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?