News in brief

Wow. I’ve been away from the blog for so long that I nearly couldn’t remember the password to log in just now.

I’m in the middle of a big proofreading job, one with myriad tiny abbreviations and awkward XML issues. It isn’t exactly difficult, just s-l-o-w, and lots of it has to be squeezed in around the edges of the rest of life, with extensive use of evenings and weekends and snatched hours of extra childcare on days I don’t officially work. It has followed hard on the heels of another long job, so things have been a bit pushed for a while now.

This is all good; I wouldn’t dream of complaining that work’s coming in. However, tonight I just can’t face doing any more of it so thought I would pop in here, remind myself I have a blog, and note a few things for the record.

• A quick look at the stats just now suggests that a decent quantity of readers are clicking through from here to various feminist blogs. This is a fairly recent development, and I’m really happy to see it. My visitor numbers are pretty modest overall, but that’s fine as long as people are finding useful links.
• Some relatives, connected by way of the Lindsley family, have been in touch, which is great – especially as they’re also researching their family history. (I owe them an email in thanks for some documents they’ve sent over from the States, which have considerably brightened my week.) Interestingly, they seem certain that the mystery woman in this photograph is definitely not the person I’d concluded she might be – nor indeed any other Lindsley relative. If they are right, not only have I been barking up the wrong tree, but in completely the wrong bit of the forest. While it’s a shame to hear this (and I guess we may never know for certain), I’m intrigued by the fact that we see the images so differently. I’ll try to put up a separate short post about it all soon, with some further photos that they’ve been kind enough to share.
• Another lovely person has been in touch via Ancestry about Augusta Parsons Hylander. I owe her a message, too.
• I’m trying to read Carol Berkin’s Revolutionary Mothers, but not finding it quite as compelling as some of the other books I’ve posted about. Good Wives and The Name of War were pretty hard acts to follow, admittedly. I’ll press on, and maybe it’ll pick up.
• The 1940 US Census is out! Not indexed yet, but searchable. I took ten minutes to look for someone the other day and completely failed to find him, but it was a long shot to start with, as he had a history of moving around a lot. It’ll be fun to work on searching others out, when I can find enough time to do it properly.
• I’m thinking about posting more here about my Scottish research in the future. I haven’t as many family photos from that side, which has held me back a bit before now. On the other hand, living in Edinburgh it’s easier to access a range of Scottish records directly, which is fun in itself.

More soon, I hope.