The US election

 We'd been steadfastly ignoring the US election, but, eternal optimists both, we'd been hoping for a more liberal America, rather than one which at times seemed to be increasingly governed by people from some alternate reality.

Well, we now know the result, and it doesn't look like what we hoped for.

So last night, we turned the tv off, got a bottle of chilled pinot grigio out of the fridge, poured a couple of glasses and sat out on the deck watching a storm roll in from the west ...

Back to some sort of normality

 After our mad dash out west last week we slipped back in to a more normal routine this week, with a productive day down at Lake View working on the books used to 'dress' the sitting room and the anecdotal observation that works of devotional literature were far less worn than the popular literature of the day, suggesting that they were far less read.

I took advantage of my work with the Athenaeum's heritage book collection, which reflects the actual tastes of reading room subscribers in Stanley in the late Victorian period to suggest that sensation novels and the like were far more popular than more pious literature.

As I pointed out, this can present a curatorial problem when 'dressing' a house for display - it is tempting to produce a display featuring well preserved items of devotional literature than the battered and tattered copies of 'Little Women' and 'The Woman in White', which more closely reflect the literary taste of the times.

I also mentioned last week that some of the items I'd catalogued at Lake View included some moral works by Hannah More that appeared little read.

While certainly the case there's possibly an interesting story here.

The books in question were printed by Thomas Tegg in London, and I'd vaguely assumed that they'd come out as part of an order from a London bookseller in a sort of nineteenth century version of Amazon, but they could potentially have been sold in Sydney, as Thomas Tegg's son, James Tegg, was a bookseller (and later a printer and publisher in his own right) in Sydney, and I'm guessing that James Tegg bought them from his father as stock for his bookshop,

After last year's possum trouble, I started off my tomatoes on the enclosed part of the back deck used as a cat run, and planted them out this week as they'd grown to a possum proof size.

This has left me with a problem - the first part of October was cold and I held off buying zucchini plants, but when I went down to the local hardware store earlier this week to see if they had any left they were completely out, so I've ended up planting some standard commercial seed in pots in the hope they'll germinate and I can plant out some late zucchini early next month.

(Normally I buy some plants from a local nursery plus try some organic varieties grown with seed bought online, with mixed results - the organic seed can have a low germination rate, possibly due to our tendency to have decidedly cold nights well into spring, while the bought plants initially struggle, perhaps because I don't properly harden them off.)

I didn't plant any potatoes this year, which was possibly a mistake but our dill, basil and chives are doing well. The broad beans took a terrific battering during the dress rehearsal for Ragnorok a couple of weeks ago and have not recovered, so I'm afraid we're going to have a fairly meagre crop this year.

Still, that's gardening ...

Furniture and a trip out west

 The last couple of weeks I've been working on the sitting room at Lake View, documenting the furniture - furniture's not really my thing, and I have to keep referring to various guides to nineteenth century chair designs to correctly describe the styles, but in among the props used to dress the house I was amused to come across a set of volumes by Hannah More, a nineteenth century conservative Christian moralist, that had evidently been given to a young woman, a Miss Webster, as a Christmas present in 1841 (or possibly as a school prize as the handwritten dedication says that  that it was given by the Misses Harding in recognition of her industry and good conduct - unfortunately I can't trace an early school run by any Misses Harding) looked more or less unread, with the bindings still tight ,,,

It's moments like these that make you wonder if Miss Webster, like Jane Austen's fictional Catherine Morland, would have preferred something a little more gothic...

Up at the Athenaeum, we've been discussing data  management with no real conclusions other than it's a good thing and trying to put together a little event based around the 1925 commemoration of Hume and Hovell's 1825 journey  from Sydney to somewhere near Corio in what is now Geelong.

In 1925 they built various monuments to commemorate the centenary of the trip and carted various worthies, including the Governor, to dedicate the cairns.

However, my morning at the Athenaeum was cut short by worsening weather - what had been heavy rain turned into a mini Ragnarok, battering the garden, and of course the power went out,

We'd had the sense to start cooking a vegetarian stew for dinner just after lunch, meaning it was more or less done by the time the power went out.

By early evening we were still in the dark (literally) and dug out our old gas camping stove to heat our stew on the covered area of the deck outside. 

As it was still raining we reckoned we'd probably better  eat before the sun went down, but just as we lighting our battery storm lanterns the power came back and stayed on.

Fortunately the bad weather had cleared by the next morning as we had booked a skip, so for the next couple of days we did nothing but work solidly on clearing the inevitable accumulation of junk left over from renovations and so on from the converted garage which will eventually become a second studio for J to do smelly things like oil painting and also give me a second work area for genealogical and other miscellaneous nineteenth century research.

As if that wasn't enough  I've been down a bit of a rabbit hole about serious crimes on railways in the nineteenth century, and traced the story of a railway crime in rural Scotland which occurred not to far from where by grandparents and great grand parents had a farm at the end of the nineteenth century,

Oh, and we played hooky this week and had a mad dash out west to look at Lake Tyrell and the salt flats...

Finding Irene ...

 Trying to find Irene Lily May Hoggan's death record got under my skin, so I decided to do a little detective work - otherwise known as brushing up my genealogical research skills.

I backtracked my searches on Victoria's Births, Deaths and Marriages website and there was definitely no death record, nor was there a death record for her husband, Arthur Burge.

And even though we are looking at a time when divorce was rare and expensive, most people simply making their own informal arrangements, I checked for a divorce record, and there was none. 

In a moment of frustration I simply tried a google search on her full married name, and strangely that worked - I stumbled across an Ancestry list of family trees and there she was, living in New South Wales.

Ancestry of course obscures most of the information unless you sign up.

 

I don't have a subscription to any of the family history giants any more, but what was not obscured suggested that Irene Lily May may have died in New South Wales.

At this point I could, I suppose, have waited to Monday to use my local Library's Ancestry subscription - you can only use the subscription from one of the Library desktops - to check further but I had enough bits of puzzle - having a slightly unusual name helps - to track her down online using open source materials.

 

A quick search of NSW's BDM site confirmed  that she had died in Manly in 1958 almost twenty years after her husband, who appears to have died in 1939.

The fact that this was relatively straight forward is a tribute to how simple it is to carry out basic genealogical research using open source materials - despite what the glossy ads tell you you don't need a subscription to one of the behemoths for basic research given so much is publicly available online.

If you are doing a lot of work in this area, a subscription to the behemoths can be worthwhile, if only to reduce the cost of access to copies of original documents, and even then your mileage may vary...

The minutiae of everyday life

 

Something I've always found fascinating is coming  across the traces of people in the past who lived, loved and died over a century ago, somehow it makes the past more alive to me.

So when  I was documenting a pile of children's books in the nursery at Lake View I was fascinated by some of the fly leaf dedications - such as this book of stories given to a little girl called Florence Edna McKean by her proud father in 1879 or like this insert in a book given as a school prize at Carlton Kindergarten in 1899 Irene Hoggan for Music and Club Swinging - I'm guessing as a physical exercise to teach co-ordination, rather than for being a regular at the Purple Pussycat.

What life gave both these little girls I have no idea - a quick search of Victoria's Births, Marriages and Deaths site suggests Florence married quite late in life, in 1915, and died in 1947. Irene married in 1914 when she would have been 24, but I can find no record of her death, but of course she may have moved interstate,

There books came from a job lot of nineteenth century children's books bought at auction and used to 'dress' the nursery at Lake View to give an impression of how it may have looked - there's no connection with the history of the property.

Otherwise I've been working on a mapping to convert the Athenaeum Heritage book collection into a format suitable for upload to Victorian Collections, as well as reverting my Lenovo IdeaPad to an earlier version of Ubuntu, after I ran into some stability issues after an upgrade to the latest version.

It's not all been computers and archiving though, I've also been able to get a bit of gardening in, which at this time really turns into a race between me and the weeds - can I pull them out faster than they grow?

 

Shorts! I've been wearing shorts!

 The weather is getting gradually warmer, though it's two steps forward and one step back at the moment, but one afternoon this week it was warm enough to wear shorts while working in the garden trying to tame the damned couch grass that infests our flower and vegetable beds.

Because we try and be as organic as possible in our garden, dealing with the couch grass infestation means getting down on one's hands and knees with a bucket and a hand fork and trying to dig out the root nodes and runners - something which I find strangely therapeutic.

Our bower bird is chirping away trying to lay wings on a mate, and is raiding the peg basket on the washing line for blue pegs, and scattering all the other rejected ones round the garden, giving us a little task to gather them all up every morning though I leave him any of the blue ones he takes.

All this gardening and bower bird foraging hasn't turned up anything so far this year in the way of garden archaeology - no interesting bits of glass or old medicine bottles, but there's a lot of couch grass left to root out.

Down at Lake View I've been working on the room that's been dressed as the nursery, but while doing so I had an important realisation about oil lamps - that lamp makers bought in burners from specialist manufacturers - the burners being quite complicated bits of brasswork, and hence the name on the burner isn't necessarily the name of the lamp maker.

I also spent some time trying to track down what had happened to the Florence Nightingale Digitization project, principally because one of my back burner projects was to investigate the treatment of mental trauma during the Crimean war.

For the rest it was just the mechanics of life, but tomorrow's clock change day when we spring forward an hour, which at least will have the benefit of the cats trying to wake us at 0630 rather than 0530 to be let out, and I probably ought to check my bike in the hope that it will soon be warm enough to start my morning bike rides over summer ...

A slightly more eventful week

 Well, this week’s been a little more eventful with a day trip to Melbourne to see the Egyptian exhibition at the NGV, not to mention a little bit of 'fun' when I upgraded my Ubuntu machine to Noble Numbat.

As this week ends with a public holiday, I didn’t have a session at the Athenaeum this Friday, but I did have a productive day at Lakeview where I started on what’s been designated the nursery.

Most of the contents of Lakeview are inevitably props, which means that the rooms have been ‘dressed’ to give an impression of what they would have been like in late Victorian times, rather than the contents being directly associated with the house.

That said, the nursery contents, like the main bedroom are mostly in period with some contemporary children's dolls and a battered Winsor and Newton water colour set, which can be dated to the last thirty or so years of the nineteenth century, as not only is it by appointment to Queen Victoria - a more than reasonable watercolourist - but also to the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Personally, I struggle to  see the future Edward VII as a watercolour artist - gin, champagne and fornication seem to have been much more his thing, but Queen Alexandra did dabble, so there’s perhaps a little bit of truth in the claimed royal connection ...