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Primary Sources

Despite the hype the world wide web is a pretty crappy place for primary sources. Internet based private space may hold masses of libraries worth of material but the promise of a free and open digital library a click away is a very long click away. It is, then, small chirpy of noises of glee I make when I come across primary sources such as the UK’s National Archives and its one million documents now plunked down for all to see on the web.

Trouble is, you do only “come across” these things. I wish there was a card catalogue of accessible web-based primary sources somewhere available. You know…like an organized log of what was one the web…now what would you call that?

The Road Once Again

I wanna live there, no there, no there...
Houses hiding from the 407 north of the Big Smoke

The road. Kingston to Kitchener to Owen Sound to Kingston.

On the way home, we went into Belleville and went to a Ponderosa Steak House. Unbelievably, it was found to be exactly the same as the last one I went into in 1983 in Truro. Home of the thin steak, the cafeteria style ordering, florescent tube lighting and all you can eat salad bar which includes jello as a food group made it entertaining. Plus I was the thinnest, youngest and prettiest man in the place. Macaroni and cheese is a vegetable side dish. I think you can fully comply with yet utterly breach the Aitken’s diet in one meal there. I am so full of MSG, I have to go hunt out that old ventolin puffer I’m sure is around here somewhere.

Hannah Richmond

Richmonds a plentyHappy Happy Joy Joy

Happy Happy Joy Joy
Hannah Richmond, born Feb. 18 1837 (detail of left)

It is not good to make jokes about your mother-in-law. How much worse to make fun of your great-great-great-grandmother-in-law.

I think this is Hannah Richmond, great-grandmother of my wife’s grandfather, who stiched this family register as a young girl. While in Owen Sound I was able to get digital copies of the register as well as a book of studio portaits from 1900 and earlier of a branch of my in-laws which begins with this lady. This photo is clearly a photo of a photo when it was taken as the people around her are cut out of the oval picture I have seen in the album. She knew people born in the 1700’s.

Fortunately, my wife’s great-aunt pencilled in some notations over some of the characters making it possible to piece together a portion of the family starting with the mother of my wife’s mother’s father back to the grandmother of the mother of my wife’s mother’s father. Clear? Most photos from about 1860 to 1890. Like these folk, one of my kids’ great-great-great-great-grandparents.

Day Off

Funky Monkey
The Funky Monkey, empty space and Treasure Cove Antiques, Brock, half a block NW of King

A day off. I took a day off with the intention of going to the Toronto Zoo enroute to Owen Sound and great-granny’s but we are having one of those days where a cold front passes through southern Ontario and there are about 16 layers of weather to get through between here and there, mimicking as many seasons. So I am idle, that greatest of states.

Above is a row of buildings on Brock Street. One of the nicest things about the City on top of the great buildings are the incidental ones, the ones which do not get the notice but which may have been on the trail of tears left by the former landlords of Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir. John A. MacDonald. Apparently he was a bit of a rover with the rent money as half the small buildings of the era in the downtown have plaques to the effect that he practiced law out of the attic for 27 days in the spring of 1848 or some such thing.

History's backside
The backsides of the south-eastern corner of Brock and King

Nearby, the backsides of a number of buildings show the different building materials used over time from limestone, through brick to cinder block and siding. Below is the front of the south-eastern corner of Princess and King, one block to along from the back alley above. It is quite a singular building, with its shuttered windows and corner facing profile – rather Addam’s Family. It houses a coffee shop now. All of these scenes are within a couple of hundred feet of Market Square.

History's coffeeshop

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