kiryas Joel community. I naturally wondered how William E. Sims, who died in this home in 1959, would have reacted to the unexpected transformation of his lands. Throughout this book, I have suggested that both factual accuracy and human meaning are important. Speculation is permissible, if balanced and clearly labeled. There are two perspectives from which we can reasonably conjecture how Mr. Sims would have reacted: (1) His interest in social history, and (2) His experience with multiple other residences. Social History: In the previous chapter, we noted his interest in the radical transformation of a Mexican utopian community into a business corporation. One of the ﬁles in Bailiwick Archives is a long 1929 newspaper article about how he led the successful effort to overturn a US court decision that had awarded extensive properties of the Russian Orthodox Church in America to the puppet Archbishop in the Soviet Union, awarding them instead to their local congregations, a victory that required him to study closely the history of that denomination.12 I knew he was an avid amateur historian, for example not merely reading many books about the US Civil War, but also assembling a philatelic collection that he believed contained all but four of the postage stamps issued by the Confederacy. I inherited his seven-volume edition of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and understood he was a great fan of the similar books written by Arnold Toynbee, subscribing to that series and rejoicing every time a new volume was delivered. Other Residences: Prior to Monroe, the Sims family had a hard time settling down, living in several different homes. In many ways Mr. Sims and Dr. Bainbridge were similar, both prosperous professionals in the New York area, sending their daughters to the same school, and occasionally interacting directly as for example when the two families celebrated Thanksgiving 1946 together, as documented by their signatures on a preserved page of a visitor book. But the main residence of

11en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiryas_Joel,_New_York. 12“Former Canton Boy Wins $5,000,000 Suit,” St. Lawrence Plaindealer, Canton, New York, Tuesday, September 17, 1929, 74(16): 1, 4. 282 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through …

Dr. Bainbridge was constant, at 34 Gramercy Park for half a century. Perhaps domicile instability, coupled with an urge to own a glorious residence, would have increased the possibly positive emotional response Mr. Sims would have experienced had he learned that Green Hollow Farm had lived on in a radically new form, rather like Death and Transﬁguration, which the previous chapter mentioned was one of his favorite works of music. It is far beyond the scope of this particular book to study family relations inside Kiryas Joel, and we would need greater knowledge of its cultural background, specialized language skills, unusual social access, and probably a large team of researchers. A medical epidemiology study analyzed how two outbreaks of hepatitis in Kiryas Joel may have been transmitted by children, thus providing data incidentally about family structures (Smith et al. 1997). A thoughtful article in the journal Ethics by Lucas Swaine includes Kiryas Joel among small list of American theocratic communities, but draws its description from public documents: “Citizens of Kiryas Joel, a small village in New York State, very nearly exclusively belong to the Satmar Hasidim. The villagers follow a rigid interpretation of the Torah, segregating sexes outside of the home, wearing special clothing, and speaking Yiddish primarily. Both political and spiritual authority is uniﬁed in a hereditary rabbinical leader, who is the mayor of the village” (Swaine 2001, p. 306). A political science study by Valerie J. Hoekstra concerning whether the general public is fully aware of the actions and principles of high-level courts included a Kiryas Joel case among its examples:

At issue in Board of Education of Kiryas Joel v. Grumet (1994) was whether the creation of a special school district for a Hasidic Jewish community by the New York legislature violated the religious establishment clause of the First Amendment. The Hasidic Jews in Monroe educate the majority of their children in private schools that they pay for and run, but a number of the children need special education. The Hasidim could not provide that service but opposed using the public school programs, fearing that their children would be traumatized by interactions with outsiders. In 1989 the legislature created a special school district for the community, paid for by the state. The boundaries were drawn to include the entire Hasidic community and excluded all others. Before the district opened, a suit was ﬁled in state court arguing that creation of the district impermissibly advanced a particular religious interest (Hoekstra 2000, p. 91).

The Supreme Court decided that this was indeed unconstitutional, but decades later the same issue is being played out in a different way and on a larger scale. When Palm Tree becomes an independent town, as such it is expected to have its own school district. Social forces within this community discourage residence by anyone who is not a devout adherent of the religious movement, so the end result may be a legally constitutional form of unity of church and state, even within the public school. Over the years, many like-minded Americans have been moving to Kiryas Joel, and buying houses outside the initial boundaries of Palm Tree. Some Monroe residents worry that their town may vanish over the coming years, as Palm Tree expands. If we are to believe today’s online social media, the Monroe area experiences considerable social conﬂict, which has not become violent beyond occasional vandalisms such as unknown people knocking down mailboxes or slashing car tires, and extreme dissensus in town politics. Without attempting to understand the evolution of Kiryas 9.3 Seeking Green Hollow Farm in Facebook 283

Table 9.1 Membership and social interlocks among Monroe Facebook groups Growing up in Friends of United Love Monroe Monroe Matters Monroe Monroe Total 4,477 648 4,332 4,815 membership Growingupin 100.0 23.9 5.4 24.1 Monroe (%) Friends of United 3.5 100.0 1.8 9.2 Monroe (%) Love Monroe (%) 5.2 12.0 100.0 10.0 Monroe Matters 25.9 68.7 11.1 100.0 (%)

Joel into Palm Tree, and the implications for families inside the close-knit community, we can get a sense of how social media may inform family histories by considering four Monroe-centered Facebook groups: Growing up in Monroe: “People born, raised, live nearby or just visiting Monroe and surrounding areas. Pictures of old and new.” Friends of United Monroe: “This group is a forum for civil discussion and informational posts and comments about local politics in Monroe and its surrounding communities.” Love Monroe: “The intent of this group is to redeﬁne the concept of a ‘united Monroe.’ This is a public forum and does not represent any political campaign or group. Personal attacks will get you blocked. Sarcasm is allowed and encouraged but please keep it as civil as possible. Political debate and political humor is part of this page so if you’re hyper-sensitive this may not be the group for you.” Monroe Matters: “This group is for everyone to voice their opinions about what needs to be done in Monroe to bring it back to life. Let others know how you feel. We need fresh faces on the board, new ideas, Board Members that DO NOT cater to the block vote, NO more backdoor deals. Lets bring Monroe back to what it once was!!! Time changes everything but we need to protect what we have and try to restore as much as we can before it is too late.” United Monroe is a grass-roots political movement that apparently negotiated with representatives of Kiryas Joel to develop a plan for separation, and is also advocating a series of steps to revitalize the original town of Monroe.13 Friends of United Monroe has fewer than 700 members, while each of the other three groups has over 4,000 members. In their self-descriptions, two express dissatisfaction with United Monroe, Love Monroe wanting to redeﬁne it, and Monroe Matters complaining about “backdoor deals.” However, these groups represent special subsets of the Monroe population, which was about 40,000 in 2010, including interested people who do not currently live there, and apparently not including many if any residents of Kiryas Joel. Mainly to show how easy it is to explore the social structure of related Facebook groups, Table 9.1 gives the pattern of memberships linking the groups, from the list of 12,066 public members, downloaded May 26, 2018.

13unitedmonroe.org. 284 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through …

For example, 155 people belong to both Growing up in Monroe and Friends of United Monroe, which is 3.5% of the 4,477 members of Growing up in Monroe and 23.9% of the 648 members of the much smaller Friends of United Monroe. The column for Friends of United Monroe shows a fairly clear picture. A majority of its members also belong to Monroe Matters, 68.7%, and it would be interesting to learn the history of social relations that has not drawn more than 10.0% of the much larger membership of Monroe Matters to join the Friends. Just 12.0% of members of Friends of United Monroe also belong to Love Monroe, which has been rather critical of the smaller group, and they may be people such as journalists and school teachers who are interested to learn what is happening, without really adhering to either perspective. We are in no position to know the history in any depth, but it seems that attempts to reduce the social tensions or solve the practical problems have not been very successful in recent years. It is interesting to see the link between Monroe Matters and Growing up in Monroe, where a quarter of the members of each belong to both, and Growing up in Monroe is the one that deserves closer attention here. Our goal is not to document the current political struggle, or to understand deeply the four different orientations of these groups, but merely to use them as examples for how family historians might use locally-oriented Facebook groups and sources of information serving their own goals. Our first of two similar examples came from entering “father” in the search field for the discussion in Growing up in Monroe. Facebook automatically added the search term “dad,” and one of the first hits was a old photograph, uploaded in 2017, showing ice skaters, with the message: “One of the races on the pond closest to the jet. My dad is starting the race.” The geography in and around Monroe contains many ponds, and I recall skating on one near the center of town myself, but probably not the same one in the picture, and among the artifacts my mother prized were her mothers’ professional-style skates. The reference to “the jet” concerns a Sabre Jet fighter from the period of the Korean War that was placed in what became Airplane Park in 1963 as a public artifact memorializing the soldiers and serving as playground equipment the children could climb on.14 It can be used as a search item across several social media. For example in YouTube we find a movie of it, to which one person added this comment: “I grew up there in the late 70s and early 80s. The slide was great. Crawling in the back was cool also.”15 Returning to the Facebook picture of the skating race, here are some of the family-related comments members of the group added:

I skated all through my youth. Speed skated all over Monroe Pond, Round Lake, Mombasha Lake, Roscoe’s Pond, etc.… I never knew about the races your dad and g’dad held until you posted about them. I loved my childhood! Family and friends, that’s all I needed.

14www.thephoto-news.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130724/NEWS01/130729973/A- birthday-for-Airplane-Park. 15www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9tvBnhuN24&t=4s. 9.3 Seeking Green Hollow Farm in Facebook 285

Absolutely agree, and men like your dad had an impact due to his good vibes toward us while we were young and longer, I believe I was in his gym class. The good old days. We had so much fun in our little town. Too bad its a very mean place to live now. But we will always have our memories. My father plowed snow off the pond so people could skate. I even went skating with your grandfather. People tell me that all the time. How is it that I did not go skating with any of you? He encouraged and taught so many kids to skate over the years. A family historian can of course communicate with people who post relevant comments, as indeed I did with Owen Ridgeley, who helped me ﬁnd Green Hollow Farm. Entering “mother” as the second example also automatically searched for “mom,” and one of the comments to a very illustrative post included that word. It was a photograph of a family history artifact, an apparently brass pin with the text “Museum Village 1963.” Here is some of the discussion, replacing names with X, Y, Z: I found this with my father’s things. My grandmother worked at the Museum Village for many years when I was a child. There is much history you have to love it. I truly think if we all pulled our stuff together. Monroe would have a four part history story to tell. I worked with your grandma summers of 67-68 along with Mrs X and Mrs Y. Do you remember what the pin was for? It wasn’t with my grandma’s things but in my dad’s box of treasures. What did you do there? My mom worked there for 20 years, I never saw the pin before. I started doing maintenance work, cleaning displays etc. then started doing crafts on the regular peoples day off. I did weaving, candles, brooms and tin smithing. Then in the fall, I made apple cider. Learned a lot and had lots of fun doing it. Oh, and I got paid too. I loved being there. My grandfather brought my sister and me on Sundays to visit my grandmother and we could chose our penny candy of the week. Root beer balls (my mom would take them away, too big for little ones!), paper dots, cinnamon candies, etc. We’d then move on to playing hide and seek among the tall pines near the tracks (something else that made my mother cringe) and then a walk around the smaller O&R lake. When I was older I would spend Saturdays with a woman named Mrs. Z making candles. I can still smell the scent of those candles in my mind. As I got older I would have to make a choice between going ice-skating with my grandpa, making candles or going to Monroe Woodbury football games with my dad. Museum Village is a popular Monroe establishment, described thus on its website: “Through educational programs, hands-on-exhibits and special events Museum Village is dedicated to exploring and interpreting 19th century rural life as well as inspiring an appreciation for the evolution of industry and technology in America.”16 Yet the Facebook groups could be considered virtual Monroe museums, that could be connected to a private family archive. As a simple demonstration of this point, I posted two different pictures like Fig. 9.3, assembling different Sims home movie frames, one on Growing up in Monroe, and the other on Monroe Matters, getting

16museumvillage.org/our-village/our-history/. 286 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through … many favorable comments from members of those groups. Then both assemblies of Monroe movie frames were posted in the discussion on Bailiwick Archives.

9.4 A Family of Homes

Having found Green Hollow Farm, using social media, it seemed a reasonable project to seek all the many other residences of William and Mildred Sims, documenting the mixture of data sources that must be connected to get the full picture. The 1910 US census lists William E. Sims as living with his parents in Canton, New York, but really he had been studying at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that was the year he earned his degree. There he met Mildred Welch, whom he would marry August 9, 1912. Seeking her in the 1910 census would fail, if one did not know something about her complex family history. Once she was married, she preferred the name Mildred Welch Sims, but technically she was Mildred Elizabeth Judson Welch Adams Sims, and in 1910 she was living in the household of George and Carrie Adams, Carrie being her biological mother, and was considered a member of the Adams family. In 1939, when Mildred applied for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, she reported that her father, Wilfred M. Welch, had been born in Cambridge April 27, 1864, and died when she was eight years old, on November 7, 1897, a death date confirmed by a published genealogy (Pierce 1899). But according to the local newspaper, The Cambridge Chronicle, her mother married George Adams over two years earlier, on September 7, 1895. To add to the historical complexities, in 1924 her mother became her mother-in-law by marrying her husband’s father, Ernie Sims, whose first and then deceased wife was also named Carrie. The two daughters of William and Mildred Sims sometimes joked that they were actually first cousins rather than sisters. The 1912 marriage record said that William Sims was then living in New YorkCity at a hard-to-read handwritten address that appears to say “27 Monroe Place, Brooklyn, NY,” and there does exist an old apartment building at that location, easily visited in Google Maps streetview. The 1915 New Jersey State Census and the 1920 US census both place the couple in Ho-Ho-Kus (Mahwah), New Jersey. Their daughter Barbara had been born in New York City on April 12, 1914, and appears with them in both censuses. The historic census records often fail to give a specific street address, but a web search demonstrated again the revolutionary potential of Internet for family historians. A plan for Mahwah town development adopted in 2013 listed a number of properties that had some historical significance, including 84 Oweno Road: “This property transferred to William E. Sims of New York City from the Mahwah Company on May 26, 1914. This house is a very good example of a modest-sized dwelling constructed on a large lot with several traits associated with the skill and pride displayed during the early 20th century’s Craftsman era, especially the use of local stone. It significantly contributes to the character of this early 20th century suburban development. The house has retained a medium level of integrity and the 9.4 A Family of Homes 287

Fig. 9.4 The Birchil home in Saddle River, dating from 1927 garage has retained a high level of integrity.”17 The house is on a corner, so Google Maps streetview allows seeing it from several directions. The next address, “Birchil” in Saddle River, New Jersey, presented a real challenge that eventually gave a result nearly as surprising as the transformation of Green Hollow Farm into Kiryas Joel. My photo collection includes pictures dating from 1925 as this immense house was being built, and family memory reports that important aspects of the design came from Mildred’s imagination. Many slightly later pictures show several of the rooms, many views of the gardens, and several of the then four family members: William, Mildred, Barbara, and little Audrey. The 1930 census also lists two African-American servants as residents, and many large middle-class houses of the first half of the twentieth century had separate servant quarters, not to mention the homes of members of the rising professional class. The address is East Allendale Avenue, but without a specific number. The value of the house was given as $50,000, which might be $750,000 in today’s dollars, but none of the other homes in the area exceeded a third that value. Virtually driving around Saddle River, and looking at aerial photos, failed to locate the house on East Allen- dale Avenue. Figure 9.4 assembles several of the unfortunately low-resolution and damaged images that documented the structure of the house and offered clues about its location. The upper-right picture in Fig. 9.4 is the front of the house, while the upper-left is the rear, and the opposite upper corners show the same end, which is also the small stone-covered area visible at the far left of the lower-left image which was labeled “side of house toward polo field 1927.” The lower-right image was labeled “from terrace overlooking garden.” Searching for social media related to Saddle River, I

17www.mahwahtwp.org/documents/master%20plan-3.11.13-burgis.pdf. 288 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through … found the history page on a website devoted to the town and studied the overview there.18 I then sent an email message to Jon Kurpis, the Saddle River historian, asking him about a possible clue connecting one of the old photos to a reference in his essay: One picture says it was taken in 1927 “side of house toward polo field.” I found your online history of Saddle River where you say, “From 1924-1935, the Saddle River Polo Club competed successfully on a field that was located at the bottom of Oak Road.” In Google Maps and various real estate services I have looked around the intersection of Oak Road and East Allendale Avenue, but could not seem to find it. I wonder if you have suggestions or even could discover the actual address. Over a period of a month we exchanged messages, and he proved his historian expertise by analyzing the pictures I sent him, placing my family’s information in the context of Saddle River history, and physically checking old paper documents in the town’s archive. Several points illustrated problems and solutions that family historians might often encounter. I had found one trans-Atlantic ship passenger roster that listed the Sims home as in Allendale, rather than on Allendale Avenue, and indeed the road goes to the town of Allendale. I also found a record that Mr. Sims had contributed to a library in the town of Allendale. The names of roads have changed over the decades, and different parts of a long street are called Allendale Avenue versus Allendale Road. I imagined that such a large and costly house would not have been torn down, especially given the availability of other land in the area, but I had not fully realized how significantly a dwelling could have been remodeled, although ironically that is exactly what had happened with the original Bailiwick. Very quickly, Mr. Kurpis hypothesized that he knew the correct address, and that it was indeed right near the old polo field. But rigorous historian that he was, he was not satisfied by a mere guess. After serious checking, he sent me a detailed report. In addition to the picture looking toward the polo field, the one looking from the terrace behind the house out across a garden proved useful, because on close inspection it showed a very large building on a distant hill, which he identified is currently the Saddle River Day School but had earlier been the Denison mansion.19 Such triangulation helped define the location, but was not yet proof. The report that Mr. Kurpis sent me included several detailed photos he had taken of maps in the archived physical book Assessment Atlas—Borough of Saddle River, on which the names of owners of various plots of land had been handwritten, and then crossed off as they were sold. He had added digital annotations to the pictures, including very clear box outlines around features like the handwritten names of William and Mildred Sims. From some of the pictures I sent him like the one at lower-right of Fig. 9.4, and a reference to “timber” in the Atlas, he deduced the likely origin of the name the Sims family gave the property: “Birchil” was a contraction of “Birch Hill,” because it had been a hill rich with birch trees. What is it today? The reason we could not immediately see the 1925 building in 2018 online images was because the building had been extensively renovated and expanded at the beginning of the twenty-first century. With some confidence, Jon Kurpis identified the

18www.saddleriver.org/history. 19www.saddleriverday.org/page/news-detail?pk=802937. 9.4 A Family of Homes 289 house Sims built as the current home of celebrity Rosie O’Donnell, whom Wikipedia describes as “an American comedian, actress, author and television personality. She has been a magazine editor and continues to be a celebrity blogger, a lesbian rights activist, a television producer, and a collaborative partner in the LGBT family vacation company, R Family Vacations.”20 Looking online, I found many real estate and news sites that presented pictures and descriptions of the home, as well as very chaotic reports of whether she was about to sell it, and at what price. Admittedly not reliably, but interestingly, the website of the New York Post reported February 13, 2018, that she was selling several properties, and “O’Donnell is also trying to unload her English manor-style mansion in Saddle River, NJ, which was asking $5.9 million—down from its earlier asking price of $6.37 million. She bought the property at 115 E. Allendale Road for $5.9 million in 2013. Last month, she pulled the home off the market. But it is still available for sale and may go back on the market officially this spring, sources say.”21 Sources say? In the modern era, historians certainly cannot trust what anonymous sources say, or in many cases even a single well-identified source. Even though Kurpis had definitely proved this is the right location, how can we be sure this is the old house in renovated form, rather than a totally new one? Because of the privacy-affording trees, the house cannot be seen in Google Maps streetview, and the associated aerial photo is not very detailed. However, the many beautiful, online real estate pictures of the O’Donnell house included several that showed the exact same stone-covered end of the building seen in three images of Fig. 9.4. Those showing the front of the house were often taken from about the same viewpoint as the upper-right image, and included exactly that peaked extension toward the camera at the left side of that image. But it was no longer at the left end of the house, because many more rooms had been added. The small stone turret that served as the front door has been enlarged into a bigger one with a small room above. The landscape has also been renovated, as has the entire interior. There is an old philosopher’s quandary, or perhaps a joke. I hold up a chopper and say, “This is my grandfather’s axe. My father replaced the handle, and I have replaced the head. This is my grandfather’s axe.” How could it be the same family artifact, if all of its atoms have changed? Recognizing the inevitable mutability of existence is one of the most profound principles of history. Yet meaning derives from the connections we make between what was and what is. I wonder how philosophers would describe the next case, Cherrywell. How could it be the Sims home if they never lived in it? Probably early in 1949, William and Mildred Sims bought a large home not far from Bailiwick in Bethel Connecticut, with this name. In the summer we often visited, but they never moved over from Green Hollow Farm. Why? The likely explanation was the diagnosis that Mildred had contracted cancer, from which she died in 1952. My other grandfather, Dr. Will, had died in 1947, and his widow had retained Maple Hill Farm within walking distance of Bailiwick, selling it only in 1951. So death was progressively reducing the likelihood

20en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_O%27Donnell. 21nypost.com/2018/02/13/rosie-odonnell-is-selling-virtually-every-home-she-has. 290 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through … that the Sims and Bainbridge families could unify in Bethel. Meanwhile, my father’s job had migrated from Connecticut to New York City, so on January 10, 1950 we moved to Greenwich, which offered a much more convenient railway commute. So Cherrywell was never a home, but where was it? Short of visiting Bethel and looking through the land purchase records, I was forced to start with only the name and some episodic memories from the set introduced in Chap. 4: B69. My mother’s parents are thinking of moving to Bethel, and buy a fancy farm named Cherrywell. The first time we visit, I remember a circular smoke house near the drive, with a huge door, that reminds me of part of a castle, with an intense smoky smell inside. B70. We are exploring the still-empty house at Cherrywell, which is in a squared U-shape surrounding a tiny courtyard. I climb out a window onto the roof of the first floor, and go to the corner, seeing another roof around it. Foolishly I try to jump, and only realize how dangerous this was while I am in the air. But I did safely reach the other side. B71. There was a big rectangular swimming pool at Cherrywell, in the woods, the wall at the far end of which had fallen in. I remember one of my father’s friends swimming, despite the fact he had only one leg. B72. Near the corner where we enter the pool, I find what must have been a kind of slug. I tell my mother I have found a trilobite. She scornfully says trilobites are extinct, but I insist it is one. B73. There is a very shallow, sandy pool below the big one, where my sister and I play in the stream of water flowing out. A snake swims past us. These descriptions might help recognize the house, and I also dimly recalled that the short drive to Cherrywell began by going east on Wolfpits Road. Entering “Cher- rywell Bethel Connecticut” into Google did indeed identify some history. A 2007 obituary of Mary Elizabeth Page Hodgson included: “She and her family summered in Bethel in the family summer home ‘Cherrywell’ where she would meet her future husband Joseph.”22 A notice of her wedding in 1938 said the reception took place at Cherrywell, which suggests that her parents, John Randolph Page and Dorothy Dawson Page, might have still been the owners when the Sims family bought the property.23 Also, the obituary mentioned she had attended the Brearley School in New York city, the same school my mother had attended, and they were about the same age, which might have been the social basis of the purchase. However, I have found no online record that gives the exact address, and names like “Cherrywell” are often abandoned by new owners. I had heard both my mother and her sister refer to a place the Sims family had once had in the expensive resort of Bar Harbor, Maine, Aunt Audrey comically pronouncing it Bah Hahbah with an exaggerated Maine accent. I believe they said the family owned a summer home there, rather than merely renting, and the time period would have been Audrey’s childhood. A public Facebook group called Growing up in Bar Harbor has 2,325 members, but unlike Growing up in Monroe, searching for “Sims” turned up zero hits. Searching online newspapers revealed nothing. While

22www.legacy.com/obituaries/ctpost/obituary.aspx?n=mary-hodgson&pid=87716876&fhid= 4716. 23“Miss Mary E. Page is Married Today to Joseph Hidgson,” The New York Sun, June 1, 1938, p. 25. 9.4 A Family of Homes 291 land records report the names of property owners, the census is supposed to tally people at their primary homes, and many other records would not have connected a family to its summer house. I know that William and Mildred Sims owned a summer home in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, because I recall visiting it in 1945, when my father returned from Fort Riley, Kansas, where he trained cavalrymen in the late months of the Second World War. We probably visited more than once, and returned to Old Orchard a couple of times after they had sold the property, not merely for nostalgia but to enjoy the rather spectacular amusement park. I recall that the house was on stilts, and near the beach but perhaps not exactly at it. The only photographs I have date from a visit in the early 1950s, none apparently showing the house. An initial search in Facebook identified six public groups where I was allowed to search for “Sims,” but I found nothing. There were also three closed groups where I could not search, but they seemed oriented to the current activities of permanent residents. Table 9.2 lists the groups, to give a sense of how people in some communities are using social media. At this point in the history of social media, only unusual communities seem to have many groups oriented toward the history or social life of their town. All it takes is one interested person to set up a group, for example an elderly person feeling nostalgic or a young small-business person who hopes that gentle publicity will help their profit margin. Monroe is an example of how social tensions can generate active groups, but it is experiencing an unusual historical development. Old Orchard Beach is unusual in a different way, because it blends the standard New England interest in history with the publicity motives of a tourist spot. The rather spectacular website of the Old Orchard Beach Chamber of Commerce calls the place “Maine’s premier beach resort.”24 The Old Orchard Beach Historical Society has a physical museum, a website, and a Facebook page that is not a group but publishes news, such as in the winter of 2017–2018 a catalog of the museum’s huge collection of postcards.25 The picture atop the society’s Facebook page is an old photo of the famous Noah’s Ark fun house, which my family explored but that was destroyed by a catastrophic fire in 1969.26 The three closed groups in Table 9.2 serve the needs of permanent Old Orchard Beach residents, while some of the public groups are aimed at tourists, and others serve combined constituencies. Clearly, social media do not offer a complete and balanced record of society’s historical past, yet they can be used judiciously along with other resources to relive and to understand the context in which a family experienced is own much smaller history.

24oldorchardbeachmaine.com. 25www.harmonmuseum.org. 26www.lafﬁnthedark.com/articles/OOB/oob_1.htm. 292 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through …

Table 9.2 Facebook groups oriented to Old Orchard Beach, Maine, in June 2018 Group name Type Founded Members Description Old Orchard Beach, Maine Public About 9,069 A place to gather and remember 2008 or plan for your trip to Old Orchard Beach, Maine Old Orchard Beach Online Closed About 7,600 An online yard sale for Old Yard Sale 2014 Orchard Beach and the surrounding areas! Like most online yard sales sites but with out all the crazy rules! Sell your stuff from the comfort of your own home and meet awesome people Old Orchard Beach is Mainer Public About 2,671 Here’s to Old Orchard Beach!! 2006 OOB has created many memories that will last a lifetime. Please feel free to join, post pictures, videos, share your memories, ask questions, tell us about your favorite spots Old Orchard Beach Maine Public March 998 SUMMER HOUSE RENTAL Rental 8, 2015 I LOVE OLD ORCHARD Public Oct 21, 808 Share memories of OOB and BEACH MAINE 2014 plan new memories. NO advertisements or spam you will be deleted! Friends of Old Orchard Public June 6, 733 This group is for folks who love Beach, Maine 2013 and/or reside in Old Orchard Beach and would like to share local events, businesses and happenings within OOB such as: Upcoming Events, Local Businesses, Town Hall Notices, Photos, News. No Spam Old Orchard Beach, Maine Public Nov 11, 542 Events and plans 2017 OOB Athletics photos Closed About 158 This page is intended to share 2015 the photos of the amazing hard work, dedication and team spirit our kids have. IF YOU WOULD LIKE YOUR CHILDS PHOTOS REMOVED PLEASE EMAIL ME Residents of Old Orchard Closed About 77 A group dedicated to the Beach, Maine 2018 residents of OOB. A place for discussion, events, questions and more 9.5 Wikis of Fictional Families 293

9.5 Wikis of Fictional Families

However popular and culturally influential Facebook may be at the present time, it is also controversial and thus may represent only one kind of future social media of significance for family histories. Another is wikis, and Chap. 4 suggested creating family archives using this method. As Wikipedia defines the category to which it belongs, “A wiki is a website that provides collaborative modification of its content and structure directly from the web browser.”27 The first wiki software was created and named wiki in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, a half dozen years before the birth of Wikipedia (Isaacson 2015). As we point out in the case of HTML, while the technology was designed for use on the web, it can also be used to organize the contents of a private archive. Given the collective nature of wiki creation, on the WWW it can be considered a social medium. As Wikipedia says of a service unrelated to itself: “Wikia, also known as Fan- dom… hosts several hundred thousand wikis using the open-source wiki software MediaWiki.”28 Seeking an example very different from Facebook, keeping in mind the ideas presented in previous chapters and the privacy-related problems of citing current online examples, I searched Wikia.com and discovered that quite a number of them concern television series, including soap operas that emphasize family relations. These wikis may be influenced by the companies that produce the TV programs, yet are largely created by fans, who learn from each other and bring to their collective endeavor contemporary ideas about family life. I would certainly not argue that soap operas provide a better set of family-related topics and concepts than social science, yet a discerning family historian might achieve valuable insights from a brief examination of this field of popular culture. More realistically, scanning a diversity of wikis focused on fictional families may help prepare for the creation of a wiki related to a specific real family. In July 2018, a good starting point proved to be a decade-old amateur wiki proudly named The Soap Opera Wiki, which had 925 topic pages, although not all of them contained useful information. Pages about abstract topics were difficult to find, and there seemed to be two primary categories, programs and people. A pull-down menu listed this set: actors, actresses, characters, shows, writers. One page defines the genre:

A soap opera is an ongoing, episodic work of ﬁction, usually broadcast on television or radio. Programs described as soap operas have existed as an entertainment long enough for audiences to recognize them simply by the term “soap”. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers such as Procter and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Lever Brothers as the show’s sponsors. These early radio serials were broadcast in weekday daytime slots when mostly housewives would be available to listen; thus the shows were aimed at and consumed by a predominantly female audience.29

27en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki. 28en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikia. 29en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera. 294 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through …

The genre evolved in parallel with the electronic broadcast media, beginning with 15-minute radio programs in the 1930s, expanding to 30-minutes and later often a hour, moving to television and giving birth to a subgenre of hour-long evening soaps aimed at a wider audience. But the primary audience was women whose personal focus was on the home, so the stories emphasized the dynamics of family relationships. A 1972 statistical study by Natan Katzman, published in The Public Opinion Quarterly, confirmed: “The daytime serial audience is a reflection of the type of people who are home on weekday afternoons. Housewives form the majority of this group; preschool children and men over 50 add to the total; and a small number of school-age children and working-age men seem to be present because of vacations, unemployment, and illness” (Katzman 1972, p. 203). A good starting point for this preliminary survey is a page on the wiki called Category:Families that offers links to pages about the families in seven popular American soap operas, listed at the top of Table 9.3 along with data from July 4, 2018.30 The first one in the list, All My Children, has its own wiki with 122 pages, but also a page in Wikipedia. Table 9.3 includes data from the primary Wikipedia page describing each soap opera, and often there were several connected pages. For example, the Wikipedia page for All My Children reports it “is set in Pine Valley, Pennsylvania, a fictional suburb of Philadelphia, which is modeled on the actual Philadelphia suburb of Rosemont.”31 This TV show broadcast on the ABC network for 41 years, beginning in 1970, for a total of 10,712 episodes. The page was created July 6, 2002, so much of the material was posted while the show was still alive. In other research, I have found evidence that articles concerning commercial topics in Wikipedia often are created by people connected with the companies, but given the intense interest within fandom, it seems reasonable that most of the 2,192 identifiable editors were not merely promoting a product. Many statistics are available for Wikipedia pages, and this one had been viewed 368,567 times in the year prior to July 4, 2018. One of the linked articles was a biography of the now-deceased creator of the program, Agnes Nixon, which claims: “Nixon’s work as producer and writer introduced a number of new storylines to American daytime television - the first health-related storyline, the first storyline related to the Vietnam War, the first on-screen lesbian kiss and the first on-screen abortion. She won five Writers’ Guild of America Awards, five Daytime Emmy Awards, and in 2010 received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Nixon was often referred to as the ‘Queen’ of the modern American soap opera.”32 The All My Children page linked to other women, notably the prominent character Erica Kane and her actress Susan Lucci, both of whom lasted the full 41 years. The text on the Erica Kane Wikia page is almost identical to that on Wikipedia, analyzing the character as an archetype that evolved over the years. Initially she was a romantic rival, then became a chic suburbanite in this ontology that was popular in the late 1970s: “the chic suburbanite, the subtle single, the traditional family person, the

30soaps.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Families. 31en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_My_Children. 32en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Nixon. 9.5 Wikis of Fictional Families 295

Table 9.3 Representative soap operas with fandom wikis Soap opera Wikia Wikipedia pages Views Setting Featured in the soap opera wiki All My Children 122 368,567 Pine Valley, Pennsylvania, a fictional suburb of Philadelphia… modeled on… Rosemont Days of Our Lives 516 901,684 Middle- and upper-class professionals in Salem, a middle-America town General Hospital 682 716,089 A general hospital… in… fictional city… Port Charles, New York Guiding Light 230 224,056 The fictional towns of Five Points and Selby Flats before its final locale of Springfield One Life to Live 385 253,476 Ethnically and socioeconomically diverse characters and… social issues The Bold and the 429 515,266 Set in Los Angeles, California… fashion Beautiful house business The Young and the 749 639,832 A fictional Wisconsin town called Genoa Restless City Other noteworthy soap operas, broadly defined As the World Turns 52 213,933 Set in the fictional town of Oakdale, Illinois Coronation Street 21,791 989,939 Weatherfield, a fictional town based in inner-city Salford… British culture EastEnders 8,210 1,035,069 Set in Albert Square in the East End of London in the fictional Borough of Walford Emmerdale 12,937 523,825 A fictional village in the Yorkshire Dales… United Kingdom Dallas 334 466,065 A wealthy and feuding Texas family… cattle-ranching land of Southfork Game of Thrones 3,884 15,122,331 Set in the fictional Seven Kingdoms of Westeros and the continent of Essos successful professional, and the elegant socialite.” Drawing on a library of books that analyzed soap operas, both wikis say that fundamentally Erica Kane belonged to the bitch goddess archetype: “The archetype is an assertive Cinderella who goes after material things. This was a change from the heroines of the radio soap operas who waited to be rescued by men. As the bitch goddess, Erica started out as ‘a conniving teenage vixen’ and transformed into ‘the femme fatale incarnate.’ The 296 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through … characters in this category are outrageous, exaggerated, financially disadvantaged and determined to change that.”33 We might immediately wonder whether it would be acceptable to place real family members of the past into archetypes, given the shameful association with stereotyp- ing. Lucy Seaman Bainbridge in the 1870s was certainly not a 1970s bitch goddess, yet if the religious metaphor were shifted from polytheism marked by lascivious goddesses to Christianity marked by chaste saints, we might see parallels. Both she and her husband, William Folwell Bainbridge, sought not merely spiritual tran- scendence, but substantial increase in earthly social status, gaining what I called a prophet’s reward in an earlier publication (Bainbridge 2002). Academic psychology has concocted its own set of archetypes, notably the Big Five personality dimensions, yet after many decades of research both their methods and results remain in doubt (Bainbridge 2014, 2017). Applying soap opera archetypes could disrupt the development of a family history, as living family members were drawn into emotional debates, yet if reconceptualized as milder dimensions of variation, the popular soap concepts may appropriately express aspects of the culture in which modern families live. An example of how radio and television soaps express real aspects of our shared culture, we can consider Guiding Light. Its Wikipedia page says, “The series was created by Irna Phillips, who based it on personal experiences. After giving birth to a still-born baby at age 19, she found spiritual comfort listening to the radio sermons of Preston Bradley, a famous Chicago preacher and founder of the People’s Church, a church which promoted the brotherhood of man. These sermons originated the idea of the creation of The Guiding Light, which began as a radio series… starting on January 25, 1937.”34 The Irna Phillips page offers more of the personal background: “Phillips was one of 10 children born to a German Jewish family in Chicago. Her father died when she was 8, leaving her mother alone to raise the children. She claimed to be a lonely child always given hand-me-down clothes and making up long and involved stories for her dolls to live out.”35 In competition with Agnes Nixon, Irna Phillips was often called “Queen of the soaps,” and we should note that the word queen refers not only to a powerful position, but to a family relationship. A website named Old Radio Shows calls Phillips the “Mother of the Soap Opera,” creating the first daytime US soap opera program, Painted Dreams, that first broadcast October 20, 1930.36 Guiding Light broadcast fully 18,262 episodes, first on radio and then TV, and one of the other soaps created by Irna Phillips, As the World Turns, achieved 13,858 episodes.37 The 6 soap operas listed at the bottom of Table 9.3 did not happen to be among those listed on the Category:Families page of the wiki where we started. The specialized wikis for three British programs have very large numbers of pages: Coronation

33allmychildren.wikia.com/wiki/Erica_Kane. 34en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guiding_Light. 35en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irna_Phillips. 36en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painted_Dreams. 37en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_the_World_Turns. 9.5 Wikis of Fictional Families 297

Street, EastEnders, Emmerdale. It may be their style and world-wide audiences attract better educated or more dedicated fans, interested in devoting time and effort in contributing to the wikis. This might presage variations in the degree of contributor commitment of members of real families to their historical wikis. Returning to the issue of archetypes, the prime-time soap opera Dallas served a wider audience than the day-time soaps, defining its characters largely in terms of their relationships to each other, and to the “iconic” villain, J. R. Ewing. On the home page of the Dallas Wikia wiki, visitors were asked to vote for their favorite characters, and by July 7, 2018, 1,060 people had voted, placing 5 Ewings at the top of the list, four of them being men: J. R. Ewing (360 votes): One of the show’s most iconic figures, J. R. has been central to many of the series’ biggest storylines. He is depicted as a covetous, egocentric, manipulative and amoral oil baron with psychopathic tendencies, who is constantly plotting subterfuges to plunder his foes and their wealth. J. R. Ewing is considered one of television’s most popular characters, with TV Guide naming him #1 in their 2013 list of The 60 Nastiest Villains of All Time.38 John Ross Ewing III (259 votes): He seems conniving and diabolical, but within that layer, the character John Ross is very complicated, he wants his birthright of course, but also his father’s approval. And most of all someone at his side, since his parents neglected him most of his life, and people branding him as being as evil as his father.39 Christopher Ewing (129 votes): Christopher Ewing was the adopted son of Pamela Barnes Ewing and Bobby Ewing. His biological parents were Jeff Farraday and Kristin Shepard, the sister-in-law of J. R. Ewing, who J. R. had also had an affair with… Ever since childhood, Christopher was keenly aware that he was adopted, and his cousin John Ross was always eager to remind him that he wasn’t a “real Ewing.” Growing up, he was the softer temperament to that of John Ross, who frequently used Christopher as a scapegoat for his shenanigans.40 Bobby Ewing (86 votes): Bobby was said to be spoiled by his father Jock Ewing and was to be his father’s favorite son. This caused rivalry between him and his mean-spirited older brother J. R. His mother favored the middle son Gary Ewing. His father also had another son, Ray Krebbs, from an affair he had during World War II.41 Sue Ellen Ewing (70 votes): Sue Ellen Ewing was raised by a single mother, Patricia Shepard, with one sister, Kristin. She was raised to be the perfect wife for a wealthy Texan man, and went to University of Texas, was invited to join all the sororities but pledged one, and was part of the cheerleading team. She was also Miss Texas in the Miss America pageant. She married J. R. Ewing in 1970, after meeting him when he was a judge at one of her pageants. They divorced in 1981, and their marriage was always miserable for Sue Ellen, due to the fact that J. R. constantly had affairs, and rarely showed any interest in her.42 The last television series in Table 9.3 may not seem to be a soap opera at all, but a fantasy adventure show set not in a realistic fictional place like Pine Valley, Pennsylvania, or a specific real place like Dallas, Texas, but in a strange world containing dragons. However Game of Thrones has often been called a soap opera,

38dallas.wikia.com/wiki/J.R._Ewing. 39dallas.wikia.com/wiki/John_Ross_Ewing_III. 40dallas.wikia.com/wiki/Christopher_Ewing. 41dallas.wikia.com/wiki/Bobby_Ewing. 42dallas.wikia.com/wiki/Sue_Ellen_Ewing. 298 9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through … not by its creators or sponsors, but by online critics.43 The author of the series of novels on which the program is based, George R. R. Martin, began his career as a writer of science fiction, but I surmise that the decline in popularity of that literary genre, and the increasing implausibility of the hopes for interstellar travel in the real universe, encouraged him to move over to fantasy. But the social structure of the competing factions is feudal, and much of the action is based on intense conflicts among or between members of elite families. The wiki is exceedingly well organized, as well as possessing thousands of pages, so there is no need to summarize the intricate and dynamic family relations here.44 Coincidentally but aptly, when I searched it for the term “family,” not only did I get links to pages about many fictional feudal families, but also a link to Wikia’s huge real-world genealogy project, Familypedia, which had 242,652 articles.45

9.6 Conclusion

While public wikis can provide ideas, information and technical experience for family historians, as in the case of Facebook, family history digital libraries should probably be private, with control over who can contribute the material, and perhaps a larger number allowed to see the information. In some of these media, it may be both efﬁcient and comfortable to set up a parallel set of archives. For example, Baili- wick Archives intentionally combined lines in the Bainbridge and Sims families, yet included two Wheeler memoirs mentioned in Chaps. 4 and 6. Logically, there should be a separate Facebook group for descendants of that Wheeler family, call it Cotton Blossoms, having some membership interlocks with Bailiwick Archives. A very signiﬁcant branch of the extended family is the Angus McIntosh heritage mentioned in Chap. 3, so it would be logical for there to be a secret McIntosh family history Facebook group, call it Blacket Archives. However, other options exist and might prove superior. I had uploaded to the discussion area of the Facebook group a photograph I had taken of Angus at work at his desk at his home, Blacket Place, in 1965, thereby sharing it with his descendants. They, in turn, had uploaded a photo of a Top Secret Ultra code cracking document dated December 22, 1944, titled Dragon Report No. 10, in which he had informed the leadership at Bletchley: “1. Production. 8 messages broken out of a total of 12 run. The dottage of the messages run was low. Our great trouble at the moment is lack of material to run at all. 2. There has been very little mechanical trouble.” “Dragon” was the name of the technology he was using to crack the German code; “dottage” was a technical term used with the Dragon machine, and we shared a recent journal article about that historical stage in the development of cryptography

43Todd Van Der Werff, “Game of Thrones is TV’s Biggest, Bloodiest Soap Opera,” www.vox.com/ culture/2017/8/10/16114482/game-of-thrones-soap-opera. 44gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Game_of_Thrones_Wiki. 45familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Family_History_and_Genealogy_Wiki. 9.6 Conclusion 299 that reported: “The operation of Dragon 1 can be tracked in a series of weekly activity reports issued by Capt. Angus McIntosh (1914–2005)… McIntosh was a cryptanalyst in the Testery, and seems to have been the sole or main user of Dragon. In civilian life he was a medievalist and historical linguist, and was Professor at Edinburgh University, 1948–1979” (Reeds 2010, p. 34). Given how much information about Angus also exists online from the University of Edinburgh, we may wonder if a better choice would be to ignore Facebook, start from the university, and build a network of links connecting many different forms of online information that would include his ancestors as well as descendants.

References

Anderson N (1923) The hobo. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Bainbridge WF (1874) Weddings at the parsonage. In: The Delta Upsilon: an annual containing the records, oration, and poem, of the thirty-eighth annual convention of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, Amherst College. Henry M. McCloud, Printer and Bookbinder, Amherst, pp 40–56 Bainbridge LS (1897) Mothers of the submerged world. In: The work and words of the national congress of mothers. D. Appleton, New York, pp 47–55 Bainbridge WS (1909) Life’s day. Frederick A. Stokes, New York Bainbridge WS (2000) New technologies for the social sciences. In: Renaud M (ed) Social sciences for a digital world. Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, Paris, pp 111–126 Bainbridge WS (2002) A prophet’s reward: dynamics of religious exchange. In: Jelen TG (ed) Sacred markets, sacred canopies. Rowman and Littleﬁeld, Lanham, Maryland, pp 63–89 Bainbridge WS (2014) Personality capture and emulation. Springer, London Bainbridge WS (2017) Dynamic secularization. Springer, London Hoekstra VJ (2000) The Supreme Court and local public opinion. Am Political Sci Rev 94(1):89–100 Isaacson W (2015) The innovators. Simon and Schuster, New York Katzman N (1972) Television soap operas: what’s been going on anyway? Public Opin Q 36(2):200–212 Pierce FC (1899) Foster genealogy. W. B. Conkey, Chicago, p 604 Reeds J (2010) American dragon. Cryptologia 35(1):22–41 Smith PF, Grabau JC, Werzberger A, Gunn RA, Rolka HR, Kondracki SF, Gallo RJ, Morse DL (1997) The role of young children in a community-wide outbreak of hepatitis A. Epidemiol Infect 118(3):243–252 Swaine LA (2001) How ought liberal democracies to treat theocratic communities? Ethics 111(2):302–343 Whyte WF (1943) Street corner society. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Chapter 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History

Abstract A challenge for any form of family history is the mortality of its creators, and thus the perishability of any archive maintained by members of the family it concerns. Plausibly, some kinds of community archive might have much greater longevity, and thus we should seek ways to integrate family histories into community histories. A pioneering example of a large-scale community history archive is the Valley of the Shadow, a digital archive developed 1993–2007 at the University of Vir- ginia, offering substantial data and documents for the period 1859–1870 concerning two counties that were on opposite sides during the American Civil War. The inequal- ity of traditional historical accounts is demonstrated by the paucity of information available about the African-American population from that period, but also exhibited for most Americans of that era who were neither rich nor well-educated, let alone free. While there is ample reason to criticize elites for publicizing their lives at the expense of everybody else, often the elite adopt new technologies earlier than others can afford them, and thus serve as explorers for the rest of us. An admirable example is the oral history project developed over the past half century by the libraries in Greenwich, Connecticut, at the time of this writing containing more than 950 interviews and 138 books. A related example is the set of Facebook groups for alumni of the town’s public schools, and a 2001 website for one graduating class. The chapter discusses the durability of communities, drawing upon the “Middletown” studies of Muncie, Indiana, that have continued since 1924, and outlines approaches that could help establish a new profession of family historian, building upon the earlier profession of genealogist but incorporating social science and employing information technology. The book ends with consideration of a research agenda that could develop a much richer concept of family history, not only preserving and memorializing our ancestors, but also giving our own lives today a greater meaning.

There are several ways in which a digitized record of family history could be usefully connected to a larger archive serving an entire community. Most simply, the historian assembling the family archive could add links to external material describing the social environment in which they lived. More controversially because of privacy concerns, a community archive could link to the family archive, allowing visitors

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 301 W. S. Bainbridge, Family History Digital Libraries, Human–Computer Interaction Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01063-8_10 302 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History to explore more deeply one component of that community. If the two harmonized well, the living community could take on the responsibility of preserving the family archives, which might solve the family instability problem confronted throughout this book. The result could be of great educational beneﬁt, allowing local school teachers to customize their lessons and homework assignments so that students would be learning about past decades and centuries that connected directly to their own lives today. This chapter will consider some of the realistic opportunities and potential problems by examining a range of existing digital community archives, with some thoughts about how they might be extended and applied to family history.

10.1 The Valley of the Shadow

We shall begin considering how family archives can be connected to community archives with an historical example containing data a century and a half old, before moving to a much more recent example in the following section. This will provide some background concerning how community archives can be structured, while also looking at examples in which people experienced very different lives, often ruined by conﬂict and disaster, that fragmented families as well as the information about them. This case especially illustrates the Historic Wall that prevents us from learning about all our ancestors because their information did not survive, and prevents many people of the past from becoming ancestors of today’s living families, because death or other tragedies intervened. The most coherent pioneering digital collection of diverse and meaningful historical records from particular communities in the United States is almost certainly the Valley of the Shadow, a digital archive developed 1993–2007 at the University of Vir- ginia under the leadership of Edward Ayers, offering substantial data and documents for the period 1859–1870 concerning two counties that were on opposite sides during the American Civil War (Kornblith 2001). The “valley” in question has multiple meanings. The two communities were not geographically adjacent, but both are in the Great Appalachian Valley; the southern one is in that section called Shenandoah Valley, and the northern in Cumberland Valley. But the archive’s name also refers to a passage in Psalm 23: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” In a more modern sense, the archive is a bridge across the valley separating paper from digital history, offering: …primary sources that document the lives of people in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, during the era of the American Civil War. Here you may explore thousands of original documents that allow you to see what life was like during the Civil War for the men and women of Augusta and Franklin… The Full Valley Archive is divided into three main sections. The Eve of War section contains all the material that comes from the fall of 1859 to the spring of 1861, giving access to information on what life was like in the counties immediately before the war. The War Years section contains all the material from the years of the Civil War itself, covering the spring of 1861 until the spring of 1865. The Aftermath section contains the records of people’s lives in Augusta and Franklin from 10.1 The Valley of the Shadow 303

the late spring of 1865 until the fall of 1870, as they tried to rebuild the counties after the end of the war.1 Today, of course, there are many online information sources about these communities, one starting point being their Wikipedia pages. The Virginia county includes the towns of Staunton and Waynesboro, but following Virginia’s standard govern- mental structure both are formally separate from the county. The Pennsylvania county includes Chambersburg. As of October 2017, both the Staunton and Chambersburg Wikipedia pages link to Valley of the Shadow, but the Waynesboro and two county pages do not. All five pages cover many topics, and the Civil War is given brief coverage, but together they report that both areas suffered death and destruction. The Waynesboro page links the past to the present: “The Battle of Waynesboro lasted only 20 minutes, and was a final blow for the Confederate Army in the Shenandoah Valley… Some of the buildings from this period still show their scars from this battle. During and after the War, casualties from the nearby Valley Campaign and other battles were buried in Ridgeview Cemetery. The Waynesboro Confederate Monument in the center of the cemetery lists and commemorates their names and states.”2 The Wikipedia page for this town’s county explains: During the Civil War, Augusta County served as an important agricultural center as part of the “Breadbasket of the Confederacy.” The Virginia Central Railroad ran through the county, linking the Shenandoah Valley to the Confederate capital at Richmond. One of the bloodiest engagements fought in the Shenandoah Valley took place on June 5, 1864 at the Battle of Piedmont, a Union victory that allowed the Union Army to occupy Staunton and destroy many of the facilities that supported the Confederate war effort. Augusta County suffered again during General Philip H. Sheridan’s “Burning,” which destroyed many farms and killed virtually all of the farm animals.3 Wikipedia pages for towns and counties usually link to their official websites, and the one for Franklin County includes a rather well designed if superficial dynamic timeline of its history, saying this about the period 1861–1865: With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Franklin County immediately responded by recruiting hundreds of soldiers to fight in long struggle. Due to its proximity to the Mason- Dixon line, Franklin County witnessed numerous raids by Confederate troops. Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart led a raid in October 1862 in Franklin County to destroy the railroad bridge in Scotland, seize supplies, and cutting telegraph lines. In June 1863, Corporal William Rihl became the first Union soldier killed on Pennsylvania soil and north of the Mason-Dixon line. Chambersburg served as a staging area in the buildup to the Battle of Gettysburg as 60,000 Confederate troops camped in and around the town in the weeks leading up to the battle.4 These brief summaries suggest one reason why these two counties were selected for the Valley of the Shadow, namely that both had suffered directly in the war. Another reason was that they also represented two very different socio-economic

1valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/usingvalley/valleyguide.htm. 2en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waynesboro,_Virginia. 3en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusta_County,_Virginia. 4franklincountypa.gov/history/. 304 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History systems before the war. The 1860 Augusta census reports 21,046 named White residents, 205 Blacks, and 378 mixed-race Mulattos.5 There were also 5,616 unnamed slaves, at a time when Virginia as a whole held 490,865, and Pennsylvania, 0.6 Franklin had 40,337 Whites, 1,222 Blacks, and 566 Mulattos, all free. The Valley of the Shadow illustrates not merely the preservation of historical documents, but also their organization. The main icon for the website looks like the map of three floors of a museum, one for each of the three periods of time covered, and each room representing some form of data. For example, the first floor includes a room for the 1860 census and tax data, the second floor has a room at the same location for comparable soldier’s records, and the third floor of the virtual museum has a room for the 1870 census data that also contains veteran’s records. Here are some categories into which the records were organized: letters and diaries, newspapers, maps and images, tax records, and church records. The form of the archive is what is commonly called stovepipes, which Wikipedia defines as “a structure which largely or entirely restricts the flow of information within the organisation to up-down through lines of control, inhibiting or preventing cross-organisational communication.”7 Each section has a home page and often a search tool that looks only at the content of the category represented as that section. True, the 1860 and 1870 census data use the same search page, but one cannot search both censuses simultaneously. This structure differs significantly from the hyperlink-based structure described in the context of family wikis in Chap. 4. Both have their advantages, and they can be combined. For example, a family wiki can link to a particular results page in the archive, at the same time it links to a totally different data sources, such as the manuscript schedules of the census. To give some sense of how a family whose ancestors had lived in one of the counties could link back, I searched through the Augusta census of 1870 for a family name that happened to give a range of results, settling on 15 non-white people with the last name Minor. Primarily using The Valley of the Shadow, I also found it useful to search for particular individuals in Ancestry.com. The reason for emphasizing 1870 rather than 1860 is that most non-whites in Augusta at the earlier census were slaves and thus lacked names in the records. A few were “free” however (Stuckert 1993). Some indication of how strange record-keeping concerning slavery was, compared to the methods today that seem so logical to us, is the Free Black Registry for Augusta County, with records covering 1803–1865. On November 24, 1856 three members of a Minor family were registered as free, with this remarkable text, in which scars seem a primary method of identification:

No 422 Wesley Minor of dark color aged thirty six years ﬁve feet and three fourth inches high a scar above his right eye and another on the little ﬁnger of his right hand and was born free in Augusta County.

5valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/govdoc/fblack.late.html. 6valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/govdoc/censi/CDAT20.html. 7en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stovepipe_(organisation). 10.1 The Valley of the Shadow 305

No 423 Elizabeth Minor of dark complexion aged thirty two years feet 4/8 inch high, a small scar on her nose & one on the first finger of the left hand and was born free in Augusta County. No 424 Martha Minor of dark complexion, aged twenty five years 5 feet 7 inches high, a scar on the first finger of the left hand and was born free in Augusta County.8 A Martha Minor does appear in the census of free residents in 1860, but in fact there are two Martha Minors, living separately, so it is impossible to connect the records confidently. The Civil War not only ended slavery, but marked the beginning of a difficult process in which the organization of farm land in large plantations gradually disintegrated in the former Confederate states, not quickly offering former slaves a real opportunity to become independent farmers (Ruef 2004). Social historians have examined whether “mixed-race” Mulattos experienced any different opportunities from Blacks, with complex findings (Gullickson 2010). Thus, without authentic information about a specific family, our ability to know how it coped with those difficult years is extremely limited. We cannot often be sure if survivors of slavery with the same last name living in the same locality were members of the same family. In 1870, Sarah Minor, age 20, was one of five African-American “domestic servants” in the large household of a prosperous white lawyer, Ann Minor, age 13, was living with a white farmer family named Baylor, which consisted of a couple with four small children. The manuscript census form indicated she could neither read nor write and had the occupation of “domestic service.” Nannie M. Minor, age 17, had a similar position in a slightly smaller white farmer’s family. Edward Minor, age 14, was employed as a “farm laborer” just two houses down from where Nannie lived, so we may guess they were sister and brother—but of course cannot be sure. John minor, also age 14 and a farm laborer working for a white family, lived in the same general area, called Fishersville. Charlotte Minor, age 32, and David Minor, age 3, were living with an African-American couple and their two small children, the 47-year-old husband being a “farm laborer.” The 1870 census shows William Minor, age 70, a farmer, living with Hannah Minor, age 75, and Ann Minor, age 35. William and Hannah were the only ones of these 15 Minors from the 1870 census also found in the 1860 census, where their ages are given as 66 and 70, implying that their ages were just estimates, and they already were among the few non-whites who were free before the war began. That accounts for 10 of the 15 Minors found in 1870, leaving a family of five headed by Albert, age 43, and Minerva, age 37. The census manuscript says neither could read or write, but it reports that Albert had what must have been a skilled profession at the time, tobacconist. Their three children, ages 11 to 16, are listed as employed in a “tobacco factory,” while their mother is “housekeeping.” Looking at the full page of the census on which the data were written indicates that three adults in the two adjacent households also worked in a “tobacco factory.” Was Albert building a successful tobacco business? Perhaps not, unless another part of the 1870 census had simply ignored him. A separate dataset lists all the manufacturing businesses, and two “tobacco” businesses were in the same area as the home of Albert and

8valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/govdoc/fblack.late.html. 306 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History

Minerva. One named Sara and Timberlake had 11 male workers, 1 female worker, and 4 children workers, so it might have employed the Minor family. The other, belonging to John B. Evans, had 12 male workers. Searching the regular census by occupation turned up 15 tobacconists, all in the same district, including Morris Sara, J. Lewis Timberlake, John B. Evans and Albert Minor. Of the 15 tobacconists, only two were Black, Albert Minor and Andrew Jackson. The 1880 census of Staunton includes an Albert Minor of about the right age, working apparently as a laborer for a hotel, with no other members of his family. It is hazardous to read much into these limited data, and we must not impose unrealistic expectations for people of the past, especially those who have just been freed from life-long oppression. Today, someone who believed that an ancestor with the name Minor or Miner lived near Staunton around the time of the Civil War, with investment of great effort visiting local archives might be able to write the true history of Albert, Minerva and the others. But until they upload the information they gathered into a durable archive connected in some way to the Valley of the Shadow, we cannot learn more online. As a very successful literary distillation of his research, Edward Ayers published a book, In The Presence of Mine Enemies, that took its title from the passage in Psalm 23 immediately after “the valley of the shadow of death.” Among the meanings that this title may convey, is that many slaves somehow survived dominance by their slaveholder enemies, gaining freedom while perhaps 600,000 people were losing their lives in the war, even experiencing a variety of lives themselves before the conﬂict. Although the names of slaves were not recorded in the 1860 census, a special tally was done of slave owners, determining how many each owned and how they were employed. Early in his book, Ayers explained that slavery was much more fully integrated in complex ways into the local economy, and even into the national economy that included the northern states, than we might have imagined. Slaves were not merely household servants and farm laborers: About one slave out of ten worked for a white person other than his or her owner. A diverse group of whites hired out their slaves: female heads of households, heirs of estates, trustees, businesses, and corporations as well as small planters. And a diverse group of people employed those slaves: people who needed a cook or a domestic, a farmer clearing new land, or a family dealing with sickness. Some of the largest businesses of Augusta hired slaves. The Virginia Central Railroad hired from twelve different owners, as did the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Institute and the Western Lunatic Asylum (Ayers 2003). The Staunton census records include lists of all the inmates of the Institute and the Asylum, but checking some of the names indicated that the Valley database does not count them among the residents of the town. Thus the slaves and the future soldiers were not the only people living in Augusta County prior to the Civil War whose future family connections were in doubt. Of the people living in the Institute, 59 were recorded as being blind, of various ages, and 98 were deaf and dumb, largely teenagers. Naturally, we cannot be sure exactly what diagnoses let alone treatments people with similar disabilities would receive today. The phrase “deaf and dumb” usually means deaf from an early age or so totally deaf that speech is impossible, but in 1860 it could have included people who suffered from intellectual disabilities. 10.1 The Valley of the Shadow 307

Labels matter, as Dr. Will learned while carrying out his duty to identify which inmates at New York City Children’s Hospital and Schools on Randall’s Island were “feeble minded” around the year 1900. During one of the examinations, a little boy who was blind and nearly deaf turned to him and said in the most pathetic manner, “Please, Mister, don’t let them call me an idiot!” (Bainbridge 1909). In the middle of the twentieth century, the term “mentally retarded” was favored, but it is now going out of style. The online Urban Dictionary gives “retardation” replacing “idiot” as the best example of a euphemism treadmill, “The process by which a pejorative term is replaced by a more politically correct term, only to over time be corrupted and used pejoratively itself until a new term is introduced, upon which the cycle repeats itself.”9 For whatever reason, terminology changes over time, and in doing history we often need to understand alternative meanings of terms. Checking the 1860 slave owner database revealed that 45 slaves worked for the Western Lunatic Asylum, 15 men and 30 women. Of the total, 31 were described as “Black” and 14 were “Mulatto,” although that does not really tell us what fraction of slaves’ ancestry was European versus African. One of the male Black slaves working in the Asylum belonged to its director, Dr. Francis Taliaferro Stribling, about whom we know a vast amount, although his slave remains nameless. In Find A Grave, I could find no burial record for Albert and Minerva Minor, while Stribling’s page includes his portrait and links to pages for his parents, wife, four children, and fully ten siblings.10 Rather amazingly, an archive in far-away Kansas has posted online 129 images and transcribed texts of letters Stribling had received: “A few of the letters are from county sheriffs and other local officials who have confined lunatics in their jails and want to send them to the asylum; most of the letters are from family members of individuals who are, should be, or have been in the asylum.”11 They are part of an historical psychiatry collection. As it happens, back in the early 1980s I had used the 1860 census data from the Western Lunatic Asylum and 16 other mental hospitals in a research study of the psychiatric ideology of the mid-nineteenth century (Bainbridge 1984). To summarize it briefly, the standard theory held that insanity was the result of a nervous breakdown, in which a person with a naturally weak nervous system suffered intensely stressful life events. This theory promoted the building of asylums, because they could provide the stress-free environment in which the insane person could recover, as with the slow healing of a major wound to the body. Early statistical studies seem to indicate that this asylum therapy worked, because many people were discharged from the asylums. But later research was far more pessimistic, and by around 1880 the asylums had become explicitly custodial institutions, with little hope that inmates would recover. What made the 1860 census records of 17 asylums interesting was that for 2,258 inmates they listed the stressful factor believed to have precipitated the nervous breakdown. The 1850 census had marked the beginning of new efforts to collect social data, and prior to that year the US census recorded names only of heads of household.

9www.urbandictionary.com/deﬁne.php?term=euphemism%20treadmill. 10www.ﬁndagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=23352150. 11www.kansasmemory.org/item/223261. 308 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History

Among the common supposed causes of insanity listed in the 1860 record for the Western Lunatic Asylum were “intemperance” (alcoholism), “religious excitement,” and “death of husband.” While the online archive does not consider residents of the Institute and Asylum to be members of the Staunton community, after the war another set of institutions arose to house another set of problematic people: seriously disabled soldiers. During my work with the census microfilms in the early 1980s, I had come across the National Military Home in Dayton, Ohio, and became aware that Abraham Lincoln had authorized its construction, as a website of the National Park Service reports: “As the campus grew, it eventually covered 627 acres, complete with living quarters, hospital, library, and chapel. It was constructed in part using lumber recycled from the nearby Camp Chase where Confederate POWs had been confined. By 1884, the Dayton Soldiers’ Home, as it became known, had become the largest of its kind in operation, accounting for 64% of the veterans receiving U.S. government institutional care. Dayton’s veteran population reflected the diversity found in the Union Army, including black veterans, whom the Dayton Home was the first federal institution to admit.”12 Veterans of the Union army received support, while disabled veterans of the Confederate army received little, until their own states had recovered sufficiently to take care of them.13 I mentioned the National Military Home in a 1992 textbook on computer-assisted sociological research methods, reporting that the 1880 census listed nearly 3,500 inmates, but also “a dramatic company of 16 actors and musicians was at the home to provide entertainment” (Bainbridge 1992). At some time in the future, we can imagine a system of online archives, each carefully backed up with durable and secure offline information repositories, that would connect The Valley of the Shadow to every other relevant community archive, including much smaller archives or online communities created by particular families. Already, genealogists are transitioning toward a newer and more complex profession that would be significant economically as well as socially. For example, an individual Ohio genealogist named Carolyn Johnson Burns set up a section of her website as a set of links concerning the National Military Home.14 In advertising her service, she expressed a viewpoint that seems quite genuine and indicative of a common path to this new profession:

As a 6th generation Ohioan, Carolyn Johnson Burns’ family roots go back to 1805 in Mont- gomery County, Ohio. To quote Carolyn: “They say genealogy is a disease. The ‘bug’ bit me in the early 1990’s, midway between celebrating my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary and my father’s 80th birthday. I suppose it was either a sense of my own mortality or that of the Johnson name that made me want to know about those who came before me. In any event, I began the process of researching my own family tree that will continue the rest of

12www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/115dayton/115facts1.ht. 13en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Home_for_Disabled_Volunteer_Soldiers, www.archives.gov/ publications/prologue/2004/spring/soldiers-home.html, www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/ 2004/spring/nhdvs-sidebar3.html. 14www.carolynjburns.com/soldiers. 10.1 The Valley of the Shadow 309

my life.” Carolyn’s personal genealogy has led her to a passion for helping others who are also searching for ancestors and descendants.15

However, as we have seen throughout this book, traditional genealogical methods using old archives are only part of the challenge. Even more signiﬁcant in the long run will be capture and documentation of new information, including interviewing family members about family relations and living conditions early in their lives. A parallel project at the University of Virginia, called Race and Place, explored the impact of anti-minority or “Jim Crow” laws in the university’s home town, Charlottesville, Virginia, covering the period beginning in 1880 and including oral histories recorded in 1980 and afterward.16 The Library of Congress offers a rather limited set of oral history interviews with former slaves.17 Thus, we should set aside our natural interest in the distant past, and come closer to the present day, in projects that can suggest how family historians can connect to larger communities.

10.2 The Greenwich History Projects

Among the most extensive oral history projects concerning a particular town, the one organized by the public library in Greenwich, Connecticut, is an especially good case to consider: “a collection of interviews with people who have helped to make or witnessed the history of Greenwich, Connecticut, since 1890. To date, the collection contains more than 950 interviews and 138 books. The entire collection is available at the Greenwich Library, as well as the Cos Cob and Byram branches, and Perrot Memorial Library.”18 Note that this project is not primarily digital, and we can hypothesize several reasons that might apply in other cases, whether or not they do in this one: 1. The project enhances the prestige of the library and thus must be accessed at the four public branches in the town. 2. An emphasis on printed books and archived paper records ensures greater durability, plausibly preserving the history for centuries, while any online service is almost certainly ephemeral. 3. While the cost of websites is low, an extensive online archive would require signiﬁcant labor, while sale of the books pays for their cost of production. 4. Privacy is a complex issue today, and online publication of the interviews would permit nasty people to copy, alter, and criticize them in ways harmful to the people who were interviewed.

15www.carolynjburns.com/about_me. 16www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/raceandplace/oralhistory_main.html. 17memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices/. 18www.glohistory.org. 310 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History

5. The project serves the residents of the town, rather than the world at large, and remains their cultural property so long as it primarily exists within the borders of Greenwich. Greenwich is a very unusually prosperous town, so on the one hand the content of its archives and their audience will be atypical, but on the other hand it has the resources to explore history to an unusual depth, providing role-model examples that later archives in different towns can elect to imitate, or not, as they themselves decide. Formally organized in 1640, Greenwich has a long history by American standards. In 1964, it was the subject of an early NSF-funded sociological survey: “Respondents were asked to describe persons to whom they talked about local affairs, outside of those within their own immediate family or household (Linn 1967).” Not surprisingly, they tended to talk with people very similar to themselves, even within their own subcommunity, of the twelve named subcommunities that constituted the town. The portion of Connecticut’s “Gold Coast” closest to New York City, Greenwich is one of the richest communities in the world, and thus of special interest to social scientists today, because most towns that have been studied by academics lack avenues for understanding the socio-cultural dynamics of the economic “elite.”19 This point raises an issue encountered throughout this book, namely whether family histories are ways through which members of the elite can promote their already high status, or should become a standard feature of popular culture in which all families can participate equally. The fact that we have just considered the heritage of people who were downtrodden long ago suggests that looking at an elite today provides useful contrast. One page of the project’s website consists of a huge table listing the first 888 oral history interviews, that began in earnest in 1974. One way to explore and communicate the scope of the interviews is to consider the topics used to index them, and then seek other sources of information that logically should be linked to them if the interviews were provided online. Looking through the full set, I noticed that some interviews discussed unusual weather events the town had experienced, including the Great New England Hurricane of 1938. Wikipedia describes it thus: “It is estimated that the hurricane killed 682 people… It remains the most powerful and deadliest hurricane in recorded New England history, eclipsed in landfall intensity perhaps only by the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635.”20 I had personally experienced the fierce hurricanes of 1954, Carol and Edna, recalling that older residents claimed they could not compare with the 1938 storm.21 Table 10.1 extracts the information from the online table concerning interviews that significantly concerned that hurricane. The Greenwich Oral History Project uses the term narrator for the person being interviewed, and a few of the records concern lectures the narrator gave, rather than responses to an interviewer’s questions. The subjects column names several

19en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Coast_(Connecticut); Nina Munk, “Greenwich’s Outrageous For- tune,” Vanity Fair, July 17, 2006, www.vanityfair.com/news/2006/07/greenwich200607. 20en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_New_England_hurricane. 21en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Atlantic_hurricane_season. 10.2 The Greenwich History Projects 311

Table 10.1 Oral history interviews that described the Great Hurricane of 1938 Narrator Interviewer Interview Title Date Subjects Harry M. Gertrude M. Recollections of June 29, Cos Cob; History; Lounsbury Reinhart Cos Cob; Life 1974 Strickland Road; Cos by the Landing Cob Fire Department; 1938 Hurricane William Marge Curtis Island Beach April 9, Boating & Sailing; Erdmann 1975 Island Beach Ferry; Transportation; Islands; Island Beach; Parks; World War II; Army; Paciﬁc; Weather & Disasters; 1938 Hurricane; 1955 Storm; Ice Paul Pierson Barbara The 1938 April Riverside; Old Palmer Ornstein hurricane in 16, Greenwich; Willowmere 1975 Willowmere; Weather & Disasters; 1938 Hurricane Vincetta Esther H. Smith 1955 ﬂood in NovemberPemberwick; Byram Siclari Pemberwick 25, River; Ethnic Groups; 1975 Italians; Weather & Disasters; 1955 Hurricane & Flood; 1938 Hurricane John J. Penny Bott Pemberwick; June 11, Pemberwick; Sorrento Haughwout Town Hall 1985 Corporations; Russell, custodian Burdsall & Ward; American Felt Company; Ethnic Groups; Italians; Central Fire Department; Parks; Greenwich Town Government; Town Hall; Public Works Department; Merchants; Cohen Brothers; Prohibition & Alcohol; Bootlegging; Byram River Flood (1938 and 1955) John Sallie W. American January Northwest Greenwich; Belding Williams Cyanamid; 1938 18, Estates; Nichols Estate; Hurricane; 1988 Old Greenwich; Nichols Estate Corporations; American Cyanamid; Weather & Disasters; 1938 Hurricane (continued) 312 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History

Table 10.1 (continued) Narrator Interviewer Interview Title Date Subjects Gertrude Gertrude Cos Cob Power February Cos Cob; Cos Cob O’Donnell O’Donnell Plant 6, 1989 Power Plant; Riska Corporations; Transportation; New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad; Cos Cob Fire Department; Weather & Disasters; 1938 Hurricane Lloyd L. Margaret J. Riverside October Riverside; Riverside Fidao French 31, Yacht Club; 1938 1991 Hurricane; World War I (armistice celebration) of the Greenwich subcommunities, with names like Cos Cob, Riverside, and Old Greenwich. Note that two of the interviews also concern hurricanes that occurred in 1955, one mentioning flood.22 Greenwich is on the coast, near the narrow end of the funnel-shaped Long Island Sound. Therefore some weather may force the sea water westward, such that it floods the streets and basements, causing sewers to back up and pollute the cellars as well as the landscape. The subgroups within the Greenwich population are geographically distributed in a complex pattern, but many living near the water have fancy homes, yachts and even docks that may be damaged, and incur significant repair costs. A Connecticut History website recalls the 1955 hurricanes Connie and Diane: “The state highway department reported that at least 17 bridges had been destroyed, isolating communities, and that numerous roads were blocked by rock slides. Major dams broke, railroad tracks were swept away, homes and businesses were destroyed, and drinking-water supplies were compromised.”23 A page of the Connecticut History website has two photos of the 1938 hurricane in Greenwich, one showing a resident being carried in knee-deep water by rescuers, and another documenting the destruction of a truck by a fallen tree.24 The official blogger for the Greenwich Oral History project, Jean Moore, published an article about the 1938 hurricane in the local newspaper, Greenwich Time, on Sunday, July 13, 2014, based entirely on Barbara Ornstein’s oral history interview with Paul Pierson Palmer, nearly four decades earlier. Paul had been 14 years old and living in the Willowmere neighborhood of Riverside, the son of a plumbing contractor, as I was able to learn in the manuscript census schedule for 1940. With a friend nicknamed Buster, Paul came home to find his dad “pumping and bailing” water from their flooded basement. The article was accompanied by a photo of two men doing the same in a basement in the waterside Byram section of town. After doing this work together for a while, Paul’s

22en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_Atlantic_hurricane_season. 23connecticuthistory.org/hurricanes-connie-diane-deliver-double-hit-who-knew. 24connecticuthistory.org/the-great-hurricane-of-1938-today-in-history. 10.2 The Greenwich History Projects 313 dad left them to check on his schooner at the historic Riverside Yacht Club, and the boys decided the weather had calmed enough for them to go exploring outdoors. Before long, they were in serious trouble, as the water rose above the wall they had walked on. Arnold Pitcher stuck his head out the window of his house on Willowmere Circle, calling the boys into safety, an offer Paul accepted but that Buster turned down, preferring instead to try to make it home. The rising water and intensifying current, however, threatened to sweep Buster away when a wave came up and pushed him over the wall. Luckily, he was able to grab and hold onto a nearby telephone pole. Paul started out to rescue his friend, but the rising water soon flooded the house, and poor Buster was left hanging, literally, when Paul began to help Mr. Pitcher instead. Only Buster’s “hollering out there,” as Paul put it, caused him to jump into action to save his friend. He ran outside to see Buster spread-eagle but still hanging on. Somehow Paul found a barrel, tied a line to it, and threw it out into the current where it floated to Buster who grabbed it as Paul and Mr. Pitcher pulled him to safety. All three came into the house to see what must have been a surreal scene: the dining room table adorned with lit candles floating around the room. Mrs. Pitcher had just finished preparations for dinner when the rising tide flooded the house.25 The four of them were rescued by a neighbor’s boat, having to climb out the kitchen window, and this episode was the beginning of an enduring friendship between Paul and Arnold, such that some years later when Arnold was ready to sell his house, the only buyer he would consider was the now-mature Paul. Moore noted in her article that Paul was still living on Willowmere Circle, at age 89, but the following year the Greenwich Time reported his death, noting that he “served as Chief of the Old Greenwich Fire Department and a member for 60 plus years.”26 Formally called the Sound Beach Volunteer Fire Department, it is an all-volunteer organization founded in 1904, that served Riverside as well as adjacent Old Green- wich.27 Prior to the popularity of modern mobile communication devices, the Fire Department used a majestic horn, blasting out honks in a number code that told the volunteers where the fire was, so they could rush there from where ever they were, while a volunteer who had been on duty drove the fire engine there. An attempt to see the history page of the Fire Department’s website in October 2017 failed, because it was blank except for this boastful message: “Hacked by Moroccanwolf And Abdellah elmaghribi.” Both the famous flood of 1938, and the obscure hack of 2017, remind us how precarious human history can be. Table 10.2 lists a few more of the oral history interviews, focused on a different topic, politics. According to Wikipedia, on October 31, 2012, there were 38,823 registered voters in Greenwich, 14,321 Republicans, 9,587 Democrats, 535 belonging to “minor parties,” and 14,380 unaffiliated.28 The term “unaffiliated” does not seem like a very productive search term, so I searched the table of interviews for “Republican,” finding the set in Table 10.2. A study of the politics of the town could

25Jean P. Moore, “The Hurricane of 1938,” Greenwich Time, Sunday, July 13, 2014, www. greenwichtime.com/local/article/The-Hurricane-of-1938-5618878.php. 26www.legacy.com/obituaries/greenwichtime/obituary.aspx?pid=174238195. 27www.sbvfd.com/about/index.cfm. 28en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich,_Connecticut. 314 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History

Table 10.2 Oral history interviews tagged with “Republican” Narrator Interviewer Interview title Date Subjects Margaret George Aida Ryan Greenwich Town December 10, Greenwich Town Belknap Government 1974; January 7, Government; 1976 Politics; Republican Party; League of Women Voters C. Carleton Marian L. Republican August 24, 1976 Old Greenwich; Gisborne Phillips Party; Memories Politics; of Old Republican Greenwich Party; Greenwich Town Government; Selectmen Helen Wilshire Marcia Anne Clare Boothe January 18, 1980 Back Country Walsh Garvan Coyle Luce; Republican Lifestyle; Party Politics; Republican Party; Clare Boothe Luce; (Judge) James F. Walsh Albert P. Morano Betty S. Cullen Chickahominy; October 12, 1982 Chickahominy; Politics Ethnic Groups; Italians; Politics; Republican Party Albert P. Morano Betty S. Cullen Politics; Clare November 15, Ethnic Groups; Boothe Luce 1982 Italians; Politics; Republican Party; Clare Boothe Luce; U.S. Congress Prescott Sheldon Marian L. Political activity January 21, 1992 Politics; Bush, Jr. Phillips in the Bush Republican Party family (state & local) Sam Romeo Alfred F. Camillo Politics in May 16, 2001 Politics; Greenwich Republican Party; Sam Romeo use many rich datasets, but this very small sample illustrates significant connections between politics and family. Mentioned in the first interview, the League of Women Voters has a page on its national website for Greenwich, that offered a download voter’s guide that was also published on paper in the Greenwich Time newspaper on November 2, 2017, 10.2 The Greenwich History Projects 315 preparing for the November 5 local election.29 The guide includes pictures and brief interviews with all the candidates, including two competing for First Selectman and two competing more modestly for Selectman: “The winner of the First Selectman race holds the office of First Selectman; the next two highest vote getters from that race and the race for Selectman will serve on the Board of Selectmen. Candidates for First Selectman responded to two questions in no more than 100 words per question. Candidates for Selectman responded to one question in no more than 100 words per question. Replies are printed as received.” The Democrat competing for First Selectman began his bio by connecting his family to the town: “I have lived in Greenwich with my wife and three boys since 2005.” The Republican’s bio reported a longer-lasting connection: “Fifth generation resident. Married; daughter and son.” In addition to providing information for the histories of the candidates’ families, the voter guide documents that the local government follows New England traditions, very different from those followed in other regions. As updated August 22, 2017, the Greenwich town charter explains: First Selectman and board of selectmen. The First Selectman shall be the chief executive officer of the town and the town agent and shall devote his full time to the duties of his office. The two selectmen other than the First Selectman who are elected as provided in this act shall, together with the First Selectman, constitute the board of selectmen. The First Selectman shall chair the board of selectmen. The First Selectman shall hold at least one meeting each month with the other selectmen for the purpose of keeping them generally informed of the business of the town. Upon five days’ written notice to the First Selectman, either of the two selectmen may place an item on the agenda of a meeting, which item shall be germane to the duties and responsibilities of the board of selectmen. Minutes of such meetings shall be taken and made available for public inspection. The First Selectman shall designate one of the other selectmen to act in his place and stead during his absence. Such Selectman when so acting shall have all of the powers and duties of the First Selectman.30 As of January 1, 2017, the salary of First Selectman was $139,216, while the other Selectmen appear to be part-time, with salaries of $13,922. The charter notes, “the salary of each of the two selectmen shall be not less than ten percent (10%) of the salary of the First Selectman.”31 The second interview in Table 10.2 was with a former First Selectman, C. Carleton Gisborne. Every Sunday edition of Greenwich Time includes a story, “This Week in Greenwich History,” and the one for March 30, 2014 shows a picture of Gisborne to illustrate an anecdote from 1954 that connects town government to the lived experience of individual residents:32 Dogs running in packs have invaded the Havemeyer Park section of Old Greenwich where Second Selectman Frank R. Parker resides, he reported to his colleagues yesterday. Mr. Parker told the selectmen of a complaint made to him by a resident of the area. He said that dogs run in packs and have become “a terrific problem.” They tear up freshly seeded gardens.

29lwvg.org. 30library.municode.com/ct/greenwich/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=THCHTOGRCO_ ART15SE. 31www.greenwichct.org/upload/medialibrary/da3/Final-Budget-2017-2018.pdf. 32www.greenwichtime.com/local/article/This-week-in-Greenwich-history-5362026.php. 316 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History

The woman who complained told Mr. Parker that she had been chased off her grounds by a pack of dogs and had to seek safety by running into her house. The selectmen and Mr. Parker agreed that the problem was a “neighborhood one,” and possible it would be advisable to have Dr. Earle F. Scholﬁeld, town dog warden, and Deputy Police Chief David W. Robbins discuss the new dog laws at a meeting of the Havemeyer Park Association. Mr. Parker said that he will contact the president of the association to call such a meeting. First Selectman C. Carleton Gisborne reminded Mr. Parker that in order to take action against dogs creating nuisances of any kind, formal complaint must be made and then prosecution action can be instituted.

A situation like unruly dogs in the neighborhood may seem insigniﬁcant in the greater scheme of things, yet it can be a valuable addition to a family history, even data for political science research focused on the forms of government closest to the citizens. The picture of Gisborne shows him standing beside Rebecca Breed who on January 12, 2011, told an interviewer for the newspaper of the adjacent town, the Stamford Advocate33:

Interviewer: Do you live in Greenwich? Rebecca Breed: I was born here. Interviewer: Are you married? Rebecca Breed: I was to William C. Breed – he died ten years ago. We were married 43 years. Interviewer: Do you have any children? Grandchildren? Rebecca Breed: Four children – great kids. My third son just got married. And I have 11 grandchildren. I’ve been very fortunate… Interviewer: What did you do when you were working full time? Rebecca Breed: I served six years as Selectman, two years as a Selectman, two years as a First Selectman, and then two more years as a Selectman. Then I decided to go to law school… Interviewer: What is the most important thing you have learned in your work? Rebecca Breed: To have a loving and supportive family.

Apparently, the traditional term selectman was not changed to selectwoman or selectperson when women began serving in that position. The signiﬁcance of the League of Women Voters is not the only reference to women’s political activity in Table 10.2, because two of the interviews concern Clare Boothe Luce, who represented the district that included Greenwich in the US House of Representatives in 1943-1947 before becoming Ambassador to Italy.34 Another connection to national politics in the table is Prescott Sheldon Bush, Jr., who was the son of Connecti- cut senator Prescott Sheldon Bush, Sr., brother of president George Herbert Walker Bush, and uncle of president George Walker Bush.35

33www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/SENIORITY-by-Anne-Semmes-REBECCA- BREED-73-952951.php. 34en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_BootheLuce. 35en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_family. 10.2 The Greenwich History Projects 317

We may realistically hope that the oral history project of the Greenwich Library will be emulated by many other local libraries, especially as books migrate to electronic forms catalogued online and thus reducing the need for some traditional work by librarians. However, many other possibilities exist as well, involving organizations that could link to and from family history digital libraries. A second and less centralized kind of project, that could be described as quasi-historical, is a network of Facebook groups devoted to the schools of the town, and largely oriented to the alumni who share reminiscences as well as other tokens of fellowship. Table 10.3 offers data about the membership on October 21, 2017, in the Facebook groups most directly related to each of the Greenwich public schools. A well-established private school, Greenwich Country Day, is “the largest independent elementary and middle school in the country” with a current enrollment of 900 students, but seems to lack a public Facebook group of alumni.36 The public school system of the town has one high school, three middle schools and 11 elementary schools, but a 12th is listed as well because it has a Facebook alumni group despite having been shut down decades earlier. The high school interlock data measure the fraction of members of a school’s group that also belong to the high school’s group. For example 52 members of the 172 in the Riverside elementary school group, or about 30 percent, also belong to the high school group and thus probably attended both. The two final columns of Table 10.3 were drawn from the school’s 2016 annual report, that notes: Minority enrollment in 2016 rose to 36.4% of students, continuing a trend which started in 1980. This trend toward increasing racial and ethnic diversity is likely to continue for the foreseeable future; 41.1% of the current Kindergarten class identifies as Asian, Hispanic, African-American or Two or More Races while the senior class at Greenwich High School is 32.0% minority. From 1980 to 1989, minority enrollment increases were driven by increases in the Asian and Hispanic populations. Recent minority enrollment increases are driven by increases in the Hispanic population and students identifying with two or more racial groups (new Census category 2009).37 Tables 10.1 and 10.2 both contained interviews that discussed “Ethnic Groups; Italians” and today the school system places a priority on integrating members of minority groups, but no longer considers people of Italian descent to belong to that category. The school called “International” in Table 10.3 is the International School at Dundee, in Riverside, whose website proclaims: “In 2000, ISD became the first magnet school in the Greenwich Public School system. ISD was also the first school in New England to become an accredited International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme (PYP) school in 2003. The number of IB schools continues to rise glob- ally, due to its inquiry-based learning program, and focus on developing the whole child.”38 There had been a public Facebook group for this unusual school, but it

36www.gcds.net/about. 37Salvatore Corda, Greenwich Public Schools Annual Enrollment Report, 2016,p.4;www. boarddocs.com/ct/greenwich/Board.nsf/ﬁles/AF4TCJ6D2B5A/$ﬁle/110316%20Enrollment% 20Report%20w%20CS.pdf 38www.greenwichschools.org/international-school-at-dundee/school-information/about-isd. 318 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History

Table 10.3 The network of facebook groups for greenwich public schools School Facebook data Board of education data name Group type Group High school interlock Enrollment Fraction members in 2016 minority Members Fraction Greenwich Public 3,527 3,527 100% Not comparably H.S. reported for the high school and 3 middle schools Western Closed 728 299 41% Middle Central Closed 619 237 38% Middle Eastern Public 166 81 49% Middle Byram Public 394 135 34% Not a school after 1978 Cos Cob Public 782 225 29% 445 37% Glenville Public 153 60 39% 445 32% Hamilton Public 463 166 36% 339 71% Ave. International Unofﬁcial page, without members 383 45% Julian Public 301 115 38% 331 52% Curtiss New Public 199 66 33% 256 79% Lebanon North 3 groups 90 31 34% 497 40% Mianus North Public 102 36 35% 382 27% Street Old Closed 303 99 33% 407 18% Greenwich Parkway Public 416 95 23% 225 17% Riverside Public 172 52 30% 470 28% became inactive in 2011, and the current unofﬁcial page seems to be operated by staff of the school as a way of communicating to the public, but without public members.39 Three of the schools have closed Facebook groups, which means that some key features are not visible unless one applies for and is granted membership. Today, any family whose members attended schools that have Facebook alumni groups would do well to copy and preserve any interesting postings, but in future we can imagine alumni groups being incorporated into much more substantial systems, not merely nostalgic but historic.

39www.facebook.com/groups/55395214740; www.facebook.com/pages/International-School-at- Dundee/396039400494687. 10.2 The Greenwich History Projects 319

Fig. 10.1 Home page of a 2001 website for the 1954 graduating class of Old Greenwich School

Facebook emerged in 2004, and prior to today’s well-developed social media, many individuals operated amateur websites that served some of the same functions, a relevant example being one for the 1954 graduating class from Old Greenwich School that I launched in April 2001. It included the graduation program, photos, and pages for all 54 students. A total of 24 students from this class communicated by email and regular mail around this website, often sharing their memories and additional photos. A more extensive version on a disk was sent to all the members who expressed an interest, in October 2001. Figure 10.1 shows the home page of the website at the top, and three of the many internal photographs at the bottom. All ﬁve photographs in Fig. 10.1 were taken by me around the time of graduation in 1954. The two in the website home page were the front and back of the central part of the school building. This pair contrasts the public face of the school, with the 320 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History private functional areas. The lower left image is a small part of the Mayday parade, marching past the school. At center bottom are the two women who taught special classes: Miss Carter who taught music, and Miss Geis who taught art. At right is one of the many photos of individual students: Tom-Eric Lagerloeff, shortly after he bought an ice cream from a truck that often parked in front of the school. He was selected, from the several students I photographed, to offer a modest memorial, given that he died in 2007.40

10.3 Durability of Communities

A key theme throughout this book has been the challenge of preserving information both before and after it has been assembled into some form of family history. At the risk of oversimplification, we may note that traditionally two very different strategies have been followed, both of them having serious disadvantages. First, very prominent individuals and families have sought to earn a form of immortality through consciously competing to be memorable. This strategy may be unjust, depending on what the individual did to become famous. It is also vulnerable to the ozymandias factor, the erosion of fame when a society collapses. It takes its name from a poem by Shelley about the ancient Egyptian pharaoh, Ramesses II, memorized in an heroic statue: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.41 Second, more modest individuals have lived ordinary lives, contributing to their communities and following its norms, thus becoming collectively memorable even if their personal names are seldom if ever mentioned. Ironically, the ozymandias factor applies not only to an arrogant king, but also to the slaves who quarried the stone for his statue, and the talented sculptors who shaped it. Neither of these two strategies is appropriate for the family history digital libraries envisioned by this book, that must integrate information about prominent people with their close relatives who are less prominent in public life, but beloved by their families and who often contributed very significantly to their lineage. From a more social-scientific perspective, it is crucial for family histories to record the diversity of life experiences and community roles across the total population. Nearly a century ago, many very significant community studies were carried out, typically by sociologists but also by other scholars and

40www.legacy.com/obituaries/greenwichtime/obituary.aspx?n=tom-eric-lagerloef&pid= 87539747. 41en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias. 10.3 Durability of Communities 321 social scientists, focused on particular locations but capable of being emulated today in a diversity of settings. One in particular suggests how a town could become an essentially permanent focus of research, connectable to digital libraries belonging to its families. Under the pseudonym Middletown, Muncie in the state of Indiana became arguably the best-studied normal town in the world, beginning with an intensive 1924–1925 research project led by Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, leading to a 1929 book, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (Lynd and Lynd 1929). In harmony with our focus on family histories, their study sought to understand the present on the basis of the past, looking at information from 1890 as well as the contemporary data they collected themselves through observations of public meetings, interviews with residents, and questionnaires. Six aspects of contemporary life were highlighted: (1) getting a living, (2) making a home, (3) raising children, (4) using leisure, (5) engaging in religious practices, and (6) participating in the community. In 1937 they published a second book, Middletown in Transition (Lynd and Lynd 1937). Their work set the standard for many later research projects, such as the “Yankee City” studies of Newburyport, Massachusetts, by Lloyd Warner, Paul Lund and their collaborators (Warner and Lunt 1941). Apparently, Muncie itself did not fully appreciate the social-scientific attention, as the 1970 obituary of Robert Lynd in the New York Times reported. The local college, Ball State University, apparently ignored the Lynds’ books, and the town may have felt they were insulting. Here is how the Times summarized their findings: “The first major profile of an American city, ‘Middletown’ documented such aspects of Muncie life as that families seldom got together; that young people astounded and worried their elders; that in business and social life the man who concealed his thoughts got along best; that money-making and money-spending were measures of quality; that a healthy adult male who did not work lost caste, and that the social system was rigid and based largely on estimated income. A commentator at the time remarked that ‘Middletown’ gave statistical support to H. L. Mencken’s and Sinclair Lewis’s derogatory views of a Middle America with an ingrown ruling élite unpossessed of vision and imagination.”42 However, Muncie soon benefitted from the scholarly attention, as it came to be defined as the representative American town, drawing attention from pollsters, advertisers, and later academics. Prominent among many other examples, in 1982 Theodore Caplow published Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Con- tinuity, and in 1990 Dwight W. Hoover published Middletown Revisited (Caplow 1982; Hoover 1990). Since 1980, Ball State University has been host to the Center for Middletown Studies: “The center is multidisciplinary in nature, promoting collaboration among faculty and students from sociology, anthropology, urban planning, journalism, history, economics, and other departments. While its principal focus is research on Muncie, it also sponsors investigations of similarly situated communities

42Alden Whitman, “Robert S. Lynd, Co-Author of ‘Middletown,’ Dies,” New York Times, Novem- ber 3, 1970, www.nytimes.com/1970/11/03/archives/robert-s-lynd-coauthor-of-middletown-dies- sociologists-book-was-1st.html. 322 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History both in the United States and abroad, as well as on topics related to the evolution of modern society.”43 The archive contains many kinds of information, often organized in terms of particular research topics. For example, one was named Documenting Deindustri- alization: “The work of the Lynds and their successors provides a baseline from which to compare the social and cultural patterns of a community hard hit by the economic changes of the past four decades. In 1972, Muncie had more than 17,000 people employed in heavy manufacturing—21% of its population. By the end of that century, only 5,000 people were engaged in industrial work and they constituted just 7% of the city’s population, and those ﬁgures have continued to decline in the early 21st century. The Lynds examined the impact of industrialization on the community’s social and cultural life. The center seeks to assist scholars attempting to do the same for deindustrialization.”44 Oral history interviews were among the methods used by that project, and often information about families was included. For example, an interview classiﬁed as being about “Industries; Labor unions; Iron and steel workers” began with a discussion of the formation of a family in Muncie:45 Muncie Labor Oral History Project R 76 Interviewer: Warren Vander Hill - Interviewee: Randall King - Date of Interview: December 22, 2005 Vander Hill: Randy, I want to begin by thanking you very much for agreeing to participate in this project, and I’d like to begin by asking you if you would tell me a little bit about your family - what I’m interested in is how you got to Muncie, Indiana. King: I married a girl from Indianapolis whose mother and father lived in Muncie, and since we were up here almost every weekend, I eventually decided to move because it was cheaper on gas, and I’ve been here ever since. Vander Hill: What year was that? King: 1970. Vander Hill: So in 1970, you came from Indianapolis? King: Yes, sir. Vander Hill: How about Indianapolis - did your family live in Indianapolis? King: No, I was going through there driving a truck. I had just got discharged from the service, and I was seeking directions really - I went into a truck stop and asked for directions, and my wife’s sister worked there and that’s how I met my wife - she just happened to come in about that time, and we got to dating whenever I was coming through and eventually got married. Vander Hill: Where are the roots of your family - where would that be? King: Tennessee. We can well imagine a series of local donors contributing to an endowment that adds to the Center’s archive the family history materials they themselves assembled, or that they paid professional family historians to develop in the most durable and valuable forms. Barring a major catastrophe, we can further imagine that the Center

43cms.bsu.edu/academics/centersandinstitutes/middletown/about. 44cms.bsu.edu/academics/centersandinstitutes/middletown/research/deindustrialization. 45libx.bsu.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/MidOrHis/id/515/rec/15. 10.3 Durability of Communities 323 for Middletown Studies will not only celebrate the first century of Middletown data collection in the year 2025, but continue indefinitely thereafter. Many other communities, such as Staunton and Waynesboro, Virginia, 1859–1870 documented in The Valley of the Shadow, got through much more rapid transformation than the slow process of industrialization followed by deindustrialization. One striking example was studied by William Sheridan Allen, through interviews as well as historical documents, for his 1965 book, The Nazi Seizure of Power; the Experience of a Single German Town,1930–1935 (Allen 1965). In 1984, he published a revised edition covering a wider period of years, 1922–1945, and taking advantage of the fact that German archives relevant to the town had diligently been collecting documents with success he found surprising (Allen 1984). He originally called the town Thalburg, to preserve confidentiality of his sources, but by the publication of the revised edition it had been publicly identified as Nordheim. Especially relevant here, he analyzed not only the series of steps through which a radical political party had gained dominance, but also how it sought to consolidate power by dissolving existing social organizations. He called the process atomization, forcing each individual to relinquish his or her identity as a member of many interlocking social groups, and become just one more atom in the steel structure of Nazi society. Even if the Second World War and the Holocaust had never taken place, this transformation would have placed severe constraints on family histories. At the same time the Lynds were doing their original research in Muncie, many researchers were concentrating on the much larger city of Chicago, developing methods that would be applied very widely in the coming years, and that tended to divide cities into smaller and more manageable communities. A highly influential 1925 book by Robert Park and his colleagues conceptualized Chicago in terms of concen- tric zones, with the downtown business center surrounded by the zone of transition of factories and decaying residential housing, surrounded in turn by a residential zone containing comfortable homes, and finally a fringe commuter zone (Park et al. 1925). A later statistical study analyzed data on 120 subcommunities in Chicago without worrying about whether they clustered into zones (Faris and Dunham 1939). It is possible that large cities could create unified networks of family digital libraries, but it is also possible to imagine that happening on a smaller scale, probably unevenly, with each specific archive serving an identifiable subcommunity. Aside from public libraries and colleges, the most obvious specialized community archive would be an outgrowth of the family-related records already kept by religious organizations. One particular denomination has already gone a great distance in this direction, as the Family History page at mormon.org explains:

In over 4,500 family history centers operated around the world by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the fabric of humanity is being woven together as volunteers compile and record important dates and information about those who have died. These records are then made publicly accessible. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints use family history records to perform sacred temple ordinances, such as eternal marriages and sealings of children to parents, for their kindred dead if these deceased family members were unable to perform the earthly rites themselves. This gives deceased ancestors the opportunity to accept these ordinances in the afterlife. While the reach of genealogy is as vast as humankind itself (the Church’s website FamilySearch.org currently holds over three billion records and grows daily), family history work also functions on the local level. 324 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History

Church members accumulate and save the stories and photos of their ancestors and record their own stories for their own posterity, thereby linking generations who would otherwise not know each other.46 A 1980 study that documented how crucial the building of social connections is for recruitment to Mormonism and other intense religious movements referred to a set of widely disseminated instructions to members of the Latter-day Saints: “The first step in the instructions advises Mormons how to select a family for potential recruitment. People who express concerns about raising their children effectively in a modern, urban environment might be a good choice because of the centrality of strong families in Mormonism. Another ideal choice would be a family ‘who have just moved into the neighborhood and thus have no strong ties of friendship in the neighborhood.’ Mormons are also candidly admonished that their friendship network ought to include non-Mormons—‘Don’t be exclusive (Stark and Bainbridge 1980, p. 1387).’” Thus, the church’s family history centers are instruments for recruiting new members, as well as arising from a theology that motivated what might be defined as recruiting the souls of deceased ancestors through special rituals. Without duplicating exactly the Mormon approach, many religious denominations could host or connect to family history digital libraries, building on the fact that their archives already link to families, most obviously in marriage and baptism records. There already exist archives devoted to preservation of Jewish heritage, and thus often of the specific Jewish families in some way connected to the archive.47 Table 10.4 reminds us that different geographic areas have different patterns of religious population, counting the known numbers of members of local religious organizations by general categories of religious tradition, as of 2010. It compares the four counties in the United States we already examined, the first two from the Valley of the Shadow, Fairfield being the home of Greenwich, and Delaware county being the home of Muncie. The table primary reports numbers of members, using data from the 2010 U.S. Religion Census: Religious Congregations & Membership Study, collected by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB) and distributed by the Association of Religion Data Archives.48 These data were collected through the religious organizations themselves, and thus they are incomplete and do not have a uniform definition of “member.” However, they do offer a rough picture of geographic variations, notably the very different numbers of Roman Catholics. Given the existence of unofficial services like Catholic Family History in Britain, we could well imagine the Catholic church becoming host to archives comparable to those of the Latter-day Saints, but larger and organized in a manner appropriate to its own theology and denominational history.49 The bottom of the table documents the fact that the Latter-day Saints do indeed have branches of their family history organization in all four counties, plus having partnerships with public libraries in two of them.50

46www.mormon.org/beliefs/family-history. 47www.iajgs.org/blog; www.kaplancentre.uct.ac.za. 48www.thearda.com/RCMS2010/RCMS_Notes.asp. 49www.catholicfhs.online. 50www.familysearch.org. 10.4 Teaching a Profession 325

Table 10.4 Formal membership in religious groups in 2010 Augusta County, Franklin County, Fairﬁeld County, Delaware Virginia Pennsylvania Connecticut County, Indiana Religious traditions Evangelical 14,908 19,930 46,888 17,042 protestant Black protestant 72 883 4,144 1,741 Mainline 13,026 19,147 82,604 9,876 protestant Orthodox 60 120 9,215 0 Catholic 0 10,259 404,341 4,171 Other 21 1,564 32,501 1,992 Unclaimed 45,663 97,715 337,136 82,849 Total 73,750 149,618 916,829 117,671 Archives connected to the latter-day saints Family History 1 1 1 1 Centers Afﬁliate 1 0 3 0 Libraries

10.4 Teaching a Profession

In the digital age, the nature of history is changing, not only because we enter a future very different from the past, but also because the past itself changes, as we gain greater access to information about it. How, then, should family history be taught? One factor shaping the answer is the diversity of institutional and physical contexts: college, high school, local community organizations, personal tutoring, or online. If the context is a conventional educational institution, there still remain multiple design alternatives. It could be a lecture class, a seminar, or a laboratory. The discipline could be general sociology, demography, recent history, or what some colleges call general education comparable to the job held by David Riesman, who was interviewed in Chap. 5. Perhaps the most important variable is the goals the students bring to the course. It would be quite respectable for a student to take a single class out of curiosity, as part of a liberal education, but some students will have some professional ambition as well. The example of Louis Effingham de Forest from Chap. 1 is instructive. A professional lawyer, he had developed skills assembling information about the actions and social context of people, and some historical awareness as part of his primary profession. These skills transferred nicely to his secondary activity in family history. Thus, a student with the aim of gaining professional skills related to family history may already be competent in a similar occupation, a fact that will shape their orientation and their need to gain particular additional skills. Through this book, we have imagined that a new full-time profession of family historian may arise, in parallel with a 326 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History growing community of skilled amateur family historians, but this will take time and many further innovations. Thus, I tend to think that many of the semi-professional practitioners will have academic positions, and for some years employ their growing expertise to family history part-time, as de Forest did. Future categorizations and job titles may be very different from today’s, but at this point in history it is valid to think in terms of three related but distinguishable occupations that students may have in mind: genealogist, historian, chronicler. Genealogist: Traditionally, a genealogist’s primary job was mapping a family tree. This book has cited a few century-old genealogy books, and they offered little if any information about the lives of the people of the past, except their births, marriages and deaths. For many families and communities, but certainly not all, this job has already been completed. Historian: A primary focus of historical research is the assembly and interpretation of events, often those that affect whole societies and thus highlight leaders, other famous people, and unusual events like wars, discoveries or innovations, and economic transformations. When considering common people, historians have tended to think statistically, summarizing information about thousands or even millions of people in numbers or percents. Chronicler: Like genealogists, chroniclers tend to avoid interpretations, but like historians are focused on events. They often focus on events as they happen, recording them in forms that historians may use in future years. While historians tend to specialize in particular centuries of the past, chroniclers tend to concentrate on particular kinds of events, for example working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and documenting each spaceflight launch. Again, de Forest is a good example, because like many other leading genealogists of his generation his work went far beyond mere tracing of family trees, chiefly adding biographies for many of the people on this or that branch. Famous people, including the wealthy as well as the heroic, tend to earn biographies. Yet, every human being deserves to be remembered, and merely a name and date of birth does not give living people much to cherish or to contemplate. Here, for example, is the condensed story of John Farmer Seaman (1804–1877), depicted here in Fig. 6.8,as told by de Forest:

He was a resident of Ballston Spa, engaging in the manufacture of boots and shoes until he was about twenty-one years old, when he went to New York City and from there to Philadelphia, always engaged in the same business. In 1830 he was in Rochester, New York, employed by a ﬁrm engaged in the manufacture of the same articles. Soon after his marriage in 1831, in Rochester, he went by canal and stage coach to Cleveland, accompanied by his bride and Horatio Ranney, and the two men there set up a shoe business of their own. Mr. Ranney soon retired but Mr. Seaman in 1836 took another partner, William T. Smith, and continued successfully in the same business with him until his death (Louis Efﬁngham de Forest 1950). 10.4 Teaching a Profession 327

It is uncertain whether enough other information still exists to expand this exceedingly brief biography into a chapter, and certainly not a book. In an unti- tled manuscript dated 1893, his daughter Lucy contrasted the two business partners: “Mr. Smith was a man who was either very hopeful, buoyant, chatting and welcom- ing trade or down in the depths ready to assign, just on the verge of ruin. My father went steadily on, was a very careful buyer and excellent judge of leather, saw ahead of present clouds and kept the business ship off many a rock.”51 He was a founding member of First Baptist Church of Cleveland, and is frequently mentioned in its 1883 history, notably: “It was said of Brother John Seaman that he gave more thought to the finances of the church than to his own business. Illustration: Some crisis in the matter of church finance had come needing prompt attention. One morning, as he came into his store he said to his partner, ‘Smith, you go to the meeting to-night, and put me down for a thousand dollars, and you put down a thousand, and go over to Sylvester Ranney and tell him to put down a thousand. Each of us will take a third. That will be about right, I guess’” (Rouse 1883). Diligent study could tell us much about boot manufacture in the mid-nineteenth century, and we happen to know that Seaman and Smith sold many to the workers in the mines on Lake Superior. But we lack information about their specific work, and none of their footwear has been preserved as artifacts. This should be a lesson for today’s chroniclers: The work and social lives of living people must be recorded, for the family historians of the future. The blending of genealogy with history, that de Forest represented, is practiced today to a very significant but somewhat disorganized extent. Wikipedia reports: “A family history society is a society, often charitable or not-for-profit, that allows member genealogists and family historians to profit from shared knowledge. Large societies often own libraries, sponsor research seminars and foreign trips, and publish journals. Some societies concentrate on a specific niche, such as the family history of a particular geographical area, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. Lineage societies are societies that limit their membership to descendants of a particular person or group of people of historical importance.”52 The page that provided that summary currently lists 10 national and international societies, many regional societies in 14 nations, and 3 societies devoted to particular ethnic groups, but we can confidently wager that very many active groups have not yet been included. Thus, teachers of family history have many options, from which to select a family history society they should join, whether it concerns their immediate geographic area or philosophical perspective. Taking a few classes that happen to be available is one reasonable way to develop effective plans for teaching one’s own course, but it is also effective to adapt the structure of a course with a similar empirical focus or methodology. With a focus on the chronicler role, I naturally draw upon the good experience I had years ago teaching a seminar on sociological field research methods, that was rather like a laboratory course, but in which the lab was the world. It was structured around a dozen brief projects, from which each student could select eight to do. Translated to

51Lucy Seaman Bainbridge, untilled manuscript about her childhood, about 1893. 52en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_history_society. 328 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History the context of this book, looking up the Gilbreth family in the US census and other online records, as we did back in Chap. 8, would be one plausible such project. One project from the field methods course would translate directly, the documentation of a set of related artifacts, merely adding the criterion that the owner of the artifacts should be a family member. One student documented the tools of a professional stonecutter, bringing to class some of the smaller tools, and collecting photographs of larger ones. Another student surprised the class by bringing a person, a woman agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in order to discuss all the pieces of equipment she normally carried, including her revolver. As the primary task for a week of the class, the assignment required one paragraph describing each of perhaps a dozen artifacts. Naturally, several of the methods used repeatedly through this book could be adapted as brief projects along these lines, perhaps allowing one project to expand into a term paper. Several chapters included assemblies of frames from home movies or videos. We might have preferred the video itself, with extensive metadata, that could be explored dynamically, but a printed book did not permit that. Yet the selection, extraction, assembly, and interpretation of frames from a movie or video could be a reasonable assignment in a class like the one we are discussing here. As our final example, we will draw upon a 1930 home movie that was intended to document a distinctive kind of social event, that naturally has several human and cultural implications. Titled “The Round Up,” this 16-mm silent movie was filmed in September 1930 at Maple Hill Farm by June Wheeler Bainbridge, to record a social gathering of eight teenagers, including her three children. It is not currently possible to identify the other participants, and state whether they were school friends or members of the extended family, but the location was a summer home, and little is known about social relations with neighbors. Six of the eight performed equestrian stunts, riding two very different kinds of horses in the field across the driveway from the house, next to Wolfpits Road. A selection of frames is assembled in Fig. 10.2, and part of the goal of having students do such an exercise is simply so they can learn the required skills, drawing upon skills they probably already possess, but combining them in a new way for a new task. A more interpretive goal is identifying information in the pictures that depicts the skills and interest of people who lived very different lives, in history. The upper left image shows the six performers, including three siblings: William Wheeler Bainbridge (age 16) on the far left, John Seaman Bainbridge (age 14) on the far right, and Barbara Bainbridge (age 13) just to the left of John. Other scenes in the movie show close-ups of their faces, and they wore very different clothing from each other, so it was easy to identify them in the nine images of Fig. 10.2. It might be possible at great effort, to identity their guests, through documents suggesting who they might be, then confirming by comparing photographs from the other families. There is nothing unusual today about young people riding horses, even having an equestrian party together, either rich people at a professional stable or riding academy, or rural people on their own lands. However, later images depict a young generation who are much more at home with riding than many people are today. 10.4 Teaching a Profession 329

Fig. 10.2 The September 1930 round up at Maple Hill Farm

William and John often spent the night in a small cottage behind the main house, woke up in the morning, opened a window where they could climb onto a stone wall, whistled to call horses over, then rode vigorously around, bareback and still wearing their pajamas. The second frame, at the middle of the top, shows William and one of the other boys riding straight toward an improvised barrier, a second later successfully making their horses jump over it. The upper right image shows Barbara trying the same thing, but failing to get over. Although the horse knocked the pole down, she was able to ride on safely, and this glitch did not faze this thirteen-year-old girl at all. Several other sequences show members of the group succeeding or failing to jump, in various ways, but never getting injured. The image at center left shows William doing one of his favorite tricks, making the horse buck, but without losing control. Here, an opportunity for deeper analysis enters the picture. Wikipedia says: “Bucking, though a potentially dangerous disobedience when under saddle, is a natural aspect of horse behavior. Bucking developed in the wild for the purpose of protection from feline predators such as mountain lions, who would attack horses by dropping onto their backs from above. The process of kicking out with both hind legs, another defense mechanism for the horse, also results in a mild bucking movement. Thus, for a human to safely ride a horse, the horse has to be desensitized to the presence of something on its back and also learn not to kick out with both hind legs while under saddle.”53 A student might well take this deﬁnition

53en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucking. 330 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History as the starting point for an analysis of human-animal relations, of the development of historically contingent human skills, and of the blurred line between conventional and unconventional behavior in both animals and humans. William made the horse buck by slapping its hind end, and another home movie shows him performing the same trick. The center image in Fig. 10.2 emphasizes the distinctive quality of past historical periods. Five teenagers are mounted together on the same rather huge horse. It is not a riding horse and has no saddle; it is a workhorse that was used to pull equipment on the farm, a job that also gave it the term draft horse. We can think back to Fig. 6.9, where a tractor instead of a horse is doing that job, a dozen years later. The image at the middle of the right side shows John and one of the other boys, standing on one of apparently two workhorses that were present, and both are visible in the image at the lower left corner. The center image at the bottom is from a sequence in which William runs in from the left side and successfully vaults over the hind end of the horse into a good sitting position. And the ﬁnal image at lower right places all six of the teenagers on the same massive steed. A student might be inspired by the workhorses to learn more about their technological and economic history. Of course their tradition has not vanished entirely from this planet, but is rare within post-industrial societies. Comparing images of the two kinds of horses reveals not merely that the draft horses lack saddles, but also that their halters were different, including blinders that prevented their side-set eyes from looking in any direction other than forward, which is the direction a farmer would want them to go. Another student might contemplate the fact that horses did not become extinct when automobiles and tractors took over their primary economic functions. Rather, their function as recreational animals became paramount. This observation immediately reminds us of the topic of Fig. 6.1, recreational sailboats. The functions of horses and sailboats have changed over history, but history itself can also change. Perhaps the people of the future will ﬁnd commercial entertainments rather uninteresting, and prefer to watch old home movies and recent videos by family members that as they age will become the equivalent of old home movies. This possibility connects to a set of frankly radical ideas that deserve only brief mention here, but deeper exploration in the future. High quality materials related to the history of one’s own family, preserved and enriched in computer-based digital archives, may become a source not only of educational enlightenment and spiritual memorialization, but of deep, aesthetic enjoyment. Even for professionals, digital history work can be great fun, its drudgery punctuated by exciting discoveries. History used to belong to politi- cians and warriors, but today it can belong to uncles and aunts, closely related to our own real lives, yet offering fascinating insights that connect to us personally. 10.5 Conclusion: A Research Agenda 331

10.5 Conclusion: A Research Agenda

As we saw in several chapters of this book, research at the frontiers of computer science may open new opportunities for family historians, for example if computer vision and natural language processing evolve to the point that they can perform efficient, high-accuracy searches, transcriptions, and translations of images and recorded speech. Some visionaries believe that advancements in artificial intelligence more generally may render it possible to emulate deceased relatives so well that living relatives can experience simulated conversations with them (Rothblatt 2014). I doubt whether this will soon be possible, let alone desirable, and my own research in that direction has more modestly sought to develop traditional social-science methods for more complete documentation of the attitudes, beliefs, and personalities of living people (Bainbridge 2014). Indeed, there is reason to doubt whether the highest priority should be given to the kinds of computing research currently popular in academia and industry, such as machine learning on Big Data in The Cloud. Throughout this book we have seen many examples of technological changes that rendered obsolete an earlier method of preserving family information. For example, the development of photographic negatives, from which multiple positive copies could be cheaply produced, quickly replaced the technology of the gem tintype photo shown in Chap. 2, produced simultaneously with many copies in a multi-lens camera, probably dating from 1864.54 This does not present technical problems for family historians today, because it is trivially easy to copy tintypes into a document scanner. However, the frames of the home movie probably from 1941 or 1942 in Fig. 1.1 presented real difficulties. Copying the original film had to be done by a professional possessing rare equipment, and the initial digital format of VHS video became obsolete when the last VHS machine was produced in 2016. It had not been difficult for the family historian to copy the VHS into an MPG file, but most families had not been equipped to do so when that was done around the year 2000. By 2014 the family owned a big-screen Samsung “smart TV” that could display MPG videos from a DVD, but could not in fact handle the early version of MPG that was used for this particular film. The problem of obsolete data formats is especially severe for systems that were specialized in nature and never became very popular in the marketplace. But it is also severe for systems that are entirely managed by large cloud-based corporations, in the absence of open-source systems to convert the data to other forms, and aggravated by the fact that even large corporations may be lost to history. It always seemed ironic that the geographic information system digital library grant to the University of California, Santa Barbara, cited at the beginning of Chap. 1, was called The Alexandria Project, given that the original Library of Alexandria did not survive the two millennia after its founding, as Wikipedia notes today: “Arguably, this library is most famous for having been burned down resulting in the loss of many scrolls and books; its destruction has become a symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge.”55

54members.ozemail.com.au/~msaﬁer/photos/tintypes.html. 55en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria. 332 10 Integration of Family Records into Community History

Thus, while giving proper respect to cutting-edge computer science, this book has emphasized folk technology that ordinary people can use and adapt. In each of the areas we have explored, innovative studies in human-computer interaction research would be feasible, and could discover results that were both intellectually interesting and commercially profitable. Given the relative instability of extended families in the modern era, and the typically wide geographic distribution of their members, there must be extensive copying and sharing of family records. One virtue of ancient Babylonian tablets is that they did not burn, which cannot be said for paper documents or even today’s DVDs. The idea that each member of a family would own a complete electronic copy of its history is laudable, but we may well imagine a hypothetical Wikipedia of the year 4018 lamenting that all the memories of the previous civilization were erased by the great weaponized EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that ushered in its demise. Certainly, no human creation is perfect, let alone immortal, so the primary benefits of family history digital libraries must be for the family’s living members and the wider community of which the family is a part. Some of that benefit may be in the area of health, including mental health which for a century has been implicated both as cause and effect of the social dynamics of the family. Much health-related information now exists online, and may be gathered by mobile devices that family members carry around with them, raising ethical issues of great sensitivity (Bainbridge 2016). Perhaps too often, when computer scientists cannot solve a problem related to human users, they pass their responsibility over to under-funded social scientists. Yet,clearly, the social science of the family will not only be a great beneficiary of the information collected in family histories, but must also contribute to the development of solutions for problems that arise. In Chap. 4 we noted how easy it is for a family to share written materials not merely in one wiki, but in two, one private and one public consisting of a subset of the pages on the private wiki. Would this design strategy work also for a family whose living members disagreed about the meaning of important past events and about which facts should be revealed to the general public? What collective decision process would be appropriate for a family whose records were already distributed across multiple archives, in fragments that required a synthesis system to connect them into a meaningful history? Consider a family from Greenwich, Connecticut, in which one member of the younger generation placed a trove of family data in the Mormon Family History Center which happens to be in somewhat distant Newtown, another put family data in the local library, a third spread subsets of the family data across the town’s school records and their Facebook groups, a fourth put a different subset at the Riverside Yacht Club, and others expressed displeasure that the data were being shared at all. This book has noted a number of different circumstances in which sensitive issues arise, and family members may disagree. It has also catalogued various possible solutions to such problems, without pretending to know which would really work best. The Mormon family history project has a wiki with a page titled Genealogical Ethics, that chiefly refers to the Code of Ethics of the Association of Professional Geneal- 10.5 Conclusion: A Research Agenda 333 ogists.56 The association itself says: “The APG Code of Ethics and Professional Practices serves to promote: (1) a truthful approach to genealogy, family history, and local history; (2) the trust and security of genealogical consumers; and (3) careful and respectful treatment of records, repositories and their staffs, other professionals, and genealogical organizations and associations.”57 Thus, it is a professional code of ethics, concerning relations between professional genealogists and their clients, saying almost nothing about wider issues beyond treating “information concerning living people with appropriate discretion” and refraining “from violating or encouraging others to violate… rights to privacy.” To the extent that the definition of genealogy is limited to the collection of formal records to draw family trees, serious ethical questions would be rare, such as the historical debate over whether Julius Caesar was really the father of the son of Cleopatra whom she named Caesarion. However, this book offer a much richer concept of family history, one that assembles a tremendous diversity and magnitude of information and seeks to find the full meaning of each major theme that can be discerned in these records. Ideally, some responsible member of each family should adopt the role of historian, gaining the best available technical skills for collecting, processing, and interpreting a diversity of forms of information. In so doing, they will not only help the others come to understand their own personal positions in human life. Through doing their work responsibly yet creatively, historians will learn the meaning of their own lives.

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