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Human–Computer Interaction Series
William Sims Bainbridge
Family
History
Digital
Libraries
Editors-in-chief
Desney Tan
Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA
Jean Vanderdonckt
Louvain School of Management, Université catholique de Louvain,
Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium
The Human-Computer Interaction Series, launched in 2004, publishes books that
advance the science and technology of developing systems which are effective and
satisfying for people in a wide variety of contexts. Titles focus on theoretical
perspectives (such as formal approaches drawn from a variety of behavioural
sciences), practical approaches (such as techniques for effectively integrating user
needs in system development), and social issues (such as the determinants of utility,
usability and acceptability).
HCI is a multidisciplinary field and focuses on the human aspects in the
development of computer technology. As technology becomes increasingly more
pervasive the need to take a human-centred approach in the design and development
of computer-based systems becomes ever more important.
Titles published within the Human–Computer Interaction Series are included in
Thomson Reuters’ Book Citation Index, The DBLP Computer Science Bibliography
and The HCI Bibliography.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/6033

Family History Digital

Libraries
123
Independent historian
Chantilly, VA, USA
ISSN 1571-5035 ISSN 2524-4477 (electronic)

ISBN 978-3-030-01062-1 ISBN 978-3-030-01063-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01063-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956268
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018

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Contents
1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 The Digital Library Initiative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2 An Historical Trapper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.3 Connections to Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.4 A Professional Genealogist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.5 Applying Technology to Human History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
1.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2 Documenting and Digitally Presenting Family Photographs . . . . . . 31
2.1 Accuracy and Completeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.2 Identifying the Subject . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.3 The HTML Approach to Documentation and Connection . . . . . 42
2.4 Adapting Conventional Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.5 The Death of Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
2.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3 Evolution from Home Movies to Videos in Social Media ........ 67
3.1 Documenting Old Home Movie Travelogues . . . . . . ........ 68
3.2 Understanding Home Movies that Did Not Involve
Oneself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
3.3 Contemporary Videos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.4 Innovative Video Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.5 The Game of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
3.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
v
vi Contents
4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries

and Memoirs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
4.1 Expansion of Narratives from Diaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
4.2 Controversy About an Explorer’s Diary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
4.3 The Mysterious Plane Crash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
4.4 Correspondence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
4.5 Episodic Memories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
4.6 A Family Narrative Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
4.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
5 Exploratory Oral History Interviews of Family Members . . . . . . . . 135
5.1 The History of Interviewing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
5.2 Finding the Appropriate Conceptual Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
5.3 Open-Ended Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
5.4 The Process of Interviewing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
5.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
6 Information Technologies for Cultivating Domestic Artifacts . . . . . 165
6.1 Documenting Artifacts In Situ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
6.2 A Brief In Situ Example of Preservation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
6.3 Toys, Play, and Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
6.4 Scanning and Searching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
6.5 Scanning Basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
6.6 Free Camera Functional Preservation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
6.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
7 Virtual World Representation of Family Homes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
7.1 Gramercy Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
7.2 Bailiwick in 3-D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
7.3 Historic Virtual Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
7.4 Historical Virtual Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
7.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
8 Applications of Online Censuses and Other Official Records . . . . . 233
8.1 Human Factors in Family History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
8.2 Sociology of the Census . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
8.3 Personal Reflections on Legal Records . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
8.4 Medical Records . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
8.5 Church Records . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
8.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
Contents vii
9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through Social

Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
9.1 Creating a Family Archive in Facebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
9.2 The Content of a Family History Archive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
9.3 Seeking Green Hollow Farm in Facebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
9.4 A Family of Homes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
9.5 Wikis of Fictional Families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
9.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
10 Integration of Family Records into Community History . . . . . . . . . 301
10.1 The Valley of the Shadow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302
10.2 The Greenwich History Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309
10.3 Durability of Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
10.4 Teaching a Profession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
10.5 Conclusion: A Research Agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
Chapter 1
Connections Between Family Data
and Wider Meanings
Abstract Popular computer technologies may be used effectively today to assem-

ble historical data about families into accurate and meaningful narratives, whether
by family members themselves or by professional historians. A major technology
development effort was the Digital Library Initiative of the 1990s, led by the National
Science Foundation, that set the stage for several aspects of current family his-
tory archiving. To provide contrast with this vast collective effort, and prepare for
consideration of family data challenges, the distinctive life of trapper and utopian
Sewell Newhouse (1806–1888) is summarized, highlighting the fact that human
fame is capricious and can distort historical records. The next example of connec-
tions between kinds of data and human meanings, one activity of a rural family in
the early 1940s, links to general principles of the relationship between humans and
nature, and between individuals and world events. Consideration of the career of
genealogist Louis Effingham de Forest (1891–1952) suggests how the profession of
family historian may evolve, while raising questions about how families may handle
uncomfortable facts that may be discovered. The conclusion combines photographs
and census data to show how the structure of a nuclear family may be delineated for
the period 1900–1940.
The great popularity of online genealogical services, despite their severe limitations,
suggests that family history work has great potential for the future, but only if effi-
cient and effective methods can be developed to collect information about our past
and assemble the fragments into accurate and meaningful narratives. Professional
genealogists have existed for over a century, and recently a new profession of digital
curator has emerged (Botticelli et al. 2011). Defined by Wikipedia, “Digital cura-
tion is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital
assets… Successful digital curation will mitigate digital obsolescence, keeping the
information accessible to users indefinitely.”1 Yet in most cases much of the histor-
ical work must be done by family members themselves, which means that they will
need instruction on how to find relevant antique information, how to assemble and
preserve the information describing their own lives, and how to handle the neces-
1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_curation.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 1

W. S. Bainbridge, Family History Digital Libraries, Human–Computer
Interaction Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01063-8_1
2 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings
sary information technology tools. At the same time, history teachers will need to
add courses about family history to their curricula, recognizing that their scholarly
discipline long ago abandoned its obsession with “kings and battles,” and the full
diversity of humanity deserves to be remembered.
This book provides a comprehensive background, for the full range of information
types and information technologies, in the context not only of traditional historical
scholarship but also of computer science and social science. Family histories are
both intimate and cosmopolitan, connecting oneself to the wider world, linking from
today to both yesterday and tomorrow. I would not have been able to write this book,
had I not belonged to a family that cared very much about its own history, or had I
not inherited two centuries of family documents, photographs covering 17 decades,
and home movies and videos covering 9 decades. While trained in sociology, my
dissertation and several later works were historical studies, and for a quarter century
I have worked at the intersection of social and computer sciences at the National
Science Foundation.
1.1 The Digital Library Initiative
In 1994, the National Science Foundation made six major investments in devel-
oping new technologies, which could today contribute to family history systems,
here listed in Table 1.1. Called the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), this ambitious
activity continued about a decade, going through two additional stages, the second
focused on smaller but more diverse grants, then the third stage aimed to partner with
other nations, recognizing that by definition the World Wide Web was international
(Griffiths 2004; Lesk 2012). I had hoped there would be a fourth stage, developing
digital library technologies suitable for use by families and small organizations, but
that never happened. A member of the DLI team, I represented the social sciences,
and the six grants in Table 1.1 were managed by my computer science colleague,
Stephen Griffin.
These grants were made in September 1994, for a total of $26,842,849, which
was about $44,000,000 in 2017 dollars, according to the inflation calculator placed
online by the US government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.2 Today, anyone who
wants to can go to the online NSF grants abstract search system to read the orig-
inal abstracts describing the grants, and take a few simple steps to find additional
information.3 For example, the one-paragraph abstract of the Michigan grant says:
“This project conducts research that will lead to the implementation and deployment
of a digital library testbed and environment of textual, video, still image, and data
sets, from both primary and secondary information suppliers. The project will make
available capabilities and services to a large number of users at multiple locations.
The basic approach is one of self-assembling agent based federation of distributed
2 data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl, accessed October 2017.

3 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/advancedSearch.jsp.
Table 1.1 The six original grants of the Digital Library Initiative
Grant ID Title Principal investigator University Cost
1.1 The Digital Library Initiative
9411287 The University of Michigan Digital Libraries Research Proposal Daniel Atkins U Michigan, Ann Arbor $4,357,199
9411299 Informedia: Integrated Speech, Image and Language Takeo Kanade Carnegie-Mellon $4,878,659
Understanding for Creation and Exploration of Digital Video
Libraries
9411306 The Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project Hector Garcia-Molina Stanford $4,516,573
9411318 Building the Interspace: Digital Library Infrastructure for a Bruce Schatz U Illinois, $4,674,232
University Engineering Community Urbana-Champaign
9411330 The Alexandria Project: Towards a Distributed Digital Library Terence Smith U California, Santa $4,394,188
with Comprehensive Services for Images and Spatially Barbara
Referenced Information
9411334 The Environmental Electronic Library: A Prototype of a Scalable, Robert Wilensky U California, Berkeley $4,021,998
Intelligent, Distributed Electronic Library
3
collections.”4 The abstract also lists the programs involved in the DLI that contributed
funding, as luck would have it naming my own program first, that together define
the conceptual location of the DLI: Sociology; History and Philosophy of Science,
Engineering and Technology; Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research;
Digital Society and Technologies, Information and Knowledge Management; Digi-
tal Libraries and Archives; Applications of Advanced Technologies. However, DLI
was not merely an NSF effort, because The Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
formed a three-partner team with NSF to achieve a technological revolution.
Abstracts list the principal investigators (PIs) who received the grants and ran
the research projects. The Michigan PI, Daniel Atkins, is well known, possessing a
Wikipedia page that mentions: “He led workshops to develop the National Science
Foundation (NSF) Digital Library Initiative, which included joint programs with the
European Commission.”5 It links to his academic webpage that reports today he is
“Professor Emeritus of Information, School of Information and Professor Emeritus of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering.”6 Another
link goes to a highly influential document usually called The Atkins Report, but
more formally, Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastruc-
ture: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on
Cyberinfrastructure, dating from January 2003.7 A third link goes to a February 8,
2006, news item in the online NSF archive, that announces: “Dr. Atkins will join
NSF on June 5 as Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI), which has a
Fiscal Year 2006 budget of $127 million.8 So, Atkins and the other DLI PIs were
extremely influential people, but given that this book concerns family history, what
do we immediately know from these sources about this particular person’s family?
He and his wife set up a scholarship fund at the University of Michigan, and its
webpage says, “Dan and Monica have two children and five grandchildren, all of
whom live in Ann Arbor. ‘Being mom and grandma is the job that trumps them all,’
says Monica.”9
The second grant in the table, Informedia, was a pioneering effort to develop
automatic means to achieve “the integrated application of speech, language and
image understanding technologies for efficient creation (acquisition, recognition,
segmentation, and indexing) and exploration (query, search, retrieval, and display)”
of a library of digital videos.10 This is directly relevant for family histories, because
antique home movies can be translated into digital videos, and much of contemporary
life can now be documented through instant videos recorded by common mobile
devices. Within two years, the project was testing the educational benefit of its initial
4 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9411287.
5 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_E._Atkins.
6 www.si.umich.edu/people/daniel-atkins-iii.
7 arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/106224.
8 www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=105820.
9 www.si.umich.edu/giving/dan-and-monica-atkins-scholarship-fund.
1.1 The Digital Library Initiative 5
fully annotated library. It “contained 1600 video segments spanning 45 hours of

video… concentrated in the areas of biology, math, and physics. The interface to this
library was a Microsoft Windows application with query and browsing capabilities…
Users included teachers and students in high school biology and physics classes, and
students in summer school programs emphasizing science topics. Primary tasks were
fact-finding and the creation of multimedia essays” (Christel and Pendyala 1996).
This project was literally visionary, in several meanings of the term, achieving
much but not reaching the lofty goals many people had in mind. Two limitations in
particular are relevant here. First, a quarter century of research has not yet reached
the point at which even very large and expensive automatic systems can fully and
accurately index all the objects, people, and places included in a video, or transcribe
the words they speak to each other, except in very limited special cases. Second, as
is the case for most if not all human endeavors, there is some danger that important
aspects of the Digital Library Initiative may be lost to history. For example, the
quotation in the previous paragraph about the “1600 video segments” came from
what used to be the major digital library publication, D-Lib Magazine, that was
accessible for free to everyone in the world, from its first issue in July 1995, but
that ceased publication with its July/August 2017 issue. Considered as priceless
history, we may hope that its 265 issues remain available forever, and four “mirror
sites” were set up in four different nations, which could preserve the archive if the
American site went down. But the main site says, “Over time, these mirror sites will
be discontinued.”11 In its early years the Digital Library Initiative was very much
an idealistic social movement, that has faded to a significant extent, absorbed into
Silicon Valley corporations and the universities.
The abstract for the third grant, to Stanford University, defined its scope suffi-
ciently widely to include family history digital libraries, without specifically men-
tioning them: “The Integrated Digital Library is broadly defined to include every-
thing from personal information collections, to the collections that one finds today in
conventional libraries, to the large data collections shared by scientists.”12 Its most
influential outcome was a biproduct, the Google search engine (Page et al. 1999). The
three other original grants in the Digital Library Initiative pioneered many technical
advances in data management, and all of them included mapping the surrounding
environment, which can be central to the histories of families (Smith 1996; Ogle and
Wilensky 1996; Zhu et al. 1999).
About a decade after the birth of the Digital Library Initiative, Douglas Seefeldt
and William Thomas told their fellow historians that their academic field was still in
the early stages of adapting to the digital revolution: “For history, the future digital
environment might challenge some of our traditional methods, perhaps even the craft-
oriented practices of our discipline. Our sources alone in the future will be almost
entirely digital—instant messages, emails, doc files, pdfs, digital video, podcasts,
and databases. Their scale and complexity will demand that historians use tools
and techniques not yet a part of our practice to create their own digital sources and
11 www.dlib.org/about.html, accessed November 2017.

employ those created by others” (Seefeldt and Thomas 2009). The somewhat obscure
reference to “craft-oriented practices of our discipline” may hint at the possibility
that future historians will primarily be amateurs, guided by but vastly outnumbering
academic historians, or even professionals providing commercial services to families
that wish to assemble their own histories. In any case, experience will be exceedingly
valuable.
1.2 An Historical Trapper
This book integrates the past, present and future, yet it is only the past about which we
have extensive information. One challenge raised by that fact is that the past did not
possess all the information technologies we have today, let alone those that will be
developed in the future. Related to that is our lack of information about large factions
of the population in past decades let alone centuries, when only rich and powerful
people tended to be memorialized. A good example is Julius Caesar, whose own
words we may read in his rather intelligent book about the Gallic Wars, and whose
face we may see in sculptures that generally agree about his high cheek bones. One
goal of this book is to encourage everyone to preserve rich records of themselves and
their families, but until the present moment that has been possible only for a small
subset of humanity. One compromise solution this book will use is to often focus
on people of the past who happen to have been well documented, probably because
they were more prosperous or notorious than the average, yet who illustrate human
characteristics shared by many people, and also permit consideration of a particular
information technology method.
Consider Sewell Newhouse. Not exactly a household name, he lacks a page in
Wikipedia, and is not mentioned on the page for the Oneida Community, yet was abso-
lutely essential for its success. As its page reports: “The Oneida Community was a
Perfectionist religious communal society founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848
in Oneida, New York.”13 The Wikipedia page for its founder is viewed by somebody
about 100 times day, rendering him an historical celebrity: “John Humphrey Noyes
(September 3, 1811—April 13, 1886) was an American preacher, radical religious
philosopher, and utopian socialist. He founded the Putney, Oneida, and Wallingford
Communities, and is credited with coining the term ‘complex marriage’.”14 New-
house could be described as the most loyal follower of Noyes, standing by him even in
the last days of his rule, and more significantly creating the trap manufacture business
that supported the community economically, before at its dissolution it morphed into
a silverware company. From the standpoint of archaeology, cultural anthropology, or
history museums, traps are artifacts, that reveal in their design and application sig-
nificant qualities of the culture and individual people who created them. Among the
13 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community, accessed October 2017.

14 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Humphrey_Noyes, accessed October 2017.
1.2 An Historical Trapper 7
less obvious topics this book will explore, is the documentation and understanding
of the artifacts belonging to a family.
A popular online source of information about deceased people, that will be used at
several points in this book, is Find A Grave, an information collectivity comparable
to Wikipedia in that most information is uploaded by non-professional volunteers.
Using its search engine with only the name reveals 3 deceased Sewell Newhouses, but
the correct one is obvious, because he is buried at the Oneida Community Cemetery.
His page shows a picture of his tombstone, and this very limited information was
posted by a contributor: “Birth: 1806, Death: 1888, Son of John Newhouse, husband
of Eveliza Hyde, father of Milford James Newhouse.” The Find A Grave search
engine lists fully 238 men named John Newhouse in about as many cemeteries, no
Eveliza Hyde or Eveliza Newhouse, but one Milford James Newhouse who is also
buried at Oneida.15 Adding the cemetery to the search terms and looking at all 7
Newhouses buried at Oneida reveals one named M. Eveliza Hyde Newhouse, who
clearly was Sewell’s wife and was not picked up by the original search because her
common name was not actually her first name.16
As Wikipedia reports, Find A Grave began with a single individual who had a
personal interest in the topic: “The site was created in 1995 by Salt Lake City resident
Jim Tipton to support his hobby of visiting the burial sites of celebrities. He later
added an online forum. Find A Grave was launched as a commercial entity in 1998,
first as a trade name and then incorporated in 2000.”17 Thus, it is quite possible
that some family historians in future years will build a business or important non-
profit organization on the basis of innovations that began as an amateur, home-based
activity. Potential future developments that grow out of family history digital libraries
will be suggested throughout this book, but as the final chapter demonstrates, there
are also many opportunities to connect small family histories together into vast
community histories.
Text search of the two most influential nineteenth-century books about American
communes, Communistic Societies of the United States by Charles Nordhoff and
History of American Socialisms by Noyes himself fails to turn up the name Sewell
Newhouse. Noyes boasts that in 1868 his commune manufactured an astounding
278,000 complex, steel animal traps, but fails to mention Newhouse, who was largely
responsible for this technological triumph, his egotistical focus being on himself and
his religious ideology (Noyes 1870). Nordhoff does refer to Oneida’s trap business,
but only among various other much less significant industries, the word “trap”
appearing 11 times, but “Newhouse” 0 (Nordhoff 1875). The last of Nordhoff’s trap
references is in his bibliography: “The Trapper’s Guide. Wallingford, 1867” (Nord-
hoff 1875). He fails to mention that Sewell Newhouse was the author of this highly
popular and frequently reprinted book, with this full title: The Trapper’s Guide:
15 www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Newhouse&GSiman=1&GScid=65556&
GRid=47725734&, accessed October 2017.

16 www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Newhouse&GSiman=1&GScid=65556&
GRid=49825876&, accessed October 2017.

17 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_a_Grave, accessed October 2017.
A Manual Of Instructions for Capturing all Kinds of Fur-Bearing Animals, and

Curing their Skins; With Observations on the Fur-Trade, Hints on Life in The Woods,
and Narratives of Trapping and Hunting Excursions (Newhouse 1869). Currently
available for free in multiple editions online, it includes portraits of Newhouse and
of the rather distinctive traps he invented, plus information contributed by others at
Oneida, although primarily recording the mind and experiences of Newhouse.
This case illustrates the fact that an individual may be unknown in one historical
context, yet famous in another. Today, when anyone may self-publish a paper book,
or share long manuscripts in dozens of ways online, any avid hunters could write up
their experiences, perhaps concentrating on the skills and tools like Newhouse, or
whatever aspect of hunting appeals to each individual. The question them becomes:
Who will read such autobiographies, or who will write biographical essays about the
hunter, based on a collection of sources? In the case of Newhouse, the first chapter
of a 1907 book, Steel Traps, by Arthur Harding, eulogized Newhouse. Remarkably,
it emphasized the mutually respectful close relationships in young adulthood he had
with Iroquois Native Americans, using language that must have seemed appropriate
at the time, but today might seem offensively condescending:
The Indians were very fond of shooting at a mark both with the rifle and the bow and arrow,
but they would seldom try conclusions with “Sewell” - as they all called him - for he could
always out shoot them with the rifle, and very few of the tribe were as skillful as he with the
bow and arrow. In wrestling too, a favorite game of the day, Mr. Newhouse was more than
a match for the best men of his time both white and red (Harding 1907).
Perhaps coincidentally, this text framed a photograph of Newhouse, and thus

seemed to be expressing his fundamental nature. And yet today it reads as naïve
advertising material, couched in ethnic stereotypes. Indeed, Harding did not himself
observe Newhouse interacting with his Iroquois friends, publishing three decades
after the trap-builder’s death, so this text can also be categorized as personal mythol-
ogy, which Newhouse himself or his family members may have cultivated. A question
that may have no answer is the extent to which family histories should avoid drama-
tizing the lives of members. At least since the remarkable work of Snorri Sturluson
around the year 1200, scholars have contemplated the tense connection between
fact and legend (Sturluson 1916). Wikipedia defines the core concept: “Euhemerism
is an approach to the interpretation of mythology in which mythological accounts
are presumed to have originated from real historical events or personages. Euhe-
merism supposes that historical accounts become myths as they are exaggerated in
the retelling, accumulating elaborations and alterations that reflect cultural mores.”18
There are many ways to consider a human life, and not all are either narrow or
idealized. Sociologist Maren Lockwood Carden studied Oneida’s history closely,
writing about its transformation and thus multiple meanings in her classic book,
Oneida: Utopian Community to Modern Corporation, where she identified New-
house both as essential to its economic success and the last of the members to accept
its demise (Carden 1969). After considering other Oneida industries, she observed:
18 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerism, accessed October 2017.

“Of all of Oneida’s products, however, the Newhouse trap remained the most impor-
tant. Neither Noyes nor anyone else in the Community seemed disturbed that their
perfect society depended for its living upon such a cruel instrument” (Carden 1969).
A large collection of Newhouse traps is permanently on display at the museum
and tourist center named the Oneida Community Mansion House, which originally
was the commune’s main residence, but its website does not say anything about
Sewell Newhouse himself.19 Traps following his design are still being manufactured
today, and the website for the Oneida Victor company offers a Newhouse bear trap
with a 16.5-in. jaw spread, offset jaws, double springs, and fully 44 in. long for $600
plus shipping, but also does not tell the life story of Sewell.20 However, it is worth
noting that the physical artifacts owned by people, as well certainly as those created
by people, are significant parts of their world and their personal life story. An entire
chapter of this book will be devoted to documenting artifacts that help us understand
family history.
To connect Sewell Newhouse to his extended family, we need to explore other
data sources. One step beyond Find A Grave is Salmon Creek Genealogy & Pub-
lishing, which offers a kinship tree, apparently of all Oneida members.21 It suggests
what other information also supports, that the marriage between Sewell and Eveliza
was rather conventional, despite being within a group marriage system in which the
extreme case was John Humphrey Noyes who had 13 children with an equal num-
ber of women. Sewell and Eveliza had one child, Milford, who married Arabella
Campbell Woolworth, and they had one child, Edith Newhouse. With a mysteri-
ous Raymond Smith, Edith had two children, whose names confusingly repeat the
names Milford Newhouse and Arabella Newhouse. Coming up to the present day,
the genealogy begins concealing names for sake of privacy. This book will cite many
occasions like Salmon Creek Genealogy in which people with limited means and
often no academic connections have shown the ability to create portions of family
history digital libraries themselves.
Commercially connected to Find A Grave is Ancestry.com, a subscription online
source for many kinds of information related to family history. For example, many
users have drawn upon the records to construct family genealogies, often but not
always of their own family, and not always agreeing with each other. Looking at
several of them, then back at Salmon Creek Genealogy, highlights the complexity of
the Newhouse family, because Arabella Campbell Woolworth produced with John
Humphrey Noyes a child named Irene Campbell Newhouse, who herself reportedly
had three daughters. Arabella’s marriage to Milford came during the dissolution
of Oneida’s group marriage system in 1879, their daughter was born in 1881, and
19 www.oneidacommunity.org/current-and-past-exhibitions, accessed October 2017.

20 www.oneidavictor.com/our-products/newhouse-bear-traps.html.
21 www.laurahatch.com/Oneida%20Community%20Web/wc01/wc01_054.htm, accessed October
2017.
Table 1.2 Childhood retention rates at Oneida

Part I: number of children in the commune
1850 1860 1870
Oneida boys 44 43 22
Oneida girls 39 46 27
Part II: retention rate over the following decade
1850–1860 1860–1870 1870–1880
Oneida boys (%) 75 64 64
Oneida girls (%) 87 85 56
Arabella’s daughter with Noyes had been born in 1873.22 The handwritten manuscript
schedules of the US census, dated June 1, 1880 and available today at Ancestry.com
as well as in various archives, show Sewell Newhouse, age 73, living with three other
members of a somewhat complex but little family: his son Milford, age 32, Milford’s
wife Arabella, age 29, and Arabella’s daughter (with Noyes) Irene, age 6.
The historical census files have been the subject of numerous rigorous studies,
which illustrates the multi-faceted connection between family history and social
science that will be a theme throughout this book. Until recently, researchers had
to travel to a small number of archives, containing either the original huge books
of forms filled out in ink by the census taker, or use microfilms of them. Sections
of later chapters will draw upon two census-based studies I published back in the
1980s, one charting the population decline of the Shaker religious groups 1850–1880,
and the other the problematic diagnoses of inmates in mental institutions in 1860
(Bainbridge 1982, 1984a, b). About the same time, I studied the original census
documents for Oneida and a comparable commune named Zoar. Like Oneida, Zoar
was religious, but it did not practice group marriage, having more conventional family
structures. One interesting comparison was what fraction of the children were still
in the commune from one census to the next. Zoar and Oneida had very similar
child retention rates, but the Shaker rates were much lower, especially for boys. The
Shakers prohibited marriage and sexual behavior, while Zoar and Oneida differed
in whether these features of family life were traditional or experimental. Table 1.2
summarizes some of the data for Oneida, for members under age 20 at a particular
year.
In 1850 and 1860, many of the children had been brought in by parents who joined
the Oneida religious movement, while those counted in 1870 were overwhelmingly
children born into the commune. That reveals one of the explicit functions of the
complex Oneida marriage system: birth control for the ordinary members, if not for
John Humphrey Noyes. The lower retention rate for boys in the period 1860–1870
may possibly represent some dissatisfaction by young male adults about this system,
22 www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/520507/person/24887136133/facts; www.ancestry.
com/family-tree/person/tree/27582228/person/12512788760/facts; www.laurahatch.com/
Oneida%20Community%20Web/wc01/wc01_165.htm.
in which they were expected to have limited romantic relationships with older women
of the commune who were often past the child-bearing years. When I originally
published research findings based on this dataset, I noted: “Defection rates for Oneida
women many be exaggerated slightly for the 1870–1880 period. There was a high
rate of marriage shortly before the latter census, and I may have failed to identify all
of the women who married, because marriage meant a change of last name.” In the
case of Oneida, our current online datasets include full genealogies, but I used first
name and date of birth in the old research to get the best estimate then possible.
Oneida was not a normal family, nor was trap-inventor Sewell Newhouse an
average guy. But some of the general issues raised by this case would apply to many
people. Most obviously, considerable effort may be required to map the structure
of a family, as it changes over time, and in cases when names change. The Oneida
children who disappeared from the census may have left in at least four ways: (1)
they died, (2) their parents defected, taking the children with them, (3) at early
adulthood they defected individually, or (4) they were expelled for misbehavior.
Similar transitions happen today, having consequences not only for the family, but
also for how a digital library would represent the transition, and what information
it would eventually contain about the person. Having considered the full life of one
person, and the rather large “family” to which he belonged, we should now go to the
opposite extreme, looking at one very small portion of life, in a small family, but that
connects to several wider issues and diverse forms of data.
1.3 Connections to Nature
This section presents an episode from the history of my own family, intentionally
rather personal and even minor, precisely to frame the range of kinds of material that
realistically family histories should contain. Indeed, this section, with very slight
edits, could become one of several dozen vignettes a family historian might write,
thus one of the small end-products of family documentation. From the standpoint
of historiography, a well-constructed vignette such as this would not merely report
a brief episode from a life, but connect it to larger themes relevant to the family
and to the wider society in which they lived, in many cases employing a variety of
data sources, as this one does. It begins with one paragraph from a letter my father,
William Wheeler Bainbridge, wrote to his mother, June Wheeler Bainbridge, on
September 16, 1941:
If you were here to read the Danbury papers you would see your son’s name in the paper
every Monday. You guessed it - but still you knew that when reading a letter from me you
would need to take time out to hear about the pigeons. We have had three races to date
with about 50 birds in each race. Each race one of my birds have been within the first three
home. The first two races a bird placed third and last Saturday a first. They have flown 100
miles twice and 160 once. The races coming up are Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington and
Charlottesville Va with a final special from Greensboro N.C. I don’t know how they do it.
From Wilmington last week they averaged 55 miles per hour.
The letter was hand written in ink on stationery printed with “Bailiwick, Bethel,
Conn.” at the top on one side, documenting that William and his birds lived in the
town of Bethel, Connecticut, actually in an antique farmhouse outside of town which
he and his wife Barbara had named “Bailiwick,” partly as a pun representing their
apocryphal belief that it had once been owned by James Anthony Bailey, the circus
ringmaster who partnered with P. T. Barnum who in fact was born in Bethel.23
Danbury is an adjacent and larger town, big enough to have its own newspaper.
Many issues of historical newspapers have been scanned in and are offered by several
online organizations, some for free and others requiring subscriptions. The Danbury
Gazette is available at GenealogyBank.com, but searching for William’s last name
turns up only 6 articles, dating from 1813–1814 and concerning a remote relative.24
NewspaperArchive.com has many Connecticut newspapers from 1786–2005, but not
including any from Danbury, while the online archive of the Danbury News Times
covers only this century.25 At several points in this book we will find that online
newspaper archives can be useful, but their coverage is very partial.
Searching the catalogued family home movie archives turned up a section show-
ing William’s wife, Barbara, tending their pigeons, undoubtedly filmed by her father
on a visit to Connecticut, because it had been spliced into his other home movies.
Figure 1.1 is a composite of four frames from this 16 mm film. The quality is frankly
low, largely because of the complex history of the film itself. It was stored at William
and Barbara’s later home in Greenwich, Connecticut, when the house burned, killing
both of them and their daughter Constance, as well as degrading but often not destroy-
ing much of the historical material it contained. The film had melted in places, but
much of it was converted to VHS videotape when that medium became popular and
a local service could do that work with a damaged film. Then years later I entered the
video from a VHS player into a computer as an MPG file. This history suggests the
complex challenge of preservation that is a major theme of this book, and assembling
four frames of a movie into a single image suggests one of many ways to connect
separate pieces of information.
The image in the upper right corner shows the pigeon coop, with Barbara at the
right, coaxing two pigeons to move down from their perch. The image in the upper
left corner shows the pair just before she began her action. The two images at the
bottom show pigeons afterward in adjacent areas immediately in front of her, with
the lower-left image depicting four of them at an entrance to the inside of the coop.
A later shot in the movie, not included here, shows a life-size pigeon doll or wooden
statue, affixed as a decoration to the upper left corner of the coop, outside the field of
these four images. The original film was undated, but must have been rather close to
the date of the letter, probably not later than the following summer, for reasons that
will become clear.
Through this book, another key theme is how to exploit and discipline the personal
memory of the historian, who often will be a member of the family being documented,
23 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Anthony_Bailey.
24 www.genealogybank.com.
25 newspaperarchive.com/us/connecticut, www.newstimes.com.
1.3 Connections to Nature 13
Fig. 1.1 Frames from a home movie of the family’s pigeon coop
with memories that can be very valuable in making sense of photographs and other
records, but also can distort interpretations. Over recent decades there has been a
good deal of research to develop a category system for comparing kinds of memory,
although the scientific issues have not yet been settled, and we shall consider several
of them in this book. But as a start we can work with one popular typology. For present
purposes we can quote the Wikipedia page that is about conscious memories—those
that can readily be verbalized rather than being implicit or unconscious:
Explicit memory (or declarative memory) is one of the two main types of long-term human
memory. It is the conscious, intentional recollection of factual information, previous experi-
ences and concepts. Explicit memory can be divided into two categories: episodic memory,
which stores specific personal experiences, and semantic memory, which stores factual infor-
mation… Autobiographical memory is a memory system consisting of episodes recollected
from an individual’s life, based on a combination of episodic (personal experiences and
specific objects, people and events experienced at particular time and place) and semantic
(general knowledge and facts about the world) memory. Spatial memory is the part of memory
responsible for recording information about one’s environment and its spatial orientation.26
Within this framework I can actually report three kinds of personal memories about
the pigeons: episodic, spatial, and second-hand, the third category being things I
was repeatedly told about the birds. I was not yet one year old when William sent
26 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_memory.
the letter to his mother, and I have no recollection of the pigeons when they were
alive. But I do have an episodic memory, probably from 1949, long after they were
dead. In addition to their coop, they had inhabited the attic of a barn-like garage,
and when consideration was being given to demolition of the rather poor-condition
garage, I was allowed to climb a ladder into the attic, where I found the desiccated
corpses of three or four of the birds. Imagining a paleontology adventure, despite
my mother’s objections, I carried them to my room in the house, set up a card table,
and tried to assemble their skeletons into fossil displays. The result was complete
failure, because the bones were fragile and resisted removal.
Two spatial memories provide further conceptual structure. First, I recall that
the pigeon coop was immediately to the right of the garage, as looking from the
driveway. After the demise of the pigeons, it was used for chickens, then removed.
Second, years later, throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, I recall where William
kept the silver-colored metal trophies he won in the pigeon races: on the top shelf of
a bookcase, initially one built into to a wall of the living room, then transferred to a
different built-in bookcase added when another room was transformed into a library.
The pigeon connection between the coop and the garage suggests how significant
the hobby was when it was practiced, and the display of the trophies implies that
William’s memories of it remained salient for years afterward. Note that the structure
and physical features of homes will be the focus of one chapter of this book, and will
appear in others as well.
Two somewhat connected second-hand memories concern what I was told about
the pigeons. First, when training the pigeons, William would take them in a cage on
the railway train from Bethel, perhaps on the way to his employer in New York City,
then at one or another stop on the railway line would release the pigeons, noting the
time they flew toward their Bethel home. Second, there had been a mechanism in
the garage attic that rang a bell and recorded the time the pigeon finished its training
flight. We can infer that each pigeon experienced this training in several steps, being
released from progressively more distant train stations. There is no record which
pigeon clock was used, but they are well documented online, including many antique
ones for sale at eBay.27
Family photographs preserve scenes that were viewed by the photographer, and
can stimulate memories in anyone familiar with the location around the time the
picture was taken. One photo of the garage survived, here reproduced as Fig. 1.2,
which connects to an episodic memory because I took the picture myself in 1949,
and remember the circumstances. The camera was obviously held at a slight tilt,
and it was the kind of box camera that had a very primitive viewer for framing the
shots. The print is somewhat damaged, and no negative survived. But we can clearly
see that the garage was in poor condition. Also, knowing that the attic belonged to
pigeons, we can recognize openings under the peak that they used for exit and entry.
Pictures are taken for specific reasons, and they document something about the
photographer’s thinking, as well as simply recording an image of the scene. I knew
that the barn was about to be torn down, and wanted to document it for the childish
27 www.ebay.com/bhp/pigeon-clock.
Fig. 1.2 A garage and pigeon loft, immediately before its demolition
equivalent of a family history. I also took a picture of two workmen, ripping it apart.
The family moved away from the home on January 10, 1950, and demolition of the
garage may have been preparation for selling it. This deduction and the fact there are
no leaves on the trees suggests but does not prove that the date may have been late
in the year 1949, near the photographer’s 9th birthday.
Just as history memorializes primarily famous people, photographic documen-
tation of architecture tends to favor grand buildings. Yet for comprehensive family
histories, all significant structures in the environment may deserve documentation.
Fig. 1.3 A readily identifiable family artifact, of significance in their lives
Since the theme of this chapter is connections, it is worth noting the obvious way a
garage is connected to everything else of meaning for a family: through the drive-
way. As it happens, a photograph has survived depicting the family car sitting on the
driveway at the side of the house, here Fig. 1.3. The garage is outside the picture to
the right, and the road, to the left.
We don’t know the date of the picture, but the car lasted until 1949 when it was
replaced by an Oldsmobile, and may have been purchased some time after the couple
married November 6, 1937, in New York City. Barbara later that month sent a letter
to her mother about their trip to Detroit, where William had just been hired for the
main company he worked for thereafter, and it described getting there by train via
Canada and temporarily renting a car at one point, thus not driving this car that month,
implying they did not yet own it. All valid forms of historical research require close
attention to details, but we should not expect to achieve perfect accuracy in these
efforts.
I recall riding in the car, and know it was a Buick, but exactly what model and
year remained questions. Searching online confidently identified it as a 1936 or
1937 Buick Roadmaster, given that there were visible changes for 1938.28 Like
the Newhouse traps, this car illustrates how information defining a mass-produced
artifact may be located online today. The fact that the spare tire is on the side and
near the front reminds us how important wheels are in human lives. The letter that
began this section was written less than three months before the United States entered
28 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buick_Roadmaster.
the Second World War. One response of this family, related to their Buick, was to
buy many worn tires and store them, presumably in the right side of the garage, in
case it became difficult as the war progressed to buy new ones. The result became an
oft-told family story, because some time afterward the government confiscated the
tires under a wartime anti-hoarding statute.
That anecdote about the tires suggests what happened to the pigeons. Once the
US was at war, the hobby of pigeon racing lost priority, and for many people became
impossible. William was drafted into the army, but not until March 30, 1944. He
served as an instructor in the First Cavalry at Fort Riley Kansas, training men and
horses, because he was an expert rider, apparently having skills with trainable ani-
mals, whether tiny like pigeons, or large like horses. As the war ended, he was
discharged with a rank of staff sergeant on August 1, 1945, and I remember several
details of the train trip to Kansas to escort him home. A standard joke in the family
was that the US Army sent 20,000 men and horses to New Guinea, but the horses
promptly died of tropical diseases. This may oversimplify an actually ironic fact, that
despite all the equestrian training, the cavalry abandoned horses during this period.29
As Fort Riley’s page in Wikipedia reports, “The Cavalry School ceased operation in
November 1946, and the last tactical horse unit inactivated the following March.”30
Human relationships with animals change over history, yet remain important in many
contexts.
Pigeon racing may seem among the most trivial of pastimes, yet hobbies are
among the variables that define us as individual persons. Once an anecdote like this
one has been shared with family members, some may want to learn more, or even
begin experiencing pigeon racing themselves. The American Racing Pigeon Union
has a website, aptly named pigeon.org, that posts extensive data on race results of
the competing “lofts” and proclaims: “We find that this hobby has a great appeal to
those who enjoy working with animals, to those who appreciate athleticism, to those
who like friendly, wholesome competition. If you find yourself in one or more of
these descriptions… be careful, you may discover that the allure of these amazingly
athletic birds is overpowering.”31 Today, some pigeon breeders and racers belong
to Facebook groups, and whatever they or their friends post online in these groups
might deserve preservation in their family archive. For example, an especially active
group is Pigeon Central, where we can imagine having posted a photo of a pigeon
that won a race, along with our thoughts about this triumph.32 Using the Microsoft
Edge browser it is easy to save a webpage as a PDF file, and the most recent day of
posts in mid-October 2017 generated a 4.5 MB file including many color pictures
and all the comments.
A key theme of this chapter, and indeed of the entire book, is how we can usefully
connect one historical record with others. In the Digital Age, networks of meaning can
29 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112th_Cavalry_Regiment; www.avalanchepress.com/First_Cav.php;
hglanham.tripod.com/uscavalry/uscavalry3.html.
30 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Riley.
31 www.pigeon.org.
32 www.facebook.com/groups/346060098814670.
Table 1.3 Facebook groups linked by 12,340 pigeon enthusiasts

Open Facebook groups Closed Facebook groups
Pigeon central For sale American Pigeon Pigeon chat
Pigeons Pigeons addicts
Pigeon central 2,119 1.6% 21.8% 8.1% 3.4%
For sale 34 2,006 1.1% 3.1% 5.7%
Pigeons
American 589 30 3,742 17.9% 3.4%
Pigeons
Pigeon 212 78 644 3,458 11.5%
addicts
Pigeon chat 85 137 114 366 2,967
be expressed through hypertext links, but first the connections must be recognized.
In Facebook, some people list close family members, and others can be found by
looking at specific posts in their Facebook timeline. Many people list their friends
and the public groups they belong to. The Pigeon Central page lists six “admins”
(administrators) who are responsible for managing this very active communication
hub, so it was trivially easy to look at the lists of other public groups they belonged
to, identify some that concerned pigeons, and to use the Facebook search utility
to discover other groups. Purely as an example, Table 1.3 gives information about
member interlocks connecting 5 groups, but such data can be valuable for serious
analysis by social scientists, as well as simply guiding explorations by newcomers
to pigeondom.
Only 34 of the 2,199 members of Pigeon Central also belong to For Sale Pigeons,
which is about 1.6045%, and 34 is 1.6949% of the 2,006 members of For Sale Pigeons.
The average of these two fractions is 1.6497%, which rounds down to the 1.6% in the
table. The strongest interlock in the table is the 21.8% between Pigeon Central and
American Pigeons. Two others are noteworthy, the 17.9% interlock between Amer-
ican Pigeons and Pigeon Addicts, and the 11.5% interlock between Pigeon Addicts
and Pigeon Chat. None of the four other groups have strong connections with the
more commercial group, For Sale Pigeons. As is true throughout the social sciences,
historical research requires healthy skepticism. Most of the members of these groups
appear to be ordinary people, sharing many aspects of their times through their per-
sonal Facebook pages. But some are in violation of the Facebook user agreement,
because they are not individual people at all. Of the “people” who belong to Pigeon
Central, 120 have a name that includes “Loft,” and thus represent teams of pigeons
rather than individual human beings!
1.4 A Professional Genealogist 19
1.4 A Professional Genealogist
The main point of this section is to contemplate the possibility that family history
digital libraries of the future will create job opportunities for specialists who become
expert in all the methods described in this book. We shall do so by using Internet
to consider a genealogist of decades past, to learn from both his accomplishments
and his limitations. He is comparable to Sewell Newhouse, because he diligently
employed the technologies of the past, but on an intellectual journey in the archives,
rather than a physical journey in the wilderness, currently obscure but really worth
considering.
His name was Louis Effingham de Forest, born October 26, 1891 in New Haven,
Connecticut, and died in Paris, France, May 20, 1952, according to his death certifi-
cate posted on Ancestry.com. Among his earliest projects was editing The Society of
Colonial Wars in the State of New York: Year Book for 1915–1916, that documents
this fraternal organization for men who were descended from ancestors who fought
to defend the original colonies in wars “from the settlement of Jamestown, May 13,
1607, to the battle of Lexington, April 19, 1775” or who held significant political
office during that period (de Forest 1916). This 123–page book gives the bylaws
and membership lists of this specialized family history organization, which includes
memorial biographical paragraphs about the lives of deceased members, plus a bibli-
ography. It is currently available online.33 Oddly, his middle name is given as Everit,
but we know it is he rather than some relative, because he lists it among his accom-
plishments in genealogy books he began writing in 1924, for example at the beginning
of his 1936 book, The Hayden Ancestry of Warren Sherman Hayden, where he iden-
tifies himself as “Louis Effingham de Forest, M. A., Jur. D., Fellow of the Institute
of American Genealogy, Fellow of the Society of Genealogists (England),” a book
that is also currently online (de Forest 1936).
According to the online US census from 1900, his father was a physician, born
in 1857 in Connecticut, apparently prosperous enough to send his son to Yale, from
which Louis Effingham de Forest graduated in 1912. In 1939, he ensured the sur-
vival of his own family’s history by donating a huge trove of papers and publications
to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, which currently has
a rather detailed web page for this collection. In addition to describing the docu-
ments and listing a family tree, it says: “The De Forest family was a prominent New
England family largely based in Connecticut. John Hancock De Forest owned the
Humphreysville Manufacturing Company, a cotton textile mill, in Humphreysville
(now Seymour), Connecticut. John Hancock De Forest and Dotha Woodward had
four sons: George Frederick De Forest, who managed the Humphreysville Manu-
facturing Company following his father’s death; Henry Alfred De Forest, a medical
missionary and graduate of Yale University (B.A., 1832 and M.D., 1835); Andrew
Woodward De Forest, a lumber businessman in New Haven; and John William De
Forest, an author. John William De Forest wrote essays, poetry, short stories, and
novels (including Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty). De For-
33 archive.org/details/ldpd_11333077_002, accessed October 2017.

est’s article ‘The Great American Novel,’ published in The Nation, is believed to be
the first use of the expression.”34
It should be obvious that traditionally some educated middle class people liked to
think of themselves as members of the elite, and joined status clubs like the Society of
Colonial Wars or published and archived material about their family histories, often
idealized. But in so doing they paved the way for more diverse segments of the public
today to use more efficient information technologies, perhaps to enhance their sense
of status, but more honorably to preserve the true histories of their families for future
generations and members of their wider community. Yet some of the more extreme
examples from the past also illuminate a wider range of possibilities, notably Louis
Effingham de Forest’s grandfather, the author John William de Forest.
Also available online is an M.A. thesis by Elizabeth Maxwell Bright, “An Analysis
of the Methods Used by John William De Forest in Translating His Personal War
Experiences into Realistic Fiction as Shown in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion.” She
explained that he had initially tried and failed to publish his own personal experiences
in the US Civil War, before fictionalizing them, beginning with his 1867 novel, Miss
Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. His grandson donated the original
non-fiction materials to Yale, and must have been pleased when Yale University Press
published them in the 1940s. However, fictionalized versions of autobiographies and
family histories can be entirely valid works of literature, that explore wider meanings
of real lives without being factually precise. Indeed, labeling somewhat fanciful or
speculative narratives as such can encourage family historians to be more accurate in
their non-fiction writings. We shall see other examples in later chapters. By carefully
comparing the novel with the documents, Elizabeth Maxwell Bright achieved a goal
which can guide authors today in fictionalizing real events:
to show exactly the methods which De Forest used in translating his war experiences into fic-
tion. The methods were catalogued and it was found that he used the following devices: letters,
paraphrasing of letters, report of events by the observant author, conversation, combination
of conversation and report by the observant author, reconstruction of events, reconstruction
of scenes, use of actual place names and personal names, and the use of figures of speech
and images first used in his letters and articles (Bright 1949).
She submitted her thesis in 1949, and its online version has “1923–2010” after
her name, implying she is deceased. It has been downloaded about once a week since
being posted July 9, 2015 at the University of Louisville’s Institutional Repository. It
is indexed in and linked from a section of the Digital Commons Network, along with
3,647 articles by 2,347 authors, as of early November 2017, who wrote about North
American literature in English.35 Elizabeth Maxwell Bright’s thesis, and many of the
other online articles, are models of how a family historian might occasionally take
on the challenging but rewarding task of deeply exploring the mind of a deceased
person, even as the thesis records her own mortal thought processes.
34 http://drs.library.yale.edu/HLTransformer/HLTransServlet?stylename=yul.ead2002.xhtml.xsl&
pid=beinecke:deforestjw&clear-stylesheet-cache=yes.
35 network.bepress.com/arts-and-humanities/english-language-and-literature/literature-in-english-
north-america.
1.4 A Professional Genealogist 21
Louis Effingham de Forest had no children, so in a narrow sense “family” existed

in his past, but not his future. His interest in family histories, both his own and those
of other people, harmonized with his main occupation, which was attorney. To be a
lawyer, one must be literate, pay close attention to those historical documents known
as laws, and take some kind of interest in human social relations. A very brief obituary
published in a Minnesota newspaper provided a good summary: “Mr. de Forest, in
addition to being a prominent lawyer, was also a fellow of the Society of American
Genealogists, president of the Society of the Cincinnati of Connecticut, an honorary
fellow of the Society of Genealogists in London, a member of The Pilgrims and of
many other historical and genealogical organizations. He carried on much research
and writing on our early American families, and helped many to establish a proper
background for themselves.”36
To understand his historical work, and see how today more might be accomplished
given our new technologies, we must look at a specific episode reported in one of
his genealogical books. As it happens, one of his very last projects was Ancestry
of William Seaman Bainbridge, a book commissioned by the father of the pigeon-
owning William in the previous section of this chapter, who however died before the
book was published. I do not know the financial arrangement, but believe that de
Forest was paid by the families he wrote about, and he even self-published some of
these books and sold them in quantity to the families. I have found brief mention in
my grandfather’s extensive documents suggesting that one of his medical patients did
some genealogical work for him. The following is a very unusual example, but one
that indicates the serious questions that arise whenever a family seeks to discover its
history very far back, going a great distance from the driveway depicted in Figs. 1.2
and 1.3, to my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Edmund Bainbridge.
See the uncertainties in de Forest’s introduction to Edmund’s brief section of the
book: “Edmund Bainbridge, according to a family record, was born in Hunterdon
County, New Jersey, in 1702 and died on February 9, 1771. The year of his death,
however, was probably 1770, as his will was proved that year in April. He married
one Abigail, of whom nothing further is known, except that the family record states
she died in 1770 (de Forest 1950, p. 17).” Edmund had a substantial farm, but ran into
complicated legal difficulties over who actually owned what, which later generations
interpreted as an early rebellion against the British, but seems also to have been a
dispute within the family, between Edmund and his brother John. As de Forest reports,
a rather remarkable episode ensued:
His son, John, was active with him in his protests and early in 1747, probably in May, father
and son were leaders of a mob of rioters which broke open the jail at Somerset and rescued
some men accused with high treason. John was caught and placed in jail at Perth Amboy
being ‘indicted for a Riot in Somerset County and presented at Hunterdon County Sessions’.
On July 17, 1747, Edmund led a mob, variously estimated as between seventy and two
hundred persons, to the Perth Amboy Jail and rescued his son. The Sheriff had a writ for
Edmund on a charge of high treason and arrested him but he was taken out of the hands
of the law and the rescuing party got away. A spectator wrote to Chief Justice Morris that
36 The Winona Republican-Herald, June 13, 1952, p. 5.

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
tiernas y turbadas; allí lágrimas y
risas, ruegos y promesas, y sobre
todo Amor que lo sazonaba. No
fué sola esta vez la que Mendino
y Elisa por aquella parte se
hablaron; pero no todas Mendino
llevó á Siralvo que le
acompañasse, porque sabía que
el humilde pastor no lo era en
pensamientos. Andaba
furiosamente herido de los
amores de Filida, Filida que por
lo menos en hermosura era
llamada sin par y en suerte no la
tenía; y como los días con la
ocupación del ganado y el recelo
de Vandalio y sus pastores (á
donde Filida estaba) no le daban
lugar á procurar verla ni oirla, iba
las noches y descansaba á vista
de sus cabañas, y algunas veces
veía á la misma Filida, que en
compañía de sus pastoras salía á
buscar la frescura de las fuentes,
y entre los árboles cantaba, y
haciéndose encontrado con ellas,
no se esquivaba Filida de oirle ni
de entender que le amaba, que
bien sabía de Florela, pastora
suya, con quien Siralvo
comunicaba su mal, y de cuantos
más al pastor conocían, que
cabía en su virtud su deseo. Esto
entendía Mendino, y lastimoso de
estorbarle, muchas noches se iba
solo á hablar á la hermosa Elisa,
entre las cuales una el
sospechoso Padileo le acechó y
le vido, y fué por mejor que,
celoso y desconfiado, sin decir la
causa de su movimiento, pidió
luego por mujer á la hermosa y
discreta Albanisa, viuda del
próspero Mendineo, hija del
generoso rabadán Coriano, que
en la ribera del Henares vivía, y
allí desde las antiguas cabañas
de su padre apacentaba en la
fértil ribera 1.000 vacas, 10.000
ovejas criaderas y otras tantas
cabras en el monte al gobierno de
su mayoral Montano, padre de
Siralvo, pastor de Mendino. Esta
famosa empresa consiguió
Padileo, y en conformidad de los
deudos de una y otra parte, partió
del Tajo, acompañado de los
mejores rabadanes dél, y el
mismo Mendino, que muy deudo
y amigo era de la gentil Albanisa,
y desposado y contento, con el
mayor gassajo y fiesta que jamás
se vido entre pastores, volvió del
Henares con la cara esposa,
enriqueciendo de beldad y valor el
Tajo y su ribera; desta suerte
quedó contento Mendino y
pagado Padileo, y Elisa, pagada y
contenta; y como de nuevo
comenzó Mendino en sus
amores, y forzosamente á fingir
con Filis y Elisa con Galafrón, que
no les importaba menos que el
sossiego, y sin más industria
dellos, el viejo Sileno asseguró su
pecho, y el trato como primero y
con más deleite tornó en todos y
los placeres y fiestas lo mismo,
porque para cualquier género de
ejercicio había en la ribera
bastantíssima compañía: en
fuerza y maña, Mendino, Castalio,
Cardenio y Coridón; en la divina
alteza de la poesía, Arciolo, Tirsi,
Campiano y Siralvo; en la música
y canto, con la hermosa Belisa,
Salio, Matunto, Filardo y Arsiano,
aunque á la sazón Filardo,
enamorado de la pastora Filena y
celoso de Pradelio, andaba
retirado, con mucho disgusto de
todos, que nadie probaba su
amistad que no le amasse por su
nobleza y trato; pero de muchas
bellas pastoras favorecido, amaba
á sola Filena y sola ella le
aborrecía, siendo verdad que otro
tiempo le estimaba; pero cansóse
el Amor, como otras veces suele,
y con todo esso Filardo, tan
cortés y leal que se escondía á
aquejarse, y en la mayor soledad
encubría sus celos; solos estaban
Coridon y Mendino junto á una
fuente, que al pie de una vieja
noguera manaba, cubierta por la
parte del Oriente de una alta roca,
que alargando la mañana
gozaban de más frescura y
secreto, cuando por un estrecho
sendero vieron venir á Filardo,
buscando la soledad para sus
quejas, y al mismo tiempo fueron
dél sentidos; y viendo ocupado el
lugar que él buscaba, quiso
volverse, pero los dos no lo
consintieron, antes Mendino le
rogó que llegasse, y llegado,
Coridón le pidió que tañesse, y
tañendo ambos le incitaron al
canto, que, comedido y afable, no
se pudo excusar, ni aquí su
canción, que fué ésta:
FILARDO
Vuestra beldad, vuestro
valor, pastora,
contrarios son al que su fuerza
trata,
que si la hermosura le
enamora,
la gravedad de la ocasión le
mata;
los contentos del alma que os
adora,
el temor los persigue y
desbarata,
lucha mi amor y mi
desconfianza,
crece el deseo y mengua la
esperanza.
Los venturosos ojos del que
os mira,
os juzgan por regalo del
tormento,
y el alma triste que por vos
suspira,
por rabia y perdición del
pensamiento;
essa beldad que al corazón
admira,
esse rigor que atierra el
sufrimiento,
poniéndonos el seso en su
balanza,
sube el deseo y baja la
esperanza.
Aunque me vi llegado al fin
de amaros,
ningún medio hallé de
enterneceros,
que como fué forzoso el
desearos,
lo fué el desconfiar de
mereceros;
el que goza la gloria de
miraros
y padece el dolor de
conoceros,
conocerá cuán poco bien se
alcanza,
rey el deseo, esclava la
esperanza.
Si propia obligación de
hermosura
es mansedumbre al alma que
la estima,
y al fuerte do razón más
assegura,
tantos peligros voluntad
arrima,
vaya para menguada mi
ventura,
pues lo más sano della me
lastima;
mas si holgáis de ver mi mala
andanza,
viva el deseo y muera la
esperanza.
Bien muestra Amor su mano
poderosa,
pero no justiciera en mi
cuidado,
atando una esperanza tan
medrosa
al yugo de un deseo tan
osado,
que en cuanto aquél pretende,
puede y osa,
ella desmedra, teme y cae al
lado,
que mal podrán hacer buena
alianza
fuerte el deseo y débil la
esperanza.
La tierna planta que, de
flores llena,
el bravo viento coge sin
abrigo,
bate sus ramas y en su seno
suena,
llévala y torna, y vuélvela
consigo,
siembra la flor ó al hielo la
condena,
piérdese el fruto, triunfa el
enemigo;
sin más reparo y con mayor
pujanza
persigue mi deseo á mi
esperanza.
Cantó Filardo, y Mendino quedó

de su canción muy lastimoso.
Coridón no, que estaba ausente
de su bien, y cuantos males no
eran de ausencia le parecían
fáciles de sufrir. Cada uno siente
su dolor, y el de Filardo no era de
olvidar que era de olvido, y ahora,
después de haber alabado su
cantar tan igual en la voz y el arte,
los tres pastores se metieron en
largas pláticas de diversas cosas,
y la última fué la ciencia de la
Astrología, que grandes maestros
della había en el Tajo; allí estaba
el grave Erión, de quien después
trataremos; el antiguo Salcino, el
templado Micanio, con otros
muchos de igual prueba; mas
entre todos, Filardo alabó el gran
saber de Sincero, y la llaneza y
claridad con que oía y daba sus
respuestas: por esto le dió gran
gana á Mendino de verse con
Sincero, que muchos días había
deseado saber á dónde llegaba el
arte destos magos; y como
Filardo dijo que sabía su morada,
los tres se concertaron de
buscarle el día siguiente, antes
que el Sol estorbasse su camino,
con lo cual tomaron el de sus
cabañas, donde cada uno á su
modo passó el día y la noche, y
ya que el alba y el cuidado del
concierto desterraron el sueño,
Coridón y Filardo buscaron á
Mendino, cuando él salía de sus
cabañas á buscarlos, y
escogiendo la vía más breve y
menos agra passaron el monte, y
á dos millas que por selvas y
valles anduvieron, en lo más
secreto de un espesso soto
hallaron un edificio de natura, á
manera de roca, en una peña
viva, cercado de dos brazas de
fosso de agua clara hasta la mitad
de la hondura; aquí quiso Filardo
merecer la entrada, y sentado
sobre la hierba sacó la lira, á cuyo
son con este soneto despertó á
Sincero:
FILARDO
Si me hallasse en Indias de
contento,
y descubriesse su mayor
tesoro
en el lugar donde tristeza ó
lloro
jamás hubiessen destemplado
el viento;
Donde la voluntad y el
pensamiento
guardassen siempre al gusto
su decoro,
sin ti estaría, sin ti que sola
adoro,
pobre, encogido, amargo y
descontento.
¿Pues qué haré donde
contino suenan
agüeros tristes de presente
daño,
propio lugar de miserable
suerte;
Y adonde mis amigos me
condenan,
y es el cuchillo falsedad y
engaño,
y tú el verdugo que me das la
muerte?
Con el postrero acento de Filardo

abrió el mago una pequeña
puerta, y con aspecto grave y
afables razones los saludó y
convidó á su cueva. Pues como
fuesse aquello á lo que venían,
fácilmente acetaron, y por una
tabla que el mago tenía en el
fosso, que sería de quince pies en
largo, hecha á la propia medida,
passaron allá y entraron en aquel
lugar inculto, donde lo que hay
menos que ver es el dueño. Aquí
en estas peñas cavadas solo vivo
y solo valgo, y aunque no á todos
comunico mi pecho, bien sé,
nobles pastores, que sois dignos
de amor y reverencia; mas vos,
Coridón ausente, y vos, Filardo
olvidado, perdonaréis por ahora, y
vos, Mendino, oid quién sois y lo
que de vos ha sido y será, que
dichoso es el hombre que sabe
sus daños para hacerles reparo y
sus bienes para alegrarse en
ellos; y viendo que Mendino le
prestaba atención, en estas
palabras soltó su voz el mago:
SINCERO
Cuando natura con atenta
mano,
viendo el Sér soberano de do
viene,
el ser que el hombre tiene y es
dechado,
dó está representado, y junto
todo,
quiso con nuevo modo hacer
prueba
maravillosa y nueva, no del
pecho,
cuyo poder y hecho á todo
excede,
pero de cuánto puede y
cuánto es buena
capacidad terrena en
fortaleza,
en gracia, en gentileza, en
cortesía,
en gala, en gallardía, en arte,
en ciencia,
en ingenio, en prudencia y en
conceto,
en virtud y respeto, y
finalmente,
en cuanto propiamente acá en
el suelo
una muestra del cielo sea
possible,
con la voz apacible, el rostro
grave,
como aquella que sabe cuanto
muestra
su poderosa diestra y sola
abarca,
invocando á la Parca
cuidadosa,
«Obra tan generosa se te
ofrece,
le dice, que parece
menosprecio
hacer caudal y precio de otra
alguna
de cuantas con la luna se
renuevan,
ó con el sol se ceban y fatigan,
ó á la sombra mitigan su
trabajo;
tus hombros pon debajo de mi
manto,
obrador sacrosanto de tu
ciencia,
y con tal diligencia luego
busca
aquel copo que ofusca lo más
dino,
que después del Austrino al
mundo es solo;
de los rayos de Apolo está
vestido
de beldad, guarnecido de
limpieza,
allí acaba y empieza lo infinito,
es Ave el sobrescrito sin
segundo,
á cuyo nombre el mundo se
alboroza,
de Mendoza, y Mendoza sólo
suena
donde la luz serena nos
alegra,
y á do la sombra negra nos
espanta;
agora te adelanta en el estilo,
y del copo tal hilo saca y
tuerce,
que por más que se esfuerce
en obra y pueda,
mi mano nunca exceda en otra
á ésta».
Dijo Natura, y presta al
mandamiento,
Lachesis, con contento y
regocijo,
sacó del escondrijo de Natura
aquella estambre pura, aquel
tesoro,
ciñó la rueca de oro, de oro el
huso,
y como se dispuso al
exercicio,
la mano en el oficio, assí á la
hora
la voz clara sonora á los
loores:
«Oid los moradores de la tierra
cuánta gloria se encierra en
esta vida,
que hilo por medida más que
humana;
aquí se cobra y gana el bien
passado,
que del siglo dorado fué
perdido
este bien, escogido por
amparo
de bondad y reparo de los
daños
que el tiempo en sus engaños
nos ofrezca;
porque aquí resplandezca la
luz muerta,
la verdad halla puerta y la
mentira
cuchillo que la admira y nos
consuela,
y la virtud espuela, el vicio
freno,
en quien lo menos bueno al
mundo espante:
crece, gentil Infante, Enrique
crece,
que Fortuna te ofrece tanta
parte,
no que pueda pagarte con sus
dones,
pero con ocasiones, de tal
suerte,
que el que quiera ofenderte ó
lo intentare,
si á tu ojo apuntare el suyo
saque
y su cólera aplaque con su
daño;
del propio y del extraño serás
visto,
y de todos bien quisto,
Infante mío;
mas ¡ay! que el desvarío del
tirano
mundo cruel, temprano te
amenaza,
tan áspero fin traza á tus
contentos,
que tendrás los tormentos por
consuelo;
cuando el Amor del suelo lo
más raro
te diere menos caro, hará trato
que tendrás por barato desta
fiesta
lo que la vida cuesta; mas
entiende
que si el Hado pretende darte
asalto,
y que te halles falto de la
gloria,
do estará tu memoria, el cielo
mismo
te infundirá un abismo de
cordura,
con que la desventura se
mitigue,
que aunque muerte te obligue,
cuando á hecho
rompa el ínclito pecho de tu
padre,
de claro aguelo y madre á
sentimiento,
y el duro acaecimiento que te
espera
de que á tus ojos muera la luz
bella,
de aquella, digo, aquella que
nacida
será tu misma vida muertos
ellos,
serás la Fénix dellos; crece
ahora,
que ya la tierra llora por
tenerte,
por tratarte y por verte y será
presto».
Dijo Lachesis esto, y yo te
digo,
que tú eres buen testigo en lo
que ha sido,
y si en lo no venido no
reposas,
esfuérzate en las cosas que te
ofenden,
que en el tiempo se entienden
las verdades
y el franco pecho en las
adversidades.
Ganoso anduvo Mendino de oir á

Sincero, y valiérale más no
haberlo hecho, porque una vez le
oyó y mil se arrepintió de haberle
oído. Imprimióse una imagen de
muerte en su corazón, que si
juntamente en él no estuviera la
de Elisa, cayera sin duda en el
postrer desmayo. Cruel fué
Sincero con Mendino en afirmarle
lo que fuera possible ser tan falso
como verdadero, mas pocos hay
que encubran su saber, aunque el
mostrarlo sea á costa del amigo.
Tal quedó el pastor, que no fué
poco poderse despedir del mago,
que con ofertas y abrazos salió
con ellos hasta passar el soto,
donde se quedó, y ellos volvieron
á la ribera, que al parecer de
Mendino ya no era lugar de
contento, sino de profundo dolor,
con quien anduvo luchando
muchos días por no poderle
excusar y por hacerlo de que
Elisa lo sintiesse. ¡Oh cuántas
veces el leal amador mostró
placer en el rostro, que en el alma
era rabia y ponzoña, y cuántas
veces su risa fué rayo, que
penetraba su pecho y aun los
mismos ratos de la presencia de
Elisa, que en muerte y afrenta le
fueran consuelo, le eran allí
desesperación, y así no tenía
gusto sin acibar ni trabajo con
alivio! «¿Es possible, decía, que
la celestial belleza de Elisa ha de
faltar á mis ojos, y que muerta
Elisa yo podré vivir, y mis
esperanzas juntas con Elisa se
harán polvo que lleve el viento?
Primero ruego á la deidad donde
todo se termina que mude en mí
la sentencia, y si no, yo me la doy,
Elisa, que ya que no sea
poderoso para que no mueras,
serélo á lo monos para no vivir».
Estas y tales razones decía
Mendino á solas con la boca, y
acompañado con el corazón, y
Elisa, inocente destos daños,
siempre se ocupaba en agradarle
y engañar á Galafrón, como
Mendino á Filis. Tres veces se
vistió el Tajo de verdura, y otras
tantas se despojó della, en tanto
que Elisa sin sobresalto, y
Mendino siempre con él, gozaron
de la mayor fe y amor que jamás
cupo en dos corazones humanos,
y al principio del tercero invierno,
cuando el fresno de hoja y el
campo de hermosura, juntamente
se despojó de vida el corazón de
Mendino no olvidado, no celoso ni
ausente menos que del alma,
porque adoleció Elisa de grave
enfermedad é inútiles los
remedios de la tierra, aquella
alma pura, buscando los
celestiales, desamparó aquel velo
de tan soberana natural belleza,
dejando un dolor universal sobre
la haz del mundo y una ventaja de
todo en el pecho del sin ventura
pastor, que aun para quejarse no
le quedó licencia, solo por la
soledad de los montes buscaba á
Elisa, y en lágrimas sacaba su
corazón por los ojos; allí, con
aquellas peñas endurecidas,
comunicaba su terneza, y en ellas
mismas ponía sentimiento. Con él
lloraron Siralvo, Castalio y
Coridón. Con él lloraron los
montes y los ríos; con él las
ninfas y pastoras, mas nadie
sentía que él lloraba. Gran
pérdida fué aquélla, y grande el
dolor de ser perdida, y muchos
los que perdieron. Esto se pudo
ver por las majadas de Sileno,
donde no quedó pastor que no
llorasse y gimiese, y
desamparando las cubiertas
cabañas, passaban la nieve y el
granizo por los montes las
noches, y por los yermos los días,
mayormente en el lugar do fué
Elisa sepultada, en una gran
piedra coronada de una alta
pirámide, á la sombra de algunos
árboles, y á la frescura de
algunas fuentes, todos los
rabadanes, pastoras y ninfas de
más estima cubrieron sus frentes
con dolor y bañaron con lágrimas
sus mejillas en compañía del
anciano padre, donde Mendino,
que más sentía, era quien menos
lo mostraba, por el decoro de
Elisa y el estorbo de Filis, y así
apartado, donde de nadie podía
ser visto ni oído, satisfacía á su
voluntad en lágrimas sin medida y
en quexas sin consuelo; y cuando
el bravo dolor le daba alguna
licencia, cantaba en vez de llorar,
y peor era su canto que si llorara,
que cuando el triste canta, más
llora, y más Mendino, que desta
suerte cantaba:
MENDINO
Yéndote, señora mía,
queda en tu lugar la muerte,
que mal vivirá sin verte
el que por verte vivía;
pero viendo
que renaciste muriendo,
muero yo con alegría.
En la temprana partida
vieja Fénix pareciste,
pues tu vida escarneciste
por escoger nueva vida:
sentiste la mejoría,
y en sintiéndola volaste,
mas ay de aquel que dejaste
triste, perdido y sin guía;
y entendiendo
que te cobraste muriendo,
se pierde con alegría.
El árbol fértil y bueno
no da su fruto con brío
hasta que es de su natío
mudado en mejor terreno;
por esto, señora mía,
en el jardín soberano
te traspuso aquella mano
que acá sembrado te había;
y entendiendo
que allí se goza viviendo,
muero aquí con alegría.
Bien sé, Elisa, que convino,
y te fué forzoso y llano
quitarte el vestido humano
para ponerte el divino;
mas quien contigo vestía
su alma, di, ¿qué hará,
ó qué consuelo tendrá
quien sólo en ti le tenía,
si no es viendo
que tú te vistes muriendo
de celestial alegría?
En esta ausencia mortal
tiene el consuelo desdén,
no porque te fuiste al bien,
mas porque quedé en el mal;
y es tan fiera la osadía
de mi rabiosa memoria,
que con el bien de tu gloria
el mal de ausencia porfía;
pero viendo
que el mal venciste muriendo,
al fin vence el alegría.
Es la gloria de tu suerte
la fuerza de mi cadena,
porque no cesse mi pena
con la presurosa muerte,
que ésta no me convenía;
mas entonces lo hiciera
cuando mil vidas tuviera
que derramar cada día;
pues sabiendo
la que ganaste muriendo,
las diera con alegría.
Vi tu muerte tan perdido,
que no sentí pena della,
porque de sólo temella
quedé fuera de sentido;
ya mi mal, pastora mía,
da la rienda al sentimiento;
siempre crece tu contento
y el rigor de mi agonía;
pero viendo
que estás gozosa viviendo,
mi tristeza es alegría.

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Textbook Family History Digital Libraries William Sims Bainbridge Ebook All Chapter PDF

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Family History Digital Libraries William

The Social Structure Of Online Communities William Sims

Building Digital Libraries Second Edition Kyle Banerjee

Digital libraries : interoperability and uses 1st

Digital Libraries and Crowdsourcing 1st Edition Mathieu

Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries

Turkey 15th Edition James Bainbridge

Digital Libraries Supporting Open Science 15th Italian

Using massive digital libraries a LITA guide First

William Sims Bainbridge

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/6033

Family History Digital

ISSN 1571-5035 ISSN 2524-4477 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956268

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018

1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings . . . . . . . . 1

4 Producing Coherent Narratives from Family Diaries

9 Recording Contemporary Family History Through Social

Abstract Popular computer technologies may be used effectively today to assem-

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 1

1.1 The Digital Library Initiative

2 data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl, accessed October 2017.

fully annotated library. It “contained 1600 video segments spanning 45 hours of

11 www.dlib.org/about.html, accessed November 2017.

1.2 An Historical Trapper

13 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community, accessed October 2017.

GRid=47725734&, accessed October 2017.

GRid=49825876&, accessed October 2017.

A Manual Of Instructions for Capturing all Kinds of Fur-Bearing Animals, and

Perhaps coincidentally, this text framed a photograph of Newhouse, and thus

18 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerism, accessed October 2017.

19 www.oneidacommunity.org/current-and-past-exhibitions, accessed October 2017.

Table 1.2 Childhood retention rates at Oneida

1.3 Connections to Nature

Fig. 1.3 A readily identifiable family artifact, of significance in their lives

Table 1.3 Facebook groups linked by 12,340 pigeon enthusiasts

1.4 A Professional Genealogist

33 archive.org/details/ldpd_11333077_002, accessed October 2017.

Louis Effingham de Forest had no children, so in a narrow sense “family” existed

36 The Winona Republican-Herald, June 13, 1952, p. 5.

Cantó Filardo, y Mendino quedó

Con el postrero acento de Filardo

Ganoso anduvo Mendino de oir á

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