Capturing memories to “keep” is like trying to hold onto a
squirming baby. If I do not write them
down, they are gone immediately.
In the last lot of pictures there was a court paper with a
face drawn on it. Lorraine, who is
Jason’s supervisor, told me that one of the birth records she saw had a
shopping list written on the back of it.
I guess court people do not think that others will ever read what is
written.
It is interesting to note that Maine was still part of
Massachusetts in the early 1800’s and the court costs were written in both
Pounds, shillings and pence as well as Dollars and Cents. I thought that was pretty unique.
My job at present is to do a cover sheet for each of the
court cases of York County. These
records have barely been humidified, flattened and then handed to me to work
with and they are still quite damp. I
came across a large sheet of paper that was some sort of declaration – or so I
thought – but I read it and came to find out that the court had to be moved
from Biddeford to Kennebunk due to an
outbreak of Yellow Fever in the area and it was thought to be a dangerous place
to be due to the outbreak. This was in
October 1802.
I soon ran out of work to do so Art went down and humidified
more records for me. I spent a lot of
the day unfolding very fragile and rather wet records and trying to lay them
out flat and get the kinks out of them and set them between sheets of paper to
dry. We had nothing heavy to put on them
except the boxes of papers from Janet’s piles of stuff. She will be in the office tomorrow and so she
may be very surprised to see how we put her stuff to good use. The missionaries came up to see how we do the
digitizing etc. and while they were there
Art gave me a few piles of humidified papers to flatten out.
Bernie brought in a whole box of cover sheets for me – I am
on the third ream of paper already.
At work the phone rang and it was the husband of one of the
girls from Safeway wanting me to recommend crafts persons to do demonstrations
at some sort of art room he is working on so I gave him Wilda and Susan to
call. He was surprised to hear that we
are in Maine. Went to the Scout meeting
to see the boys get their merit badges from the scout camp activities and while
there Bro Jager from Prescott Valley called me to ask me to go back to work in
the Family History Center when I get back home and to attend the Family History
Conference on October 20. He wants me to
work Tuesday 2pm to 6pm. That will be a
change from the Friday 10am to 2pm that I have had for 12+ years.
David has made it to Nebraska. Hooray for him. Sara had to drive around and around and
finally park so that she could get him to the car. It was of great concern that David would even
make it to the airport let alone get on the correct plane – but he did and so
things are fine.
It was so cold in the Archives that I took a pink piece of
fleece that is a very wide scarf to put around my shoulders. I’ll certainly need it tomorrow since I went
and had my hair cut today – short hair means a cold neck in the freezing
Archives rooms.
Sara left a note on Skype.
Jacob’s doctors are contemplating getting him onto the transplant list
if possible. That puts a wrinkle in
everyone’s plans.
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