Brandymore Castle

I've talked before about the need to accept the inconvenient existence of multiple of truths that exists in genealogy. Incomplete knowledge about the past is unavoidable. The past is gone and we are not getting back to put under a microscope. Even the present is difficult to pin down. We only know what we experience or someone tells us, which is pretty much what we know about the past, only through source material and what someone tells us. We are left frequently with only sketchy knowledge about family history. This leads to different families claiming the same individual, each with their own basket of evidence and story. I've learned to accept this as a reality and moreover, I've learned to accept this as being a Good Thing (or at least the best thing we can expect given the nature of reality). The net it turns out is very good at handling incomplete information as it rapidly emerges and changes from multiple authorities. The applications emerging ont he web are gradually...

The kind of social science work exemplified by Albion's Seed and the kind of work done by folklorists demonstrates the value of vernacular material, the potential usefulness of photographs of ordinary people and places. The scholarship of Albion is based upon two pillars, the first is social statistics and the second is anecdotal. The latter is used to confirm and explore the culture as it existed, such as Byrd's secret diary. The former is used to verify anecdotal and cultural evidence (from the diaries and art of the time). In the eighteenth century photography had yet to be invented. This means that now is the first time we are beginning to use photographic evidence, the documentary tradition, as scholars have used written documents, letters and journals. The photograph, and recorded visual imagery in general, which includes photography, video and any new technologies in the future, such as 3d visualization, present us with both a documentary record useful collectively to so...

I wrote these last week or so. The more you do the more you are able to do without knowing how -sek Willful spirits explain our hates and loves lightning strikes -sek Brandymore Castle a castle only in the imagination -sek

Here is a haiku I wrote in 2005 after reading about the philosophy of haiku. Haiku seems more than any count of syllables -sek Here's one I wrote this morning. On the beach I made my mark in the sand and covered it over. -sek And one in the afternoon. My thoughts are always jostling to explode in eight hundred directions -sek

Jennifer Armstrong (author, The American Story) said in a talk (BookTv 1/29/07) at the Blue Willow Bookshop, "consciousness moves backwards and forwards in time." I stopped working as my mind dropped into gear and listened as she continued to talk about story telling and history. She had struck a chord in my mind with this observation. I thought how strange it is a thing to say. It seems obvious of course, since we all can move our minds back and forth over the events of our life, consider the future and reflect on the past. But it still struck me as strange. She followed up her remark with a disclaimer reminding us that at the quantum level time is not very orderly or linear, a thought that occurred to me almost simultaneously with her first remark, a little voice rising against the implied linearity of time. However, the distinction between the mind's comprehension of time and natural time was made clear as was the capacity for the mind to create this construct of linea...

I was talking with filmmaker Tom Davenport today and the discussion turned to my observations of a tree outside the window of my apartment, which over many years I have observed to display fascinating changes and cycles in response to climate. The conversation turned to haiku as he likened my noticing a leaf falling outside my window on a quiet day to haiku. I was startled when he said "in haiku, the tree and the person are not very separated." This is an idea very close to Zen. I won't go into the details of Zen belief here, but one idea of Zen is that individuals can reach a state where they feel as if there is no separation between the self and the things making up the world around them. Scientists and Zen masters may debate exactly how and why this feeling arises in the human mind, but what is interesting is the possibility haiku may represent a kind of expression or record of this kind of merging of the individual with things. I found myself agreeing with his observa...

Today, I posted the following to the GenPhoto email discussion group. I thought it would make a good addition to the blog as well. Google has a new service called My Maps enabling anyone to create a public or private map containing descriptive markers for just about anything. The markers can contain rich text and images. Card photographs make an ideal subject for mapping, since they generally are imprinted with the location of the photographer's studio on the back or front. This makes is possible to create a marker for each studio. If the photograph has a known date (a tax stamp date, indicated in writing or estimated from the card style or knowledge of the subject), studios can be mapped as the photographer moves. I have mapped the known studio locations for J. G. Mangold , a significant nineteenth-century studio photographer and publisher of stereoviews in the Quad Cities region and Florida. I encourage everyone to note the photographer's imprint on the back of the card pho...

Do you want free broadband? Look no further than Google's revolutionary Comm(on)-(m)ode network. I want my TiSP !

"Most people don't understand Americans because they don't know how frightening it had been to leave home completely and to pull up your roots and face the wilderness." -- Alan Lomax I was startled by how Alan Lomax in the film Appalachian Journeys anticipates David Hackett Fischer's findings in Albion's Seed, discovering evidence of British folkways transplanted to America. Speaking of the poetry and song of the Scots-Irish, Lomax observes "This 70,000 square miles of beautiful tangled green hills allowed this British tradition time to reshape itself ... when it was being cut to pieces by the industrialization of Great Britain, it was finding a new home here ... taking on a new life ... a life out of the corn fields, the feuds and the whisky stills..." Americans were shaped by the unique environment of a new land, but they were were also shaped by the persistence of old world culture. Although, the unique flora and fauna of America, such as the poi...