Controlled vocabularies and genealogy

 Well after our slightly frenetic trip to South Australia it's back to some sort of normality.

While we enjoyed our road trip, it also reminded us that we haven't quite mastered the idea of slow travel, and even though we split our return leg into sensible sized chunks, and had a day off in Echuca, it was really a bit silly.

Better to have gone a little less far and taken some more time off on the return journey.

However, we're back now and I had my usual Friday session up at the Athenaeum working on trying to put together a controlled vocabulary of the publishers.

Most of them aren't too hard - A and B started in the 1880's merged in the early 1900's, somehow survived into the 1960's and then got bought by some megacorp - and wikipedia is quite good as a source.

There are of course these ones who vanished, victims of recession and world wars, but they've usually left some sort of a trace.

However, there are those small publishers of what we can loosely call 'pulp fiction' that appeared and then disappeared.

These ones are actually quite important as they often were the publishers of both detective and wild west novels for which there was a considerable appetite in the 1920s and 1930s - Agatha Christie might be the doyenne of interwar crime fiction, but she was by no means the only popular author, and as I've said elsewhere, the heritage book collection lets us see what people actually wanted to read, the popular fiction of the time.

Not all of them turn out to be what they first seem:

I spent an hour or so trying to track down a single publisher who seemed to have left absolutely no trace whatsoever, despite publishing books by Dane Coolidge, who while mainly known for his cowboy novels, was also a serious naturalist, anthropologist and photographer, documenting some of the last indigenous peoples of the south western United States.

Most of his books were originally published by Avon in the United States, but they were written at a time when the book trade in Australia was dominated by UK, not US, imports.

According to the catalogue list, which we know has errors, the novel in question was published by Steppington and sons.

I could not trace the publisher, even after searching the Library of Congress catalogue.

Various editions, published by various publishers existed but no Steppington and sons.

And then I had a brainwave - I tried the British Library catalogue, and there it was, published by Skeffington and sons, a small British publisher that started in the 1850s publishing primarily Christian literature but later moved into publishing wider range of works, including one by Conan Doyle which had previously been serialised in various newspapers and magazines.

Well, I guess I'm not the only one with illegible handwriting, and when the original handwritten record was transcribed, Skeffington had been mis-read as Steppington.

Lesson learned - always check the British Library catalogue entry for a book if you can't easily identify the publisher. And it also shows how important for putting together a controlled vocabulary of publishers is for data quality.

I also had a look back at the family history work I did during the pandemic.

Some of it is interesting, a lot of it is quite boring to anyone but myself, but it's all a bit disorganised, because in the main I used it as a sort of distraction from what was going on the world around me - and remember we had quite a few lockdowns over the first two years of the pandemic here in Victoria - rather than treating it as a serious exercise.

I would trace a bit, find something interesting, stop, and then go off down another rabbit hole. Unstructured, I think is the polite way of describing my approach.

Ideally I ought to organise the material and put it together in some sort of a usable fashion, but I have a quasi-technical dilemma.

When I was doing this originally I used J's old imac which had a 21" screen to read and transcribe old census records and the like.

That was ideal as the screen was a decent resolution and big enough to comfortably display a scanned page.

Well, five years on the old imac has gone to the recycler, as has its successor, and while I've got several computers with decent enough resolution screens they are all laptops with naturally smaller screens.

I could of course buy a decent second hand monitor and use it as an external display, but for almost the same money I could pick up one of these all in one windows machines you often see on receptionists' desks, which has a large screen and install Linux on it - Linux because the Gramps genealogical package  works well under Linux.

That would give me a dedicated family history workstation I could stick in a corner of J's outside studio rather than trying to find space to leave a laptop and an external monitor set up somewhere.

I can't decide which way to go, buying an extra machine seems silly when I've got some perfectly capable Linux laptops already, but equally it's more compact solution and I'm a bit constrained for desk space ...

[Update 06/04/2025]

Well, I spent the morning patching my Linux machines - clock's  change day seemed an ideal time for it, especially as the morning was cloudy and cold, and that has helped me come to a conclusion of sorts - procrastinate with a purpose.

So my workplan, as added to Trello, looks like this:

Draw together all my existing material, sort out some of the inconsistencies in my existing GEDCOM database, ensure that my various existing scans of census records etc are correctly annotated, and then review where we are with things, and decide then if I need another machine, or a bigger monitor.

There's no urgency to purchase either, decent second hand examples are not that hard to find, and even if they disappear for a week or two, the end of the financial year in July usually brings a new tranche of ex- lease equipment ...

And I finally got to document the hip bath

 Quite a busy few days.

Down at Lake View I finished the study and the Henry Handel Richardson memorabilia, meaning that I have now finished the main house and am now working in the external kitchen block.

The kitchen block lacks power sockets which makes data capture a challenge. I did think of using the minimalist research machine to do the data capture, but for the moment have settled on an old school solution - an A4 notebook and a series of scribbled notes to which I add comments as I go - basically the same methodology as I started with in Dow’s back in 2017.

Working in the kitchen has meant that I finally got to document our rather grubby example of a hip bath 

Basically a battered example of a nineteenth century enamelled hip bath.

Up at the Athenaeum, I’m grinding through the book list identifying unique publishers, and once I’ve done that I’ll add in synonyms eg Longman Green and Co is an earlier version of Longman’s, and that way we will hopefully avoid the confusion caused by people making up abbreviations such as randomly abbreviating Conan Doyle’s publisher Simpkins Marshall and Kent to a fairly meaningless’Kent’.

After my problems photographing a typewriter serial number I bought myself an incredibly cheap USB endoscope, which is hopefully going to make photographing serial numbers and other labels in awkward places that little bit easier.

Besides that I’ve been spending more time than I intended on Katherine Scragg.

The case has got under my skin a bit, and I should, along with the case of Fanny Elizabeth Bull write something about how assaults on middle class women were handled as opposed to cases like that of Harriet Daniel’s that were thrown out, perhaps because they were seen as the lower orders doing what happened on Saturday night behind the Dog and Duck in a first class railway carriage…

A fairly full dance card ...

Suddenly, I seem to have been busy.

A full day down at Lake View, documenting Henry Handel Richardson memorabilia, including a typewriter that certainly wasn't hers,  a session of the local family history group, which introduced me to the joys of Trello, and a morning up at the Athenaeum building a controlled vocabulary of book publisher names.

The last part is part of preparing the heritage book collection data for upload to Victorian collections and I realised that the names of the publishers had been entered inconsistently in the original spreadsheet, and that we would need to standardise them.

Fortunately wikipedia is pretty good on nineteenth century publishers, and where it fails there's a couple of other good reliable resources, and I've only found two publishers so far that don't seem to  have left  a trace - a pre-World War II Australian publisher of thrillers, and an English publisher, Juvenile Productions that seems to have specialised in 1950s editions of out of copyright chilren's classics such as Alice in Wonderland.

As well as all that I've done a little more research on assaults on women in railway carriages in the 1880s, and finally run to ground some nineteenth century photographs of a hip-bath in use, courtesy of an archive of Eadweard Muybridge photographs, and found time to convert my Dell Latitude from Lubuntu to Ubuntu.

All good fun ...

Brrr!

 Ever since Christmas we've had hot, sometimes unpleasantly hot, dry weather, and being a bit of a dag at heart I've spent most of the time wandering around in a pair of battered shorts, thongs, and an equally worn and battered t-shirt.

But no more. This morning, when I got up just after dawn for my weekly 10km bike ride, it was chilly a 4C, and a definite shock to the system.

The ride itself was quite beautiful, with an almost full moon hanging in a pale blue early morning sky, and I was warm enough once I got going, but I did appreciate having the heating on at home and a hot shower afterwards.

It's just nature's way of reminding us that autumn's not that far off and that colder weather is on the way ...

Tomatoes and artefacts

 Last week was another very hot week, so hot that I skipped going down to Lake View.

On the basis of the previous week, the building would have retained the heat and be incredibly stuffy, and with no wind or fans to circulate the air no way to try and cool the building.

After Sunday's heavy rain, this week was a different story and I managed quite a productive session cataloguing the Henry Handel Richardson artefacts on display in the study. There's nothing super amazing - mostly things like books given as presents to her sister

which shows that Henry was more that a pseudonym, and that she referred to herself as Henry even to family members.

Driving down to Lake View wasn't without incident, as I came over a slight rise there was a big wallaby - so big I thought at first it was a kangaroo - sitting in the middle of the road thinking wallaby thoughts, as they do.

I slammed on the brakes and stopped about five metres short of it. It looked around, looked at a car that was coming in the other direction which had also had to do an emergency stop, and then hopped lazily off into the surrounding native bush.

Fortunately, here was no such excitement at the  Athenaeum the previous Friday.

The building has the benefit of air conditioning, so last Friday was the first full session back working on sorting out the catalogue and preparing material for upload to Victorian Collections, which is going to involve an audit of the book collection - which might be fun.

J has been working on something that will probably end up as something like a radio play with her drama group - no costumes, no props, just some spotlights - and asked me if I had any examples of nineteenth century reporting of  assaults to get an idea of the language and euphemisms used.

This set me off following the case of Fanny Elizabeth Bull who was attacked while travelling home in August 1885 in London.

Sadly, these cases were all too common, and were not just a British thing, but occurred in Australia as well, as in this case reported in the Sydney Daily Telegraph in 1887

However, the Fanny Elizabeth Bull case is more fully reported on - perhaps because she was a governess - and give us an insight into how things worked at the time.

In Victorian England, the victim of an assault had to mount a private prosecution, which meant that the victim was subject to cross examination by the assailant or the assailant's lawyers, who invariably tried to make out that the woman concerned was a person of loose morals.

This of course meant that women were reluctant to take men to court in sexual assault cases, because of the long term risk to their reputations.

I've written previously about how, in a case in rural Angus (in Scotland), the judge shut down any discussion of the sixteen year old victim's character. In this case we can see how the victim was persuaded, with promises of support from the railway company,  to take the case forward to the central criminal court in London, even though the assailant had pleaded guilty in a lower court, where he would receive a harsher sentence.

(Not all such cases ended well, I also came across the case of Harriet Daniels from Ruabon, who had her prosecution of her alleged rapist thrown out - why is a bit of a mystery as the newspaper reports of the time seem to clearly suggest that she had been raped while travelling in a first class railway carriage.)

After spending time researching Fanny Elizabeth's court case, I felt a need to try and find out a little of the shape of  her life, so that she was more than just a name.

This turned out to be more difficult than I thought, mainly because the UK censuses are paywalled.

I tried various workarounds but in the end the simplest solution was to use our local library's subscription to Ancestry to search for her in the UK census records.

Not only was this a success, it also put me in touch with the local family history community.

While I was at it I tried using the free search facility at  UK census online to find Harriet, or at least give me some clues as to where to look. This wasn't a great success. There's no Harriet Daniels listed in the 1891 census returns for the pre 1974 counties of Denbeighshire, Merionethshire, Montgomeryshire or Flintshire, or the adjacent English counties of Cheshire or Shropshire.

In the 1881 census, there is a Harriet Daniels listed as living in Merioneth

who is listed as being a 21 year old servant. None of the press reports give enough detail to confirm that this is the same Harriet Daniels, and as domestic servants sometimes moved about checking the census records on Ancestry probably wouldn't help much.

I'm guessing that after her failed case she left the area for somewhere, such as Liverpool, Birmingham or Manchester where no one would know her and she could start anew.

Gardening wise, I have not done that much other than concentrate on keeping plants alive in the searing heat, watering and sprinkling every evening.

After our possum incident, the possums gave us a wide berth for nearly a week, which let us harvest three or four kilos of tomatoes - basically as many as we could eat, before the possums came back and relieved us of our unripe and damaged ones.

We still have some small late tomatoes which have yet to start ripening, so we're hoping that having stripped our plot, they'll move on to somewhere else, and we'll get some late tomatoes.

And, we finally got our first zucchini!

Which was good, but I'm worried that it might be due to a lack of bees to pollinate our plants - we're getting plenty of male and female flowers, but no zucchinis....

Vegetables and possums

 Netting the vegetables to deter the possums worked - almost.

Last night, when we were getting the cats in from their outdoor cat run we heard something crashing around in the vegetable patch.

The cats were alert and clearly ready to go and deal with whatever was the source of the noise.

Well, we didn't let the cats investigate, but we donned head torches and went and had a look ourselves.

It was a possum, which had somehow got under the net and tangled itself up in an attempt to steal some tomatoes, so we lifted the net and gently swished the tomato plants with some garden canes to encourage it to escape.

It didn't, it tried to hide and tangled itself up even more, so we ended up pulling the net off the tomatoes to encourage it to let go and free itself, which it did, eventually.

Reluctantly, because we want our tomatoes, we've removed the net because we don't like the idea of an animal being trapped overnight. 

Still, I think that possum had such a fright it won't be back - I can imagine back at possum central it telling its friends that it got stuck in a strange restraining net and some very odd bipeds with lights shining on their heads came and poked it - almost a possum alien abduction story.

However, the possums obviously havn't stolen everything, when I was taking the net off I found this ginormous patty pan that both we and the possums had missed ....

Tomatoes

 

Well, we've finally beat the possums to the tomatoes - the first of the season. No zucchini as yet, but here's hoping!