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Jan. 12th, 2020 03:03 pmI have no training as a historian or an archivist, but I like to find out things in those realms. My activities of yesterday afternoon might provide an example. The first band of ringers at Old North (Christ Church) were teenage boys from the neighborhood. Or at least the most famous of them, Paul Revere, was 15 at time they wrote up a highfalutin’ contract for themselves
https://oldnorth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Bell-Ringer-document.pdf
There is an enlargement of this in the ringing room, for the use of tour guides, so I see it weekly. We know a lot of what happened with Paul after that, but I have often wondered about the other guys. I was going to be spending the afternoon at the BPL. It dawned on me that I wasn’t far from the New England Historic Genealogical Society (on Newbury Street, a block or two over), and that maybe I should finally break down and join, so that I could look up folk of history in New England. I had the iPad with me, using the library’s wifi, so I searched for the exactly address on the web site. To my surprise and pleasure, going to the site from the library logged me automatically to the search page, and I didn’t have to get up from the chair or spend any money. I spent the next hour+ trying to track down long-gone ringers. It’s problematic, because all I knew about them was where there were once a week in 1750, and their names aren’t uncommon, but I think I got pertinent info on Josiah Flagg, and maybe Bart Ballad. All of my notes were taken on an old boarding pass that I found in the bottom of my backpack (why don’t I travel with a notebook?), scribbled in no order, and I didn’t even write down the exact title of most of the documents, or the unique reference number the organization uses for each person in their database. I expect other people to cite correctly – why am I not setting myself up to be able to do that?
There was a historical coincidence of the day last Sunday. At the time that I was reading along on “the Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics,” by Olivia Waite (set in 1816), a Dr. Who episode aired which included an 1834 visit to Charles Babbage, with the Doctor longingly stroking the model of the difference engine in his drawing room. There is a character in the Lady’s Guide who is not much like CB in some ways, but recognizably a tribute to him in others, including having the first thoughts toward the engine at the same time period. Waite’s character doesn’t call it a difference engine, and the character is clearly a completely fictional person, but it sent me to Wikipedia and here
https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/ to see how much alike or different the two were. That doesn’t really count as historical research – just looking stuff up, but I could stand to be better at it anyway.
https://oldnorth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Bell-Ringer-document.pdf
There is an enlargement of this in the ringing room, for the use of tour guides, so I see it weekly. We know a lot of what happened with Paul after that, but I have often wondered about the other guys. I was going to be spending the afternoon at the BPL. It dawned on me that I wasn’t far from the New England Historic Genealogical Society (on Newbury Street, a block or two over), and that maybe I should finally break down and join, so that I could look up folk of history in New England. I had the iPad with me, using the library’s wifi, so I searched for the exactly address on the web site. To my surprise and pleasure, going to the site from the library logged me automatically to the search page, and I didn’t have to get up from the chair or spend any money. I spent the next hour+ trying to track down long-gone ringers. It’s problematic, because all I knew about them was where there were once a week in 1750, and their names aren’t uncommon, but I think I got pertinent info on Josiah Flagg, and maybe Bart Ballad. All of my notes were taken on an old boarding pass that I found in the bottom of my backpack (why don’t I travel with a notebook?), scribbled in no order, and I didn’t even write down the exact title of most of the documents, or the unique reference number the organization uses for each person in their database. I expect other people to cite correctly – why am I not setting myself up to be able to do that?
There was a historical coincidence of the day last Sunday. At the time that I was reading along on “the Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics,” by Olivia Waite (set in 1816), a Dr. Who episode aired which included an 1834 visit to Charles Babbage, with the Doctor longingly stroking the model of the difference engine in his drawing room. There is a character in the Lady’s Guide who is not much like CB in some ways, but recognizably a tribute to him in others, including having the first thoughts toward the engine at the same time period. Waite’s character doesn’t call it a difference engine, and the character is clearly a completely fictional person, but it sent me to Wikipedia and here
https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/ to see how much alike or different the two were. That doesn’t really count as historical research – just looking stuff up, but I could stand to be better at it anyway.
