Virginia Sawmills of the 1900s

PostSecret: I’m not sure whether to say PostSecret does or doesn’t make the user think.  If you were to arrive at postsecret.com with no prior knowledge of the site, I admit, you’d probably be pretty confused, and you’d be asking a lot of questions, so I guess in that way it’s poorly designed (as much as I hate to say it).  On the other hand, PostSecret involves essentially no site navigation – you type in the URL, and once you’re at the website, there’s nowhere to go but the homepage.  So, it’s easy to navigate, but also leaves a lot of questions unanswered.  PostSecret does not require (or even offer) accounts, and I personally think that the very simplistic set-up of the website both directs the user’s attention in the proper direction and achieves feature exposure, since really the only thing to look at is the postcards themselves.  Frank (PostSecret’s founder) has absolutely set up this website to be simplistic – I think the simplicity of it is what drives the entire appeal of the website, and he’s certainly not afraid of the extra space.  He does include some side-bar links, including a Facebook widget, the address for sending in postcards, and upcoming events, but for the most part, the website has the secrets, and just the secrets.  As I reach “visible language” I’m slowly running out of ways to say that the simple design of postsecret.com is basically perfect if you ask me, and visiting the site it’s plain to see that while you have to read the postcards, they are very focused on imagery as well.

A screenshot demonstrating how PostSecret directs a user’s attention and isn’t afraid of empty space.

http://www.postsecret.com – I think it’s important to note that the purpose of this website is very different than the types of websites Krugg was focusing on in his article, and therefore the design is different as well.

The Valley of the Shadow: The first thing I noticed when I opened this website is that they have an opening page where you have to click a button to actually enter the website, and I think that right there they probably lost some potential visitors by adding that level of complexity.  Based on Krugg’s criteria, having to click on an extra button is probably making the user think too much.  Once I entered the actual website, there are links to three different time periods via strange pictures that look kind of like blueprints for a building, with each section labeled.  What I didn’t initially realize was that it actually matters which section you click on.  I understand what they’re getting at, but I think that this also is too much thinking for the typical users.  I have to admit, they don’t really have my attention because the site is kind of plain and boring, and a little difficult to navigate, but this site, like PostSecret, isn’t afraid of white space.  This website could definitely be easier to use by changing the navigation system and ditching the strange blue-print pictures.

Valley of the Shadow opening page.

What I learned from The Chicago Homicide Project: On the night of Mach 12, 1924, Walter Law was found shot and dead in a car with an automatic pistol beside him. The car was parked on Belva Gaertner’s property. Belva Gaertner was arrested shortly thereafter for the crime, drunken and covered in blood. She was tried and acquitted in June of that year.

What I learned from Wikipedia: Law and Gaertner were having an afair (Law was married to another woman, Gaertner was married but separated). Gaertner admitted to having been driving drunk with Law that night but couldn’t remember anything else. During the trial, a co-worker of Law testified that Gaertner was overly possessive in her relationship with Law. Gaertner’s defense was that Law could have killed himself, and she was acquitted in June. In 1925 she remarried the husband from whom she had been separated/presumably divorced, and they divorced AGAIN the next year, with her husband claiming she was abusive.

The basic facts of the two sources are the same, with Wikipedia containing more details surrounding the murder and events thereafter, giving a more well-rounded, but still unbiased idea of what might have happened. Wikipedia’s references are all from the Chicago Tribune. I think that based on the fact that the main information is all the same, and that Wikipedia has a fairly reliable (primary) source, it probably is reliable itself on this issue. Because the Wikipedia page contain the same basic information as the Chicago Homicide project, which is a reliable source, the Wikipedia page is reliable as well.  This may not be true for any and all Wikipedia pages, but this specific page seems to be accurate.

I do not understand geolocation.

The word didn’t appear in our readings, so I googled it and found definitions from various sources that essentially amounted to this: geolocation is locating objects based on their geographic situation.  Which basically sounds like mapping, ie, placing a “pin” on a map in google maps.  But we just did that last week, so I don’t feel like that’s what we’re being asked to do this week.  Also, the syllabus mentions geolocated images and videos and I completely don’t understand how those things can be geolocated.  If we watch a video on the internet, it’s on the internet and therefore not geographical, so there’s no way to map it other than perhaps to map the location of the IP from which it was uploaded.  So I guess I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be doing and I’ll be happy to do it once I understand but right now I’m stuck.

For my secondary source, I picked the history section of the website for Babcock lumber company, which is the parent company for the saw mill in Tucker County, West Virginia.  The section does not mentioned the Alderton family, but it does refer to the expansion that lead to the establishment of the mill in question.  It’s not a scholarly article, but it’s something.

I had a lot of fun making my map.  I started with my house, since that’s where I spend most of my time.  Then I just tried to think of important things that happened in my life and where they happened, so I chose my secondary school, my elementary school, my boyfriend’s house, etc.  I got a little more in depth and added the houses where my parents grew up (also in Arlington), and some other places that I’m maybe slightly less connected too, but still are a part of my life.

Basically, I ended up mapping my home town, because that’s where my life has happened.  I mean, what else would I map?  I chose very few locations outside of Arlington, one that is just barely in Falls Church, and the other three are all in West Virginia, interestingly enough.  I have a lot of family history in West Virginia, so I mapped where my family vacations and where my grandfather was born, and also where my boyfriend’s dorm is because that’s where I was at the time.

Now that I think about it, I guess I did have some other options for things I could map.  A few years ago, my family went on a cross country trip (to see an eclipse of all things…).  We traveled through I think thirteen states and stopped in probably at least as many cities.  I managed not to kill my brother over the ten days.  I could map the cities we went to.  We also did a ton of geocaching (look it up, it’s fun!) and I could theoretically map the geocaches that my family has found… but that’s almost 300 and that’s just too much.  The only other option I can think of is to map where my friends from high school went to college.  I’m really close still with a lot of them, and they’re really all over the country.  In fact, two of them went to college outside of the country.

Anyway.  Mapping my hometown was my best bet for sure because I’m so emotionally attached to it.  My whole history is here and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I started off my research with a nice online game of Kings Corner.  But I realized that wasn’t getting me very far, so I decided to try Google instead.

I started by searching “1950s federal polio vaccine,” which resulted in nothing useful.  Then I tried “federally mandated polio vaccine” (also useless) and several others.  I found myself searching through the references at the bottom of the Wikipedia page titled “Polio Vaccine,” I posted a Facebook status asking if anyone knew anything about it.  I asked my dad, who had no idea what I was talking about, but offered to help with my research.  I even emailed the WHO (World Health Organization) but didn’t receive a reply.  After quite a bit of collaboration with my dad (at least an hour), we came up with this book.

Yeah, one book.

It was published by the United States Army in 1957 and is titled “Medical Service: Program to Vaccinate Civilian Federal Employees Against Poliomyelitis.”  Unfortunately, the only portions of the book that are available online are the title and a small amount of publication information.  Obviously, this isn’t very much to go on in what was supposed to be a small project, but here’s what I have.  It started either in 1957 or shortly before – no earlier than 1955, as that is when the first Polio vaccine was developed.  The description of the book offers no author, no name of the program, no information on the funding, and no description of whether or not the vaccine was mandatory or voluntary.  Based on the wording of the original question I received in class last week, my guess would be that the vaccination was mandated, but I can’t say I have a strong basis for that assumption.

I honestly would consider buying the book and looking into the details of this program, because all of the things I mentioned above as unknown factors are things that I would be interested in finding out.  But I didn’t buy the book because this is a digital history class and everything I use in my research is supposed to be accessible online, so I decided not to.  Also I wouldn’t receive it in time, but that’s beside the point.

The lack of information on what was a federal program surprises me.  I thought that government websites and archives would have this sort of stuff online, since it’s a part of our history as a nation, and a huge part of our medical advancements in the past 100 years.

Oh gosh.  This is a big question.  I’m glad to say that I’ve already started preserving my family history, and I wasn’t the first one.  My dad’s first cousin Rick started doing family history research before the era of the Internet, and his mom, who lives a few hours from my immediate family, still has a lot of his research.  She’s nearly 90 years old though, and due to dementia, I highly doubt she knows where any of it is – she was supposed to find it for me several years ago and I haven’t heard from her about it since.

For my seventeenth or eighteenth birthday, my parents got me some software that included a year long subscription to Ancestry.com and some offline tools for creating a family tree.  I definitely utilized it, and I now have a solid family tree going back several hundred years.  I still wish I could do more with it, like researching more deeply into the backgrounds of my grandparents and other relatives, but we had to cancel our subscription when the fees got too high.  Quite a bummer.

The other big family history project that I’ve worked on is a large family photo album, comprised mostly of photos that my grandfather shot of my dad and his brothers, as well as his brother’s kids, 50+ years ago.  My dad and grandfather are and were, respectively, both very talented photographers, and we literally have boxes full of photos from my dad’s childhood.  It’s interesting to consider this because I hardly have any printed photos of me as a child.  That’s not to say I don’t have many photos, I do, but they’re all stored on computers, SD cards, flash drives, etc.

Anyway, the photos from my dad’s childhood turned into a big project for me for a while.  I scanned each and every one of them onto my computer, saved them as individual jpegs, and then put them into a home-made album.  I really enjoyed choosing which photos would go together on which pages, but more interesting as asking questions and learning about my dad’s, uncles’, and cousins’ childhoods.  Looking at the pictures, I saw that two of his cousins as children looked exactly as their current kids did at the same ages.  I even sent pictures to them and we got a good laugh out of it.

I guess storing the photos physically (for the most part) has its downfalls.  There could be a house fire, a flood, the dog could destroy them, but as is becoming abundantly clear throughout this course, there are equally as many, if not more, ways that a document can be destroyed, lost, or rendered otherwise unreadable if its stored digitally.  I think having documentation in both formats is probably best in order for preservation, which is why I scanned them before putting them into the album.  But for the most part I really enjoy sitting down and flipping the pages of an old fashioned family album, and I really don’t think I would want to put it all online and lose out on that experience.

I’m going to start off being completely honest and let you know that I feel like the legal concepts we learned about in the readings for this week went completely over my head.  Much to my former-lawyer-father’s dismay, this is something I’ve always struggled to understand.  It’s as if legality goes in one ear and out the other.  That being said, I’m more interested in the morality of Shorpy than it’s legality.

When I opened the website, the first thing I saw was a very old photograph of a china doll giving a piggy-back ride to a kitten.  Adorable, right?  You can look at it here.  Then I realized that the website has an entire section devoted to cat pictures and proceeded to waste a significant amount of homework time looking at hundred-year-old pictures of cats.  And it was awesome.  Anyway, my point is that I clearly was able to quickly enjoy this site without thinking about the legality or morality of it.

I think from the standpoint of the cats, these pictures may have questionable morality.  I mean, if I was one of those cats, I don’t think I’d be thrilled to be dressed up in silly outfits and have my picture taken.  But I guess that’s not so much the point here.  I’ll start with this: these photographers are all dead.  The pictures were taken almost a hundred years ago, and the photographers had no idea that something called the Internet would exist one day, and that through it anyone who wanted to would be able to view their photos.  So does it have questionable morality?  Yeah, I guess so, since the people to whom the art originally belonged never gave consent for its distribution (to the best of our knowledge).

But I don’t think that’s the only question worth asking.  It’s important to consider the point of photographer.  As a photographer, I want my photos to be seen by as many people as possible, because that’s basically the point.  Why would I be shooting photographs if I didn’t want people to see them?  I recognize that there are certain pictures people take that they don’t necessarily want to share with the world, but these are not those photos.  Basically, if I was the photographer, I would be really, really happy that a well-known website wants to share my pictures with everyone, so long as it was acknowledged that it was my work (which, by the way, this website does).

The long and short of it is that while the morality of this website is probably arguable, I think most people would agree with me that it’s essentially legit.

(I’d like to add as a sidenote that Shorpy does have photos that are not of cats, but let’s be real, who on the internet looks at photos that aren’t of cats when they could be looking at cat photos?  Not me.)

Looking over my topics from last week, I realized that the first one, my linguistics interest, would be essentially impossible to research from the standpoint of primary sources (that is, language development is a slow process, so people don’t realize it’s happening, and therefore there are no primary sources on the topic).  Because of that, I’m framing my potential research question in the topic of my genealogy.

There are two big question marks in my family’s history, both of which pertain to my ancestors on my dad’s side of the family.  First off, we know that a man named Jacob Adam Krout (or possibly originally Kraut) immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1749, when he was three years old, on the Ship Fane.   Obviously he was with his parents, as a three year old doesn’t travel alone, but nobody seems to have any record of them.  Two things pique my curiosity about this immigration.  First, why did the Krout (Kraut) family immigrate to the US?  And second, from where in Germany did they come?  We’ve long considered the possibility that one of the Penn brothers, who often traveled to Germany to convince people to move to their state, had an influence on their decision to move, but where they came from remains a mystery to us.

The second big question is much more recent.  My grandfather, Homer Lee Krout (one of many Homer Lee Krouts) was born and raised in Tucker County, West Virginia.  His mother’s name was Alderton, and my family has come across reason to believe that the Alderton family may have been partially or fully in ownership of the sawmill, which at the time, basically ran Tucker County’s economy.  Though the sawmill itself doesn’t exist anymore, it’s history is still well known in the area, and it even has a restaurant and inn named after it.  My question on this topic would be what was the Alderton family’s involvement in the sawmill in Tucker County, West Virginia?

For my primary source I discovered a book called History of Tucker County, West Virginia, which I found through the Library of Congress Digital Collections.  It’s fully readable online

Maxwell, Hu. History of Tucker County, West Virginia. Kingwood, West Virginia: Journal Printing House, 1884. http://archive.org/stream/historyoftuckerc00maxwe

Also through the Library of Congress Digital Collections, I found an 1898 map of Davis, Tucker County, West Virginia (the town where my grandfather was born).

Fowler, Thaddeus.  Davis, Tucker County, West Virginia 1898. 1898. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Accessed 6 Sept. 2012. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/gmd:@field(NUMBER+@band(g3894d+pm009920))

One thing that has always really interested me about history is linguistic history, specifically the history of phrases and idioms.  When I was in middle or high school, I remember reading a chain email that contained the supposed history of several phrases such as “graveyard shift” and “raining cats and dogs.”  I have no idea if these histories were accurate (though they made sense) but it’s definitely something I’d like to learn more about.  I’d like to find out if the origins of the phrases I read about are true, and learn the stories of others.

As a child and young adult, my mom used to tell me about the computer games she played when computers and electronic gaming were still a new commodity.    She’s particularly fond of telling me about one game she played where she typed specific commands for the character in order to eventually solve a mystery.  These games actually sounded pretty cool to me (kind of like Nancy Drew) and it got me thinking about the evolution of video games throughout the past few decades, so this is something else that I’d like to learn more about, especially since I have a close friend who’s in her senior year of her computer game design degree.

For my eighteenth birthday, my parents bought me a one-year subscription to Ancestry.com, where I diligently spent a year tracking my family history.  I learned the exact year my ancestors immigrated to the US (1620) and viewed census records to discover the address of the house my grandfather grew up in so that we could visit it in the town where he was born.  I learned a ton about my family history until my subscription ran out.  This isn’t something I’m sure I’d like to pursue further because I feel like I already know a lot about, but there are definitely some specifics that interest me and would be really cool to learn about.

Obviously these aren’t my only history interests but they’re some that I’m really into right now!