Below is a fossil of many centuries ago - they estimate about 5million years ago?
This is the one and only Blot I have found on any of the pages of the books we are digitizing.
This little blue trailer home is on the road that we use to get to the Archives every morning. I think that it is totally cute and way too decorated but it makes a statement anyway.
The Michelin man is an equal opportunity employer. He does not mind if I appear in PINK! And for those who are wondering how cold it was - It was 43degrees......and Carol, my neighbor in Prescott sent me an email saying that it was 32 degrees in Prescott this morning when she was leaving for school. What will I do when it really gets cold here? I really think that one of the tender mercies of God was to let me have a mission where I will be inside a warm building (digitizing records) and not out in the cold and snow trying to track down members of the church who no longer attend in the capacity of Member/Leadership Support Mission activities.
The index books that we have been digitizing are unique in that 4 of them have fine grain leather as their cover. I guess someone thought that it would help make them last longer, I don’t know what went into them getting such wonderful covers for these books. They did not hold up well and were very fragile as we used them.
Bill put on a rubber finger cover for using with papers to allow you to pick them up easily. We are not to wet our fingers or use that sticky stuff the bank people use to pick up the papers – they are fragile to start with and a wet finger will leave a mark and possibly cause more problems than we already have. The books are put on a cradle which is an interesting contraption to use. It has a central bar that is mounted on springs and two side plates that are also mounted on springs and each side will operate independently of the other. For example, when we first put the big books on the cradle, the thicker heavier side pushes down lower and the thinner side stays static and when you put the glass cover over it to digitize the image, they both lay flat and give a good image. I think it is rather ingenious how this cradle works. So far, we have digitized 12 of the court ledgers and 9 index books. The remaining three ledgers have self contained indexes that arein the front of the book. Any books I have usually have the index in the back but these are in the front and I wonder if they were assembled there like that for the printer to do the bookbinding. I asked the Archivist about this and he thought that the index was assembled on a regular basis during the court sitting and that the index was put together separate from the court record but later assembled in one book. The most notable thing about these records is the exceptional penmanship that is used. I cannot begin to think how accurate and exacting this job must have been for the clerk who wrote all the notes, but to write all the letters uniformly and the same throughout the record is amazing to me. I took Calligraphy in college and did some pretty fine work myself, but there were always some letters that did not turn out quite as expected. Not so for this clerk of the court who wrote these records in the mid 1800’s. I asked if it might have been a quill but was told that most probably it was a metal pen nib dipped in inkwell. I remember using inkwells when I was in grade school in Australia – those inkwells were used for a lot more than dipping pen nibs into……..like pigtails of the girl in front, pencils and whatever else we found to shove into it for devilment. The finest nib we used was a mapping pen but that cantankerous nib always blotted somewhere and was not happy to be pressed firmly but you had to use it lightly on your mapping book. I was really glad when they came out with affordable fountain pens, but even these sometimes dropped blobs of ink where you did not need them. In all the 12 books we have digitized, we have found only one page that was blotted – I guess the clerk really blotted the copybook with this one.
One of the workers came into our room and asked if I would like to see some artifacts that were being photographed in the basement. There is a PhD student who is researching one particular Indian Tribe who lived along the Kennebec Valley and they were known as the Red Paint people. Apparently they found a certain amount of Ochre colored material that was smeared on the dead and the more important you were, the more Ochre was smeared on you. It seems that at one time there were Sword Fish in the Maine Bay because they have found swordfish remains in the archeological digs of this particular tribe. It is a theory that is being tested “ Was the capture of a swordfish enough of a dangerous activity to warrant one being smeared a lot by the Ochre?” The Ochre is found many miles from here and there is evidence that this particular tribe had contact with peoples from over 1,000 miles away. This tribe lived in this area about 2,000 years ago according to the dating of the artifacts. This tribe disappeared and left no trace of where they went – much like the Sinagua people of Arizona. No one knows where they went either.
As we were driving to the Archive building this morning I saw many flocks of birds – clouds of them reeling through the sky –they appeared as an amorphous bunch, seemingly without any specific direction to their flight, wheeling and dropping on unsuspecting trees in the middle of Augusta. They were so far away that I had no chance of identifying them. There was a similar flock of birds careening around the sky near Walmart. I guess there is safety in numbers, especially if you are heading south for the winter. If you are going to get lost, at least you will be lost with company and not be on your lonesome.
The clerks here tell me that this is the season for craft sales etc. ready for the winter holidays etc. so this weekend we are going to check some of them out. I hope to get a local cook book to add to my collection of area-specific cook books. There was a bake sale today in the atrium of the building – or rather it was a totally diet damaging effort on the part of the organizers to derail those of us who need to watch the waistline. We bought something anyway and it was delicious.
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