I love being out in nature. Too bad my knees and heart prevent me from going on long, woodland hikes.
I think, a few posts ago, I mentioned I had a new writing idea. Not sure if it will be a book or something else. Right now, it’s just an idea not yet fully developed.
I got this idea from the book I’m currently reading, Darwin’s Century. This is a book that talks about Darwin’s predecessors among naturalists, who came up with a piece of the evolutionary theory. Darwin put them all together. The part I’m at now is about Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, and how this impacted his intellectual journey on his scientific road. Soon it will get into the theory itself, and talk about the people who helped to “sell” Darwin’s theory to the scientific community and the world. Right now, without having looked ahead or checked the Table of Contents, I’m not quite sure where the book is going—other than it’s pro-Darwin and pro-evolution.
This is the seventh book I’ve picked up about evolution. I find the story fascinating. I have only one more I plan to read (if I can find it at a reasonable price) and re-read one other. That should complete what I feel like I need to know to be well informed about the subject.
Oh, make that eight books. I forgot about the novel I read recently that dealt with some of these issues.
These have got me to thinking about the opposition that the theory of evolution has set between science and religion. Many people who believe in God think evolution is bunk. And many people who believe in evolution think God never existed but was a manmade concoction.
The crux of the matter falls into two categories, or maybe it’s three: God’s sovereignty, creation of humans, and old earth vs. young earth. I’ve been trying to put this into succinct, short paragraphs describing what I see as errors on both sides, but I haven’t yet been able to find the phrasing I want. I’m making progress, however.
I’m tempted to put the drafts of two paragraphs in this post, but will hold off. I need to learn to finish things before posting. Suffice to say I like how the two statements are shaping up.
So what about this book, or whatever this writing idea turns into? What’s the premise? It’s that God is seen in nature, that all that we see is His creation—however He set it in motion and however it continues. Also that science is an ever-changing thing, and we need to be careful about ever saying “The science is fixed,” and basing any type of beliefs about what science says at present.
Well, this post is unfocused today. Sorry about that. That tells you where I am with this writing idea: unfocused. Perhaps I’ll get some focus before long, as I put little thoughts on paper.
These massive structures took computer programs to design optimally. A library helped me do it well.
The first company I worked for had several libraries, one for each of the major divisions. But the main library was in the main building, Building A, on Meadowlake Parkway in Kansas City. I discovered this when I was working in Building N (or was it Q?) in Roeland Park, Kansas.
I had to go the 10 miles to Building A a couple of times a week to deliver a deck of punch cards to the main computer room, where they fed it into a modem to have the program run at McDonald Douglas in St. Louis. Don’t laugh, folks. This was 1975-76. Sometimes I would go, drop the cards off, and get the results the next day in the interoffice mail. Sometimes I was supposed to wait for the results. On those times, with nothing to do, I found the library and browsed in it.
This led to what I call two of my “career moments”, those times when you do something so spectacular that you remember it for the rest of your career and even after. At the time, I was with a group that was doing the structural design of 230 kV lattice steel transmission towers for the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. A few years later, I would be in Saudi and get to see those towers on the ground.
We were designing the towners using what we thought was a very good computer program, and none of us knew a whole lot about it. In the library, I found shelves full of journals of the American Society of Civil Engineers. One of those was the Power journal—many years of it—dealing with all things a civil engineer does for the electrical system. I found several articles about transmission towers. Needless to say, this was interesting reading.
In one issue, I found an article comparing the six or eight major transmission tower design computer programs (the analysis done by an unbiased party). The one we were using, the BPA program, was ranked second. The one that was first was proprietary, available only to the company that created it. My boss was about ready to head to Japan to a meeting about the Eastern Province project. I showed him the issue and article, and he took it with him and read it on the plane. In his meetings, someone criticized our program, saying it was not the best. My boss, fortified by the article and with the issue in hand, said, “Well, the ASCE Journal of Power Engineering says it’s the best program available. Look at this.” He won the argument and I was a hero. Career moment #1.
In another of those issues was an article on the general methodology of structural design of those towers. That led me to check out the manual on the BPA program and I learned it was a whole suite of programs. We were using the Design program, but after that we were supposed to go another step and do a more detailed analysis with the Analysis program. Based on what I learned, we started using it.
I learned this while a full-scale model of one of our towers was being tested in Japan, and we had a man there watching it. We worked late into the night and discovered that tower was 3% overstressed in one structural member. We quickly made a change, reran the analysis program, and had our fix, and waited for our man to make a pre-arranged call (no cell phones back then).
That morning, our man in Japan called and said that the tower being tested had failed at 97% of full load. We gave him the fix and were able waive the re-test, saving thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Career moment #2 was in the books.
My next corporate library experience: While in Saudi Arabia, I discovered an Aramco library in Dhahran, where I frequently had to go for meetings. Perhaps it was more of a privately run public-type of library, but I’m calling it a corporate library. Whenever I had a half hour to kill between meetings, I would go there and browse. My main find was an atlas of the universe. I don’ remember the exact name. This had more than star charts. It talked about all things stellar and galactic. I learned about stars and galaxies near and far, and clusters of galaxies. I learned what a parsec was and how it was used to measure distances in the galaxies.
This gave me a fascination with space travel. I have several books queued up about that. Not sure when, if ever, I’ll get to write them.
Alas, my last couple of memories about corporate libraries aren’t good. When CEI moved into our new building in 2000, we had a great library. The then-director of training and his assistant did a wonderful job of organizing and labeling everything. And we even had a digital card catalog. This worked great from move-in day to around early 2005. A re-organization caused the library to move to less prominent quarters in our building. Things didn’t get put on the shelf the digital card catalog said they were on. This was not a downsizing but rather a reduction in usefulness at the start of the search engine era.
The downsizing came in 2009. After three or four layoffs, we were giving up our beautiful building and moving into rented offices. The library would move, but would be reduced in size. I was assigned the task of deciding what to keep, what to throw away. First, I had to organize it, which resulted in finding many duplicates of manufacturer’s catalogs and many we didn’t need. Things such as old phone books, old municipal standards, etc. all had to go. It was hard, but I made the cuts, and the truncated library barely fit in its new shelves.
That wasn’t the worst. As the Information Era came on full blast, and as we had a little growth, around 2012 the library lost much of its usefulness. It had to be shrunk even more, to maybe 125 linear feet of shelf space in a conference room. Again I had to make those hard decisions. Then, around 2016 the company decided to get rid of it all together. I took some of it into my office, got other people to take things, and got rid of everything else. Those were hard decisions to make, and hard to see valuable books and references overflowing in our dumpster.
I’ve wondered what my first company did with that library in Building A. The thought of all those journals being discarded isn’t a pleasant one. Maybe they found a way to keep it. I hope so.
I hope to do some writing on the sequel to this this week.
It’s Sunday evening as I write this, multi-tasking as we watch the specials about 9/11. I’m looking ahead to tomorrow, and realize I don’t have time to write the type of post I’d hoped to have for Monday. Even Friday is a little iffy for a post that takes a lot of time.
This is a killer week. Not so Monday and Friday, but the other days have a lot of activities and appointments.
First, I have two “gigs” this week. On Tuesday, I will repeat my presentation on the Universal Postal Union to the NW Arkansas Letter Writers Society. I made this presentation in May, but almost everyone who normally attends was gone that day. So I’ll do it again. Fortunately, all I have to do is dust off my PowerPoint and run through it once or twice.
Then, Wednesday morning, I am to be at John Tyson Elementary School in Springdale (40 mile drive), where I will make a presentation of There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel to Henry and Izzy, the two students I had Zoom meetings with about a writing project they were doing, then had them be beta readers for my book. They don’t know I’ll be there and giving them the finished book. This will be at 9:00 a.m.
I have several hundred more of these WW2 newspapers to inventory.
Then, at 12:00 noon, I have an appointment with my cardiologist’s P.A. Hopefully I’ll learn how well the cardio rehab program went. Between those two appointments, I’m hoping to meet someone for coffee. We’ll see if that happens.
Then, Wednesday afternoon, Lynda and I have dental appointments. I’ll barely have time to get home after seeing the cardiologist to leave for the dentist. But, unless we head to church that night, that will end appointments on Wednesday.
At noon on Thursday, Lynda will have her MRI to find out what, exactly, caused her sciatica attach in July. That has been twice delayed, not because of us, but because of insurance and provider problems. Then, that evening, is a semi-monthly meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes critique group. I’ll have some preparation time required for that.
In addition to this, I have my normal activities, which at the moment include:
morning 2-mile walks
digitizing a minimum of 10 printed letters a day
inventorying a minimum of 30 issues of the Stars and Stripes
whatever writing I can squeeze in, most likely on The Key To TimeTravel, though I have other projects to work on as well, if I want to do so.
A little bit of yard work, although the work I got done on Saturday puts me a little ahead of where I normally am.
reading for research as well as for pleasure, including a couple of C.S. Lewis writings.
At some point, I need to begin the strength exercise program recommended in the cardio rehab program. I hope to begin that on Monday.
So yes, it will be a busy week. Hopefully I’ll be able to see progress on all my tasks.
A period of intense research is what led to this book. What will come of this new time of research?
Somewhere, in the back pages of this blog, I’ve said that I love research. I find that it motivates me. But research, I have also found, has a dark side—at least for me it does—in that it can all too easily become all consuming.
Two research opportunities came up recently, and I am trying very hard to resist the urge to dive in fully.
One has to do with genealogy. This month, one of my few book sales is of my genealogy book, Stephen Cross and Elizabeth Cheney of Ipswich. That’s the second of these books sold since I published it in July 2020. Then, a day or so after that sale, I was browsing through my Google Books library, looking for a new download, and saw a copy of a two-years volume of The Essex Antiquarian, a genealogy and history magazine. The volume I downloaded and started reading years ago was from 1898. Of course I had to open it.
But rather than read on, I decided to search the book for “Cheney”, my wife’s maiden name. The family was in Essex County, Massachusetts for a while, some in Ipswich, including Stephen and Elizabeth Cross. I found several hits for Cheney, four of which were for John Cheney of Newbury, the immigrant ancestor of the family.
I’ve done a lot of research on John Cheney, and possibly he and his wife Martha will be the subjects of my next genealogy book. That book, however, is so far down the line that I don’t have dates for writing it. But, I had this opportunity: four items related to him published in a 1898 magazine were at my fingertips on my screen. I pulled up my John Cheney research document, and learned that two of those hits were new information. I dutifully made the new entries and did comprehensive source documentation. Beautiful. A pleasant 30 minutes spent.
That wasn’t good enough. I searched for other editions of that magazine, and found several more, available for full viewing. I did the Cheney search over several volumes, and found additional information about John Cheney that was new. Repeated the entries and documentation. A pleasant 2 hours spent.
The next day I repeated and expanded this, looking for information, not only for Cheney, but for other family names, including Cross. I also found a longer article about a Newbury man that John Cheney supported in a controversy with the government. Rather than take time to read that (six pages), I made a note of where to find it again. Two more hours spent.
Within a year, these will be going to the University of Rhode Island library. While it will be sad to see them go, it will also be a joy knowing they will be well cared for and properly preserved and available for study.
The other research opportunity came with the many copies of the Stars and Stripes newspaper that I have. As noted in previous posts, these were newspapers that Dad worked on in Africa and Europe during WW2, copies of which he sent home to his parents, to be stored in an old steamer trunk to this day. As I reported earlier, I’m donating them to the University of Rhode Island. I decided to inventory them first, and began that process on Labor Day.
With every Bill Mauldin cartoon I see, I wonder if Dad modeled for that one.
Tuesday, I continued. My inventory method consists of recording the day, date, and edition—also whether the copy has any damage or not. By the end of my dedicated time on Tuesday, I had a total of 70 listed. Only 700 to go. I’m purposely not taking time to look at the newspapers. I will make a couple of exceptions to that as I get further into this.
But, on Tuesday, I saw a headline, “U.S. Woman Writer Held by Russia as Spy”. That sounded interesting, and I read the article. The writer was Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970). She was an American who became a socialist, then found sympathy with the Soviet Union and Communist China. Much of her writing was promoting the economic systems in those two countries. Why the Russians kicked her out is a mystery, but it seems some think it was her cozy relationship with China that was the problem.
Much of that I learned from the article about her at Wikipedia, not in the newspaper.
Anna Strong is a new person to me. I’ve never heard of her before. Thirty minutes of reading gave me the gist of what her views were, views very different from mine. A few quotes of hers made me think of things that need to be said about the capitalist and communist systems. I could easily write something about that, given a little more research.
When I first got Dad’s Stars and Stripes, in 1997, I had dreams of doing war research in them, thinking about the fog of war. How much of what the newspaper reported would prove to be true or untrue? How much does journalism get wrong, requiring history to set the record straight? Alas, after 25 years, the newspapers remained untouched. My research project null and void. I suppose I could pick it up again, but I can see that would require years of research and then some writing. No, I just can’t dedicate that time to that project. So off the papers go to URI. Perhaps students, faculty, or outside researchers will someday use them to good purposes.
More research? No! In the last three days I’ve spent over five hours on research and almost none on writing. That can’t be. I’ve got to find a way to pull away from it and concentrate on the tasks at hand. I have three books in the pipeline, started and unfinished. I need to choose one and get it done.
Not so fast. We know that earth’s rotation isn’t exactly 24 hours. It’s a little less than that. That’s why we have to add 397 leap days every 400 years. Yet, even that isn’t quite accurate enough to keep our solar-year-based calendar exactly aligned with a true solar year.
The world recognized the inexactness of the 24-hour day to measure a year. The Julian Calendar was produced during the reign of Julius Ceasar, creating the concept of a leap year and leap day. A long time later, mankind found that wasn’t accurate enough, and the Gregorian calendar was created, tweaking the Julian and getting us enough into alignment for, it was thought, a few millenia.
Now, however, we have scientific instrument so accurate that they have found that not only is the Gregorian Calendar off a little, but the earth’s rotation is not a fixed amount. It changes regularly, and can change with each rotation. So one day, it might be 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.1 seconds. The next day it might be 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.11 seconds. Or some such variation.
A while back I studied this. I wondered: Is it possible that the earth’s rotation is slowing, and what impact would that have on climate. I found data showing that the earth’s rotation is slowing. Every now and then, those that keep the atomic clock announce that they will add a “leap second” at such and such a time. Somehow all these electronic clocks we have get the message and the second is added, or they are manually reset. Maybe that’s why our analog clock in the kitchen keeps running fast.
The current info on Wikipedia’s “Earth’s Rotation” page is that earth’s rotation seems to be slowing about 2.3 milliseconds per century for the last 15 centuries. Except, in 2020, scientists noted a change, an infinitesimally longer rotation. Whether this is a trend of just an anomaly is too early to stay.
What would the effect be of a slowing rotation of the earth on earth’s climate? You would have longer consecutive daylight and longer consecutive dark. It seems like this would result in more weather extremes. Over time, the climate should exhibit more extremes.
But, how much difference can a few seconds over a milenia or two make? Surely, you will say, I’m over-emphasizing this potential factor as a potential natural cause of currently observed climate change. Maybe so. But I think we have several factors to consider. One is that we don’t know that this slowing has been at this same rate forever in the earth’s life. What if it slowed at a faster rate for a billion years and is now reaching some kind of steady state? The other is what if the cumulative effects of slowing rotation have just reached some kind of critical mass, and the climate is showing the effects of thousands of years of slowing?
I looked for answers to these questions, and didn’t find them. Possibly it’s like with volcanic activity—articles not available in 2018-2019 when I did my studies didn’t exist but they are out there now. Someday I’ll repeat my studies, but not now. For now, I see no mention of the earth’s rotation as a factor in climate change, only pat dismissals.
Somehow, these pages had to speak to me and tell a story thought lost forever.
As I’ve written here before, I’ve been working on the book for our church’s Centennial. It was July 8, but due to the pandemic and construction adjacent to the church, we pushed the celebration back a year. It was last November that our pastor asked if I would do it, I said I would, and got going on it. It took me a while to get into it, but by January I was rolling.
As I researched the history and wrote the book, one item nagged at me. We had twelve acknowledged charter members, but a statement about our first church service said there were 63 charter members. Who were the other 51? I didn’t have the names because, if they kept records during those first 3 1/2 years, they are lost. The fourth pastor, Rev Joe Mickel Tyson, began keeping records on Jan 1, 1925. One good thing he did was reach back into the past and write the names of those he knew of that were members before he came. I imagine he queried the then-current members to ask who had been members and left before he got there.
Somewhere in those names were the missing 51 charter members. I was sure of it. There were 170 names who were members of the church before Rev. Tyson came. Subtracting the 12 who were known left 158 names from whom to extract the 51 who were the unknown charter members. I knew it would be an impossible task, so I decided not to do it.
Then, I finished writing the book, and I thought again about the 51 unknown charter members, and the 158 names gathered by Rev. Tyson, and decided I needed to see if there was any way to research those people and make an educated decision as to which of the 158 were the 51. Is this making sense?
So, it was sometime in July, I think, that I decided to do the research. Today I finished it. Two months, maybe a little more, pouring over the names, looking in on-line genealogical and related databases, to see what I could learn about them. I was about three weeks into the process and was, I thought, about 3/4 done, when I realized I needed some type of objective criteria to use for making the 158 decisions I needed to make. I took a few days off to ponder what criteria I could use and developing those criteria. Once established, I had to start over with the research.
I wasn’t able to do this fulltime, as other endeavors needed my attention. But rare was the day since I started in July that I didn’t do some work on it to some extent. When this week began, I felt that I was down to needing to choose about 14 more members from about 40 names. I decided it was time to knuckle down and get it done. As of Thursday night, I had all but two people fully researched. I had them and another 8 people to choose between for the last two final charter members.
Friday morning I went back to it. The two remaining names were Mr. & Mrs. L.F. Barry (yeah, Rev. Tyson mainly used initials for the men and no names for their wives, only “Mrs.”). I didn’t find the Barrys in our county in the 1920 census, one of my criteria. Nor did I find them elsewhere. I searched a little deeper, and found a marriage record for L.F. Barry and Jessie Weaver in our county in 1915. Bingo! They were here. He was 66 and she was 36 and had never been married. But were they still here in 1921? Did they really have any connection to our church?
I had looked for this couple before at the finagrave.com website and not found them. I looked again. And there, in the main cemetery in Bentonville, was Lafayette Barry. He died in 1936 and was the right age for someone who was 66 in the 1915 marriage license. And, someone had pulled the story of his death and funeral from an archived newspaper and attached it to his grave record. In that story, our church featured prominently. I had my final couple. Based on the criteria I established, the list of charter members was complete.
Is it right? My criteria isn’t perfect. Of the seven criteria, five are not as rigorous as I would like. I could easily include someone who wasn’t a charter member and exclude someone who was. But it’s the best I can do. It may be the best anyone can do. As one of the Centennial committee members said to me, “No one is going to question who you designate as those missing members.” I suppose that’s correct.
So the major research project is over. I now have a small section of the Centennial book to rewrite to insert these names. And I have to gather all my research notes and put them in a reasonable format to store in the church office. I don’t want someone writing the sesquicentennial book, in 2071, to bemoan that guy who wrote the Centennial book and did a slipshod job of researching.
I must be losing my mind, for I forgot that, at the change of the month, I was supposed to do my usual progress and goals post. No, not losing my mind, but totally absorbed in a research project. I finished that Friday (I’ll discuss it in the progress section below) and it was like blinders came off. I realized I needed to do this post. But, having already made a post on Friday Sept 3, I’m writing this on Friday but will schedule it to post on Monday Sept 6.
First, here are the goals I posted to begin August and what progress I made against them.
Continue to tweak the church anniversary book. I can think of only two more interviews to do. I may add in photos this month. Well, I more or less did this. I tweaked the book. I did all the interviews I intend to do. I even reached out on the internet to find relatives of our church’s charter members, with some success. I added a few photos, but for the most part let the research of charter members overwhelm the tweaking/finishing the book, so it will be a September goal.
Finish a short story in the Sharon Williams Fonseca series, tentatively titled “Foxtrot Alpha Tango”. I wrote four pages in July to share with the Scribblers & Scribes critique group when we met that month. With just under 2,000 words written, I believe it’s 2/3 done. I guess I did some work on this, since it sits at 3600 words, but it’s not done. Add it to September goals.
Work on the middle grade novel I started in July. The Forest Throne is technically to be co-authored by my oldest grandson, though I’ll do most of the writing and he will edit it, helping me to understand what 10-13 year old boys like. I wrote the first chapter of this in July and sent it to him for comments, receiving his approbation of the sample. I’d like to add another 5,000 words to it this month to go with the 1350 written so far. I’ve brainstormed out most of the plot but not specific scenes. No writing on this at all. I brainstormed the plot some more (which is work and progress) and figured out how to solve another plot problem that I was uncertain of. Hoping to get back to this in September.
Blog twice a week, as always. Did this, as always.
Do some work on my website. I’m not sure what, but I have to overcome this technophobia and improve it. Nope, put this off again. I still need to do this. Oh, if I were only a techie!
Attend meetings of my three writing groups, assuming they don’t get cancelled because of local corona virus outbreaks. Two of the groups cancelled, with the pandemic figuring in each. The Scribblers & Scribes of Bella Vista met, and I attended.
If the cover artist gets the covers re-done, re-publish the three older church history novels, updating them for new copyright info and list of works, as well as link them in a series. The cover artist wasn’t able to do this, so my goal remains not done.
So, what are my goals for September 2021? Just about everything from last month, I reckon.
Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.
Wrap up my research project on our church’s charter member. I’ve come to a stopping point of sorts. What remains is to get my research notes into a useful format so that a future researcher, maybe at our 150th anniversary in 2071, will find the notes legible and useful and the research accurate.
Finish “Foxtrot Alpha Tango”, the short story I’ve been working on for two or three months.
Link the books in my Church History Novels series on Amazon. This is an easy process. I’ve been holding off until the new covers were done, but it’s time to just do it.
I still have a few more tweaks to do on the church centennial book. I’m going to work on it after I finish this post and may finish them today (Friday afternoon).
Attend my writers’ groups. At the moment all three are scheduled.
Document one Bible study idea I had and put it in the queue.
That’s enough. I wonder if I can achieve much of this in September. See you in early October. October 1 is a Friday, so possibly I’ll post progress and goals on the 1st.
A congregational photo taken in 1925, the earliest photo I could find. We have identified a few people in the photo.
Well, I’m late with my post today. Often I write my Monday morning post sometime during the weekend and schedule it for 7:30 a.m. Monday. Alas, that didn’t happen. My Saturday outdoor work was interrupted by rain, so I worked inside. Besides the usual clean-up, such as dishes, vacuuming, kitchen counters, laundry, decluttering, I worked on the checkbook (yes, I still keep the checkbook and make sure it’s correct to the penny) and budget. I then switched off to continue some research into our church’s centennial book.
As I’ve said before, it’s complete as to the writing. Well, almost complete, I have one more interview to do, and I decided I wanted to add one small section. Photos are something the committee will help me select.
One task I have taken on concerning church history—well, two tasks I suppose—is expanding the list of charter members. From history passed down, we know we had 63 charter members back in 1921. Alas, the names of only 12 were recorded. In fact, the church didn’t establish a record book until almost 3 1/2 years after they started meeting. Fortunately, the pastor at that time wrote the names of all who were then or who had been members before his coming. It is about 170 names. Of those 170, 63 were charter members and the others what I call “early members”. I decided to take on the task of figuring our who the missing 51 were.
I delayed that because I knew it was going to be a huge task. I was right. I established some criteria, researched the names, and was able to identify 32 people who I thought could be added to the 12 known charter members. I passed that list two three different people to check the names and see what they thought. Yesterday afternoon I met with two of them for nearly three hours. We went over every name on the list. Most of the names they were not able to rule in or rule out. One family they ruled out, being pretty sure they joined a little after the church began. One other family they added, being sure, from church lore passed down, that they were in fact charter members.
So where does that leave me? I have 12 known charter members, 34 probable charter members, and 42 possible charter members. The rest of the ±170 I have ruled out based on the research criteria I’ve set. The 12 + 34 add to 46, leaving me 17 still to be determined. Somehow, if I am to be successful with this task, I need to decide which 17 of the 42 were most likely charter members. That is my current research task.
One related item I’m working on is cross-checking that old record book to make sure I didn’t miss any names or any clues. I’m also working on documenting my research better than I have thus far. It occurred to me that some future historian will write another church history, maybe at our 150th anniversary. I want that historian to have confidence in my research. So I’m going back over every family, every name on that early members list, and doing the research over, but this time documenting everything I find in a Word file. I’m being meticulous. It’s slow going. Yesterday evening I documented the one family added to the list of probable charter members. There were four or five in the family but only the parents were on the early members list. They are now fully documented and added to the charter member list as “probables”.
While this is tedious work, and will take me a couple of months to do, It is also quite satisfying. It’s a mix of detective work and genealogy. Once research is finished, it will give way to writing. I have a section in the book giving the 170 names on the early members list, a section I will have to rewrite once the research is done.
Will it ever be done? Just as I finished my afternoon research session, I took a look again at the “H” page (since the next family I’ll do begins with an H), and realized I may have misinterpreted what that pastor wrote long ago and have to add some more H names to the early members list. I’ll do that happily, to be as accurate as I can.
Of course, I am hoping to return to creative writing at some point, more than just sneaking an hour or two of it in from time to time. The end is in sight.
This morning, on the Presidents Day holiday, I was up as always around 6:30 a.m. With no stock market work to do, I decided to download income tax forms and organize the folders and files. Still waiting on one critical income form so I can’t quite start on them in earnest.
The last forecast before the snow began was for 3-6 inches. We got 5, though it took 33 hours of light snowing to for that much to accumulate.
After that I shifted to work on the church 100th anniversary book. I like the progress I made. I’m researching charter members. Wrote the short bio of the one who organized the tent meeting that got it all started then began researching another family of charter members. That took me up to noon or later.
Then it was reading time. After lunch it was reading time, walking time, and phone call time. Now here it is, almost supper time, and I’m just getting around to a post. My only excuse is: the snow made me do it.
Yes, another day, another snow storm. It started around 8 a.m. yesterday and is just about now quitting. In those 33 hours we have had only 5 inches. I went out in it around 2 p.m. Walked about 1/4 mile out and was so cold, even with several layers on, I turned around and came back. I love walking in the snow, but thought I’d better not push it in this bitter cold.
But all day, from The Dungeon window, the sunroom windows, from my reading chair in the living room, and wherever else I was, the snow captivated me enough that I couldn’t concentrate on blogging. The important post I’ve been putting off is still important, but not so timely as when I first envisioned it. I may start a draft of it tonight, after dark, because if it’s snow that distracts me…
…The current forecast is for another storm to start tomorrow evening and rage into Wednesday, giving us another 4-10 inches. Well, the latest forecast has it 4-9 inches. I don’t want to exaggerate. Tomorrow I’ll have to shovel the driveway. Not because we are going anywhere, but shoveling 4 inches twice will be a whole lot easier than shoveling 8 to 10 inches or more once.
Snow exhilarates me. I don’t even mind the cold so much. Hopefully despite the flakey distraction I’ll be able to get my work done.
The Port Royal expedition was short, close at hand, and successful. The Quebec expedition was long, arduous, and conducted much too close to the harsh Canadian winter to be successful. Click on the image to see it larger.
I think I mentioned in a previous post that I pulled away from my creative writing to work on genealogy research and a genealogy/family history book. I suppose it is really more of a biography.
The subjects are Elizabeth Cheney and Stephen Cross, who married in Ipswich Massachusetts in 1672. Elizabeth is the youngest daughter of John Cheney of Newbury Massachusetts, who is my wife’s immigrant ancestor in her paternal line. Over the years I’ve gathered a lot of information on John and finally decided I should write a book about him. What the book would look like crystalized in 2015. It would be about him and his ten children who lived to adulthood. I decided I would start gathering data with the youngest child, since published sources I looked at had less about Elizabeth than her siblings.
From 2015 to 2016 I began that process. I found that there was actually a lot of information about Stephen Cross, Elizabeth’s husband. It’s unfortunate that, in the era they lived, the women didn’t leave as many footprints as the men. But there were a lot of footprints to find and assimilate. In a couple of months of occasional work, I had the part about Stephen and Elizabeth up to 60 pages, and I wasn’t really done.
Woah! Sixty plus pages for one of John’s children. That meant a possible 600 pages about the children. Add that much or more for John, and I was looking at a monster, 700 page book. That wouldn’t work unless I did two volumes.
Ipswich, on the north shore of Massachusetts, is an interesting study. It’s been nicknamed the Birthplace of American Independence for the stand many of its leading citizens took against the heavy-handed government of Edmund Andros.
I had another thought back in 2016. The Stephen and Elizabeth material could be expanded into a stand-alone book. I put this on my list of writing to-dos, then, my research fervor having been stated for the moment, I went back to my creative writing work, knowing someday I would get back to Stephen and Elizabeth, and later to her siblings.
“Someday” was March 25, 2020. I dusted off what I did in 2015-16, realized I had much more research I could do, and got into it passionately. When I research a topic the work tends to consume me. From the research I made three discoveries that, so far as I can tell, have been overlooked—or maybe “not found” is better—by other researchers.
First, Stephen was a coastal mariner. He bought a boat and plied the coasts from Maine to Connecticut, hauling freight. That has always been known by researchers. So has his part in the colonial naval assault against Quebec in 1690 as part of King William’s War. But researchers have missed that he was also part of an assault against Port Royal, Nova Scotia, two months before the Quebec expedition. Smaller, closer, shorter than the Quebec expedition, the Port Royal expedition was a huge success. Stephen Cross was part of it, not as a mariner, but as captain of a company of foot soldiers.
This seems to have been missed by all researchers. My research has turned up Stephen in close to twenty published works, sometimes as a “bit player” in a genealogy but sometimes as a key figure in a Cross family book, story, or major website. I’m not even sure how I found out about his Port Royal adventure. I suppose it came from researching the disastrous Quebec raid, which I learned was shortly after the successful Port Royal raid. Searching a narrative of that must have turned up Stephen’s name. It didn’t take much digging to confirm his participation and role.
The fact that he led foot soldiers at Port Royal caused me to question the nature of his participation at Quebec. Every researcher I’ve found said he captained the ketch Lark in that raid. However, in original sources about the Quebec expedition, his name doesn’t show up as the captain of that vessel. Instead, it shows up because he attended a war council the evening that they anchored in the St. Lawrence just down river from the city. Of the thirty-odd people who attended that conference, only two were among those listed as captains of the thirty-some vessels in the expedition. That conference was for the officers of foot soldiers!
This also seems to have gone unnoticed by other researchers. Of the seven captains of foot companies at Port Royal, five attended that Quebec war council, including Stephen. My conclusion is he was he again a captain of foot soldiers, not a captain of a vessel.
So why have other researchers thought otherwise? In Perley’s History of Salem is a statement “In August, 1690, the Salem vessels joined the rest of the fleet which were at Nantasket to sail for Canada…. The ketch Lark of Salem, commanded by Capt. Stephen Cross, had been in the expedition to Canada, and had returned to Salem this year, and the arms on board were deposited in Mr. Derby’s warehouse.” Perley’s source for this is the Massachusetts Archives, volume 36, leaf 33.
Alas, to sort this out I would have to see the folio in the archive. It’s possible that Stephen simply piloted the ship from Boston back to Salem, since he was an accomplished coastal skipper. Or maybe he took over the vessel at some point during the expedition and his name didn’t get added to ship captains. It’s possible that the portfolio would tell.
At this point I believe I’m right about Stephen leading a company of foot soldiers at Quebec.
The other thing I discovered seemingly not found by other researchers is less adventurous. About the time of his marriage, Stephen bought a sloop, the Adventure, and hauled freight and passengers in it. He had a partner, Samuel Cogswell, who died three years later. All of this is well-known and is included in other accounts of Stephen. What is new is that, after Cogswell’s death, Stephen took on a new partner, John Lee (or Leigh) of Ipswich. The relationship is clearly spelled out in some court cases beginning in 1678 and extending into the 1680s. Accounts of Stephen’s life prepared by others mention the Adventure and Cogswell’s role in it, but not Lee’s.
I must end this. The post is much too long and probably of interest to me and no one else. I just wanted to let you know how good it felt to research a topic—in this case a person—and break new ground, find something no one else seems to have found.
