Photoessay #1991 - Voyage of discovery

I admit that these last week's worth or so of blog entries give me a little jolt because the numbers are the same as the years of my kid's birth.  1982-1989.  As an adult and a parent, I measure every possible date by how old my kids were.  My husband says that I completely missed the 1980s.  It's true, with 4 kids within 7 years, a lot gets missed.

But that's not the voyage of discovery I'm talking about.

As an aside, I would like to report that the microfilm reader at the Bothell Public Library is now fixed.  Not a bad machine really.  Free parking.  You need a bunch of dimes.  Let's just say that there's never any competition to use it.

So I'm working on Maier Zunder and the devotional exercise controversy, natch.  Strikes me how this really is a voyage of discovery.  I didn't even know about the devotional exercise business until I went to New Haven in November.  At that time, I could find a bunch of newspaper articles and I knew there were scrapbooks.  As I printed things out, I soon had a very satisfying pile of paper to put in my binder.  I had tons of stuff.  Soon, I realized that I needed two binders, now three.

With cool dividers by year, I've NEVER been so organized.

But slowly, I realize that there's more to it.  I need to know about things that might not have my ancestor explicitly named.  Genealogy Bank has lots of newspapers articles but after awhile that you can't really see what you don't have because it's hard where the articles from a newspaper start and stop.  In my case, the articles start right at the end of the devotional exercise business and stop before Maier's death.  And it's only that one paper.

So I start seeing what I don't have and what MIGHT be important.  I'm just relaxing and not getting too insecure.  I know that nobody's written about this for quite a long time and it's SO timely.  I wonder why I didn't scour those 1872 articles when I had the microfilm.  Didn't occur to me.  I've been toting around the 1877-8 reels to various microfilm place.  Inter-library Loan will cut me off soon.

Finally heard back from a historian in New Haven, there's more to do.  Wish I knew what was going on at Hillhouse High School in Fall of 1877 but nowhere to find out.

As I go along, I forget that I didn't even have an inkling of parts of it until recently.  It's all evolving in my mind.

Picture taken from turbogranny's blog without permission.