Alas, I have left a trail of broken microfilm machines in my area. There's not very many around here. One at the Bothell Public Library which I used for awhile. You can make copies for a dime. I can do that, lotsa dimes no problem. But then it stopped making copies. They called in the service guy who said he fixed it but he didn't. I hadn't been there for several weeks, figured it must be fixed by now. But it wasn't. But you can't really figure that out until you have completely set up, put your reel in, find something to print. Then you find it doesn't work.
Also a machine at University of Washington, Bothell. Not too far away (six miles) but you have to pay $5 parking no matter what. They have a machine hooked up to a PC. You scan the image into a file and then put it on your little drive or email it to yourself. OK, that's fine and I like the UW Bothell library. But, most of the time, I couldn't get the reel to load, it's tricky. But most of the time I could get the scan function to work. Except for that tricky bit that you have to manually save the image if there's multiple pages.
But this weekend, I couldn't get the machine to work. Part of the problem might be that one of the reels is a little broken. But the weekend staff couldn't figure out how to get it to work. So I did at least read some articles so I had a few to print.
I find myself getting confused about what I do and don't have. Picking things off of Genealogy Bank is fine and you can feel good that you have satisfactory bunch of articles. But do you have everything? Is it maybe missing November 1877? Or not give you all of December 1878? You just do not know. Plus I keep getting the dailies mixed up. Is it July-Dec of the Journal or Courier that I didn't have? Or was it the Register? I thought I had the Register but it turned out today that I certainly did not!
But you don't need EVERY article, just like you don't need to have every house.
I met with my friend Anne last night and she started talking about my thesis sentence for my Maier piece. Oh oh oh, this sounds like school stuff. But useful, very useful. So I'm trying to develop one.
Here's my latest:
Maier Zunder, a participant in the large migration of Bavarian Jews to the United States in the mid 19th century, used his considerable personal talents to establish become of prosperous merchant, bank executive, community leader and member of the Board of Education in New Haven Connecticut.
I appreciate the help so much, I really want to get this right.
Anyway, I decided to try luck at the main campus today. A whole different setup. But, like the others, once you get the hang of it, it works well. I didn't have my camera but I saw a similar one at the Dartmouth library which I am using here. Without permission. With this, the film is separate from the screen, it's not just magnifying and projecting on a screen, it's actually scanning. I found a ton of letters, articles and speeches in the Register leading up to the Sept 1878 School Board election.
That's for the second paper about the Devotional Exercise controversy. It's SO timely.
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