Sunday, June 22, 2014

Thomas Gardner Society, Inc. site down

This has been a bad week for genealogical "web-sters," it seems. ancestry.com went down; the auxiliary sites are still unavailable, to wit myfamily, rootsweb. The other day, Facebook was down.

Today, the site at thomasgardnersociety.org is unavailable since the server that supports it is having a file system problem which started earlier this am (no expected uptime given).

There will be more  information later (see status.webhostinghub.com for now).

Remarks: Modified: 11/22/2014

06/22/2014 - 219 pm. Site is back up. No explanation. ... 235 pm. Chatted with support. They cloak the information under proprietary shields. Perhaps, I ought to look at what discussions there are in the community about failures/outages, of this type (which was said to be a disk failure, rather than some outage due to hacking).

06/22/2014 -- See the post related to the move from MicroSoft's OfficeLive to Hub (March 15, 2012). I still have my research notes. ... Too, a recent post about content management (earlier post in this blog, CMS again). ... Some have gone to the cloud which is a nebulous affair for the user. That is, the cloud provider hides the technical issues (or, a lot of them). Yet, the user is the one who has the responsibility for the content and its availability. --- ancestry.com? Yes, they stacked a whole lot of stuff on that node. The paying stuff is back (like ancestry.com). Those things that were freely available (and, in many cases, not started by the ancestry folks) are still out - will they come back? As in, there had already been a notice that myfamily.com was disappearing. Will they make an effort to get it back so that we can download our material (supposedly to be done before mid-July - or, that was the deadline before their outage).

06/24/2014 -- At last, rootsweb is back. ... Wait, it's an empty shell.

06/25,26/2014 -- rootsweb is back. Listing of 303 trees for Thomas (those with sources, showing descendants and providing the death year). ... Of the 303, 181 trees have parents for Thomas. ... Then, there are 43 trees with George being the grandfather of Thomas. ... See Whence came ...

11/22/2014 -- 12:29 cst -- Site down, plus email not available.

Saturday, June 7, 2014

First cold war

Genealogy (again and again) without history is incomplete (hence, the foresight of the NEHGS founders). Actually, a scientific attitude complements, too (in very many ways).

A recent Foreign Affairs issue has an article titled "The First Cold War" that reviews a book about the seventeenth century. Essentially, there were several cold years, in particular, during the 1640s, in which there were "more rebellions and revolutions than any comparable period of world history." Too, people starved due to frosts wiping out crop.

What was the effect on the New England experience? The below is from an introduction by Lynn Betlock on the Great Migration site.
    Another aspect of life in New England proved noteworthy: the remarkable health and longevity of the population. Many colonists lived to the age of seventy, and a substantial number lived to be eighty. Both male and female settlers in New England lived significantly longer than their English counterparts. This longevity is no doubt due to a variety of factors: dispersed settlement patterns, lack of epidemic disease, the healthful effects of a “little ice age,” clean air and water, possibly a better diet, and the original good health of most immigrants. Also, infant and childhood mortality rates were lower in New England, and the settlers produced large and healthy families — most having seven or more children. Accordingly, New England experienced  tremendous population growth within the lifetime of first generation settlers. (emphasis mine) 
---

A regular theme will be to look at world events in the context of the New England experience (such as, early losses over the winter of 1629/30 in Salem - 80 plus souls as resources could not support the demand).

Remarks: Modified: 06/07/2014

06/07/2014 -

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Great Salem Fire of 1914

Quoting Salem State University about the Great Salem Fire of 1914:
    On June 25, 1914 fire broke out in the Korn leather factory at 57 Boston Street in Salem and was quickly carried by high winds across the city. By dawn the next morning the blaze had finally been quenched, but much of Salem lay in ruins. Single houses, apartment blocks, tenements, shoe and leather factories, and the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Mill had been consumed by the flames, leaving only brick chimneys standing as sentinels across the cityscape.
Snap of map from
salemfocus.com 
The University is sponsoring, on June 20 and 21, A Centennial Symposium (see Program) and has provided some facts related to the fire. For instance, over 1,300 buildings were burnt. 18,000 persons were displaced. It is estimated that a million came to view the fire.

The Nelson Dionne Collection of photographs (see images on Google) will be on display during the Symposium.

The map shows the extent of the fire which started in the industrial district (top) and ran down toward the water. Many historic buildings were threatened. The fire came right up to area of the witch house.

We will look at this further, such as paying more attention to those burnt areas using older maps.

Remarks: Modified: 03/02/2019

06/04/2014 - Nelson shared a lot of his photos with me. I will see if there is a collection that is visible on-line. In the meantime, the list of photos shown by Google tells a whole lot.

06/18/2014 -- Reminder at Creative Salem.

08/12/2018 -- Thomas, with others on Gardner Hill, was left where he was. Stones were moved over to Harmony Grove Cemetery. A few of those withstood the move, say that for Seeth. Most did not and are piled somewhere. At the burial site, though, the road was cut through. So, the remains? Well, moved to God only knows. Or, if the burial was away from the road, it is beneath some structure. Lots to think about. Reflect on. How to proceed into this mire?

01/04/2019 -- This topic will be followed more regularly this year (344th of 29 December 1674). We will initiate a discussion on WikiTree (see link in sidebar) in support of the research.

03/02/2019 -- We building an index by images for our portal to truth.