Family history: when was it the “Brackbill” farm?

harryAndEstaBrackbill

I got email yesterday that there was a fair amount of storm damage at the Brackbill Farm in Lancaster County, PA earlier this week. The storm uprooted half a dozen old trees, and sent major chunks of other ash and locust trees flying, with the result that the old cabin and bunkhouse near the creek were heavily damaged. They had stood for over 50 years, so the loss was pretty painful, but fortunately the main buildings and the people on the farm were spared.

But it got me thinking. I learned yesterday more of the provenance of the cabin–which great-uncle built it; which of my first-cousins-once-removed helped–than I knew about the provenance of the actual farm. So I had to do some digging. I already knew that the farm had been the home of my great grandfather and his large family, and I had noticed in 2003 the dedication name on the side of the house that said Hershey rather than Brackbill. A few years later I went back and took a better picture, and was able to decipher the stone entirely; it said “Built by Abraham & Barbara Hershey 1857.” That’s interesting, I thought. There are plenty of Brackbill/Hershey marriages, but I knew Harry G. Brackbill hadn’t married a Hershey (that’s my great grandparents Harry and Esta above, in front of the farmhouse). So what was the connection?

I went back and looked at my genealogy. It seems Abraham Hershey was Harry’s great-uncle–his mother, Barbara Hershey, was the daughter of Christian Hershey, Abraham’s brother. (He was also Harry’s wife Esta’s great-uncle, but that’s a story for another time.) But Abraham had children of his own. How did the farm end up in the Brackbill family?

This week I found some clues, finally, in the magnificent MennObits archive of old Mennonite obituaries. There we find obituaries for both Abraham and Barbara, and some pieces start to fall into place. Abraham passed away in 1887 and Barbara in 1904, and Barbara spent the last seven or eight years of her life living with her children. Presumably she would have lived at the farm if it was still in the family, and had the children living with her (it’s a large farmhouse with enough room for large families). So sometime around 1896 or 1897, the farm may have been sold. My mother thinks that it was sold to Harry’s father, Elam, but I haven’t been able to find anything to confirm that.

The good news is that the historic deeds of Lancaster County, from the 19th century through 1980, have been made available online. The bad news is that the files are in unindexed images, and there are hundreds of pages of books. So I will find the answer… maybe within the next year.

Grab bag: A new canvas

Web-wide citations?

I recently started a new wiki project, which I’ll discuss in more detail later. Like the Brackbill Wiki, this one is based on the same software that powers Wikipedia, MediaWiki. It’s a powerful site building tool if you want something that’s collaboratively edited.

However, don’t assume that all the power of Wikipedia is in any other MediaWiki site. Case in point: citations. I love the citation templates on Wikipedia, together with the reference templates, because they make it drop dead simple to do professional citations, which if you’re trying to construct a reference work are kind of important.

But the citation templates that power Wikipedia aren’t in the default MediaWiki package; they’re templates that live specifically in Wikipedia’s content. And while Wikipedia’s liberal license policies allows reuse-by-copying, that means you have to keep up with bugfixes yourself. It would be one thing if it were just one template, but by my count I had to copy no fewer than 66 templates to get web and book citations, and their associated documentation pages, working. That’s nuts.

What would be nice, of course, would be to have a nice, robust markup strategy that would do proper footnote citations on any site, not just a wiki. The anchor tag is kind of the degenerate version of it–very powerful but also lacking in some of the stuff you want for a formal citation, such as the date the item was last accessed.

Grab bag: Barney Frank

Grab bag: Twisted words and screams

The 1910 Virginia Glee Club: found, one director

I may have found a missing link in the Virginia Glee Club’s history prior to the 1920s, when it became a part of the McIntire Department of Music at the University of Virginia. As I’ve written before, the Club disbanded and reformed pretty frequently in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and we have evidence that the group came back together in 1910 following a hiatus of no more than four or five years. Now we know who led the group then–and it was a professor, not a student. (See my prior post on student directors of the Glee Club for some of the history there.)

A new volume of Madison Hall Notes, the journal of what was then the UVA branch of the YMCA, is on Google Books. In Vol. VI No. 7 (Oct 22, 1910) and Vol. VI No. 11 (Feb. 11, 1911) we read of the newly (re)formed Virginia Glee Club under the direction of Professor M.S. Remsburg. Hopefully I’ll turn up some more information on Remsburg and the efforts to rebuild the Club as more information from this era comes online.

Grab bag: Strategies and appropriations

Postcard from Madison County

madison county vista

Today’s post is a delayed peek at where I was the first week of August. We took a week’s vacation and spent it with my parents at their house in Buncombe County, as well as getting in a lot of good time with my aunt and uncle, cousins, and a rare visit with my Aunt Jewell. The photo above was taken at what I still think of as my grandmother’s farm (now my Aunt Jewell’s) in Madison County, as are a number of the other photos in the Flickr set I just posted. (Folks who are marked as friends and family in Flickr will find some new family photos in this set and in my photostream.)

Every time I go down there to visit, time slows a little bit. Part of this is because of the infrastructure in western North Carolina; though growth has accelerated in Buncombe County around Asheville, Madison remains the same deeply rural, underdeveloped county that maddened me as a bored child and entrances me and saddens me now. Part of it is the land and the quiet. Part of it used to be the isolation from technology, but my parents have had high speed for a while and before this visit they installed a wireless access point. I still managed to spend most of my time outside.

I sometimes think: so much of my job is virtual. What if I had to live in Asheville? I could probably do some of what I do, but sadly product management still requires a lot of face to face time with the various constituencies that we support. The refrain of “Free Man In Paris” goes through my mind every time I leave: “If I could I’d go back there tomorrow, but for the work I’ve taken on…”

(Of course, I’d miss other things about where we are, like being able to sing in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. But our work is the main thing.)

Grab bag: Command and control

Grab bag: Cool, Newt, Lenny, and UI

The first part of the 1921 Yellow Journal

1921-apr-01-top-vignette

I’m gradually scanning and uploading the pages of the April 1921 Yellow Journal, that scurrilous anonymous satirical broadside at the University of Virginia. This morning I’ve uploaded pages 1 through 4 along with an index of the stories. The pages available through my site are 100dpi PNG files; TIFFs have also been produced.

For now, these are scans of photocopies, as I’m reluctant to subject the fragile newsprint to my color scanner directly (mostly because every time I unfold it I run the risk of cracking the pages). I intend to get scans of the original artifact, but these black and white copies hopefully give some flavor of what the original is like.

My favorite excerpt from the issue so far may be the one liner on page 3: “Mike Wagenheim says that Norfolk is the greatest town in this state. Quite right. No other town could be in the state that Norfolk is in.”

Grab bag: FriendFeed acquired

The death of tr.im, or why you are your own product manager

The recent flap over the impending death of tr.im reminds me of a discussion I had at the Berkman Center when I crashed one of their meetings back in 2004. The question was, do you use external services with your blog? That is, do you host your images on Flickr or a related service? Do you outsource comment management? These days, the question is do you host your own videos or do you let YouTube do it; or do you use a URL shortener.

Fundamentally, these are strategic questions like the ones that product managers face every day. The question is “Build, Buy, or Partner?” and it’s a question about how you add functionality to your product offering. In this case, the “product offering” is your public presence on the Internet–which is to say, in public, on-the-record discourse. As the question is conventionally understood, “build” means build it yourself, “buy” means acquire the functionality via some sort of purchase of rights, and “partner” means make a business arrangement where the partner delivers the functionality directly. In web development terms:

  • Build: You can build most of the functionality that people use on the web, from photo galleries to URL shorteners, yourself if you are a reasonably competent programmer.
  • Buy: You are acquiring via a license (even a free one) functionality from a third party and providing that functionality to your users. Can include purchased software or free software, whole packages or plugins.
  • Partner: You are using third party services directly–embedding photos and video from someone else’s server, using a third party URL shortener, etc.

So how do you decide to build, buy or partner? You can ask yourself the same questions that product managers everywhere ask:

  1. Do I have the capability to create this functionality?
  2. Do I want the responsibility of maintaining this functionality and adding to it over the long run?
  3. Is this functionality a core part of what I do? Do I derive some sort of competitive advantage from it?
  4. How much control over the final product do I want?
  5. Can I afford to have the content go away?

If you can do #1 but not #2, buy might be a better option than build. If the answer to #4 is “a lot”, partnering is not an appropriate option.

Let’s look at some people’s reactions to the event in this light:

Dave Winer had chosen the “partnership” model with tr.im (in the sense described above, that he is using their services and building atop them), building a lot of functionality on top of their APIs. He sees tr.im’s collapse as an argument to eliminate URL shorteners altogether, or at least to require that they provide a portability option. Portability is a way that you can escape Question #5, a safety clause if the partner goes out of business or if you don’t like what they’re doing with your content. I think that shortened-URL portability is in this analogy the equivalent of source code escrow and other safety provisions in conventional software contracts–it’s your escape hatch to make sure your personal data isn’t threatened. This is a perfectly sane request if you’re entering a real partnership relationship, where you’re adding value to the other party’s offering.

By contrast, Jeffrey Zeldman went the “buy” path, installing a WordPress URL shortening plugin to share pointers to his own content. For him, having short links to his content that work indefinitely is too important to risk having “the third-party URL shortening site [go] down or [go] out of business.”

Looking at it through the build-buy-partner lens, it’s also easy to see why WordPress has become such a dominant platform. The ability to add third-party developed plugins to add functionality provides a wide variety of options to add new functionality and allows you more options than simply blindly partnering with another organization, without any assurance that they’ll continue to support you.

Why go down this path at all? Why worry about the longevity of what are almost certainly transient services? One way to look at it is this: at the end of the day, your web presence is your product, and you are its product manager. You are responsible for the strategy that determines how the world views you. And in that light, it makes sense to borrow some strategies from product management to plan that strategy. Others use the formulation “You are your own CEO”; as your own CEO, consider that what people interact with online is not you but a product.