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The family church, in more ways than one
I should really just retitle this blog “Tim’s Adventures in Historical Documents.” I keep finding really interesting stuff when I dig.
Today’s interesting find is probably only interesting to my Lancaster County family, but here goes: the Leacock Presbyterian Church in Paradise, PA, which was my mother’s family’s church since at least the early part of the 20th century, has a deeper connection to the family than we knew.
I was looking through deeds, as lately I seem wont to do, when I decided to stop checking out property sold by Abraham Hershey and look for what was sold by his father and mother, Christian and Susanna. And, though I still didn’t find who sold the barn, I found something more interesting: a deed, on pp. 459 and 460 of the old deed book Z7, dated June 12, 1840, recording the sale of land in what was then Strasburg to the trustees of the old Leacock Presbyterian Church, so that they could “erect and build… a house or place of worship, for the use of the members of the Presbyterian Church…”
If you look closely at the photo above, at its maximum resolution on the Flickr page, you’ll see a dedication stone listing the beginning of the building in 1840. The land that Christian and Susanna Hershey sold the trustees for the princely sum of $286.87 became the home of the “new” Leacock Presbyterian Church, the church that my great-grandfather and his family then attended, in which my parents got married, in whose graveyard now resides a fair number of my kin. It gave me a bit of a shiver knowing that my connection to that church goes back even further.
Grab bag: Lessons of failures
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Good overview of how success came out of a long string of failures for Harmonix.
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A survey of economics history to try to understand why economists can’t predict that a train is about to go over a cliff.
Grab bag: Kennedy funeral thoughts
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I love this explanation for its Christianness. And I love the rabid fools in the comments section who through their lack of charity (with a capital C) make the point that some Christians need to learn the teachings of Christ.
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Make sure to hit http://www.adobe.com/getflash to update your Flash player; the bundled one is out of date.
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UVA alum Philippa Hughes’ arts calendar and event series just got promoted to must-visit site if you are in DC. Hat tip to Cudlin for the pointer.
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Crowdsourcing tips to survive the next big California wildfire season, which is upon us.
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Tom Ridge gets a chance to explain his comments on the politicization of the terror threat level system. The result kinda speaks for itself.
Grab bag: Acquisition, validation, and more
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Heh heh heh. Nice set of Marvel characters in the Disney style and vice versa.
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User research on the effectiveness of inline validation concludes: Focus it on fields that are difficult (passwords), keep it persistent, and show the validation messages after the user is done typing, not while.
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The usual deep missive about a new Mac OS X release from John Siracusa. Exhaustive down to Spotlight indexing times, the mechanics of transparent application compression, the mechanics of QuickTime playback, and more. I like this quotation about QuickTime X: “This is just the start of a long journey for QuickTime X, and seemingly not a very auspicious one, at that. A QuickTime engine with no editing support? No plug-ins? It seems ridiculous to release it at all. But this has been Apple’s way in recent years: steady, deliberate progress. Apple aims to ship no features before their time.”
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More digital news archives.
Brackbill Farm: no needle in the haystack yet
I was a little premature with my sketch of the history of the Brackbill Farm two weeks ago. As you’ll recall, the farmhouse says it was built by Abraham and Barbara Hershey in 1857 (or maybe 1867–the sign isn’t very clear in the photo I took from the ground). And I was very excited to find the microfilmed deed books of Lancaster County so that I could start figuring out how it passed from their hands to my great-great grandfather Elam Brackbill.
Turns out that just reading the microfilm was akin to sequentially looking at sectors on a hard disk. If there was an organizational structure there, it wasn’t apparent to me–each book was chronologically ordered, but there was no relationship between book numbers. So I couldn’t even find which book had the deeds from the 1896-1897 timeframe that I guessed to be the date of sale of the farm.
The Internet to the rescue. The Southern Lancaster County Historical Society photographed the Indexes of Grantors for all those deeds, meaning if you know who sold the property, you can go to the photo pages, read the book number and page, punch them into the online microfilm reader, and read the deed. So I found four or five deeds relating to the estate of Abraham Hershey and his wife Barbara and started reading avidly.
And was crestfallen. Each of the deeds conveyed property, to heirs or others through sale, but all of the property was on the wrong side of Rt. 30, in Paradise or Strasburg, or in the townships of Eden and Bart. As near as I can tell, the family property’s mailing address should be in or near Salisbury Township, but so far none of the Abraham Hershey deeds have turned up in Salisbury.
The good news, I suppose, is that the indexes only represent the years up to about 1893, so it’s still possible that the second volume of the index will show a deed in about the right time period showing Elam Brackbill’s purchase of it. And I’m now certain that Elam purchased it; a newspaper record from 1905 talked about his residence in Salisbury Township. (Special hat tip to the Access Pennsylvania Digital Repository, a really well put together research site.)
So we’re not back to square one, but I still haven’t found the relevant information. It’s frustrating, knowing that it’s somewhere in that massive pile of microfilm and that I simply don’t have the key to find it.
Grab bag: Genealogy, soulless soup, death prayers
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The Snow Leopard compatible version of the Reunion genealogy software for the Mac is out.
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The deeds describing the disposal of Abraham Hershey’s property after his death are listed here.
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Photos of the index pages (by grantor) of the Lancaster County Deeds, permitting you to use the microfilm reader to find the deed you’re looking for. Brilliant.
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Black Francis (and Bob Lefsetz) indict “I’m a PC” and the music business in one fell swoop: “Too many lame-ass, greedy cooks in the kitchen! The soup is SOULESS!”
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Stay classy, Arizona: “Steven Anderson, the Arizona pastor who says he’s praying for President Obama’s death has now thrown in some helpful specificity. He wants him to get brain cancer like Sen. Kennedy.”
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The Incredibles Fantastic Four? Captain Amerimickey? The mind boggles. Wonder what this does for the cause of creator owned characters…
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Rands discusses the review experience and its breakdown from both sides of the desk.
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Laser cleaning isn’t just for exfoliation: a backpack laser will be used to clear years of pollutants off marble capitals on the Lawn.
Grab bag: Farewell, Edward Kennedy
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Partial list of transcripts of the Friday night memorial for Senator Kennedy.
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Of all the speeches last night, Biden’s hit home for me: “He’d constantly renewed my faith and optimism in the possible… I never saw him petty. I never saw him act in a small way. And as a consequence, he made us all bigger, both his friends, his allies, and his foes. His dignity, his lack of vitriol, his lack of pettiness forced some of the less generous members of our community to act bigger than they were.”
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Oh Frabjous Day! HP actually updated their software for Snow Leopard. And best of all: “Scanning: The Scanning interface is now built into Snow Leopard and supported with the Apple Image Capture application.” !!!!!!
Snow Leopard: Initial thoughts
I did the Snow Leopard upgrade last night, and it went OK.
First step was to back up my MacBook. It’s an exaggeration to say that it had never been backed up–I do, or did, regularly back up files to my .Mac iDisk, but rarely if ever did a whole system back up. A $99 external USB hard drive let me use Time Machine for the first time and I let that run for about three hours. Once it ran, I kicked off the installer and went to bed. (Yes, tempting fate.)
In the morning, I came down to the login screen. After login, about five copies of Software Update popped up, prompting me to install Rosetta so that “HP IO Classic Proxy 2” could run. I cancelled all of them, and went to HP’s site, where I found a suggestion that I didn’t need that driver, or any of HP’s software. Seems that the printer drivers are included in Snow Leopard, and scan support has been added to the built in Apple Image Capture application. Um, yay. Scan support from pressing the printer button is gone, but I never used that.
I couldn’t get my Cisco VPN working, but I should be able to get a later version of the client from work on Monday. Even better, I’ll be able to try out the built in VPN support once I turn up my connection file (it’s in a directory that’s not indexed by Spotlight, apparently).
Best of all? The update did free up disk space. About 11 gigs. Now that’s what I call a good upgrade.
Thinking outside the Internet box
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What we call the Internet is too big a box to serve as a good metaphorical basis from which to make decisions. There are infrastructure layers of the Internet that should be driving our thinking, but without a sound metaphorical basis we’re making policy decisions about it that are grounded in the physics of radio.
Grab bag: ePub, online ticketing at UVA, and more
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A nice way to get offline access to ebooks for free. I read all of Patton’s “Jefferson, Cabell, and the University of Virginia” on the iPhone using the Google Books web interface, and I think this would be better, not least because of the offline capability.
Wonder how you get the books into an iPhone app.
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The UVA Arts Box Office actually does ticketing for student organizations, like the Virginia Glee Club, too (even if it doesn’t link to them). I may pass out from surprise. Back when Arts $ was launched, student orgs were locked out.
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File Quarantine (“this application was downloaded from the Internet”) has been augmented by a known bad list. A decent start, but what if the user’s badlist is out of date? Or if they downloaded a file from Bittorrent? Needs improvement.
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Alas, I won’t see much in the way of disk savings from Snow Leopard if most of it is from deleting unused print drivers. I purged those a long time ago.
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Hey cool–some fringe benefits from the Black Dog.
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Nice move to online ticketing, though, of course, this article is useless without a link.
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A look at the security of the Mac OS X platform on the eve of the Snow Leopard launch.
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Hog Bay Software discovers the power of marketing price promotions: doubling daily sales and adding 15000 new downloads by briefly taking the price of their iPhone app to free.
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The author of Wired’s Craigslist piece digs deeper into the site and where it’s going. Nice follow up blog series coming.
Historic homes go on sale at Ft. Monroe
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I’d love to find a way to get back to Ft. Monroe once the base is decommissioned. Beautiful location on the water, tons of history, childhood memories of being there every Independence Day… and houses on the Historic Register.
Grab bag: Read, evolve, ditch
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Some ideas for getting rid of physical discs. Doesn’t suggest how to scale the approach to a collection of over 1000.
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Incredible video showing the evolution of the UI for an iPhone app. Inspirational; makes one want to get the details right.
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Links to readings and interview with the poet and translator, whom I was lucky enough to publish when I was at Virginia.
Snow Leopard arrives Friday
You can now pre-order Mac OS X 10.6, aka “Snow Leopard,” at the Apple Store for delivery on Friday. I forgot what it feels like to be excited and waiting for a Mac OS X release, even what is admittedly a point release with a handful of features. Some of those features are pretty cool, though, like Exchange support.
I’ve decided to get ready for the new Exchange features by doing something I should have done a while ago: I created a new dedicated “work user” on my laptop for those times I need to get into the office from home, and locked down the account–deprivileged it, used File Vault for the home directory, the whole nine yards. When Snow Leopard comes out, I’ll hook that user’s Mail and Calendar into the office Exchange server over the VPN. Nicer experience than Outlook Web Access and still secure.
I think, though, that most of all I’m looking forward to getting up to 7 GB back on my hard disk.
Grab bag: Rebel waltzes and secret doors
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Awesome hidden doors projects in the gallery.
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Free Clash tribute with some Sally Timms and Camper Van Beethoven tracks. Worth a listen at the price.