Saturday Serendipity (February 15, 2014)

Saturdays often allow a more leisurely approach to life than work days. I can more easily post links to some blog posts or other materials I have discovered during the week, or even to those discovered during a Saturday morning coffee and extended surfing of the blogosphere/internet.

Here are a few recommendations for inclusion on your reading list this week .  .  .  

1.  From The Legal Genealogist comes a real story about the Mann Act -- also known as the "White- Slave Trade Act -- surfacing in a woman's genealogy research. Read about it here. Also at The Legal Genealogist is Judy's very amusing and instructive read, "The cousin who isn't."  

     

2.  I was very impressed by a piece on NPR this week explaining why "Rhode Island based CVS drug stores" had decided to cease selling tobacco products.  As a result, I determined to switch my spending votes to support the CVS decision . . . and then came this timely post by Barbara Poole at Life From The Roots blog. It turns out CVS headquarters might be in Providence now, but Barbara recalls and photographs CVS roots elsewhere. Have a look!  

3.  The blog Holyoke is a specialized blog about all things Holyoke, Massachusetts.  Having lived there briefly and having started my formal schooling in Kindergarten there, I like to read the posts.  This week presented a story told as only a small local newspaper could do. It is about a Prohibition-era shooting/murder by an off-duty Holyoke police officer in February 1924. You will find it absorbing reading and probably wonder as I did . . . What was the rest of the story? Was the police officer convicted or not?  Maybe Holyoke has a follow-up post in store for inquiring minds who want to know?

4.  Heather Rojo of Nutfield Genealogy blog posted a very interesting story about Gove's Rebellion -- named for the only New Englander to be convicted of treason and then sentenced to death by being drawn and quartered. Read here how Edward Gove ended up in the Tower of London from 1683 - 1686 awaiting a gruesome death for treason.   

5.  It took a long time and a turbulent voting history from 1915 to 1920 before American women gained the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.* My 1st cousin 3x removed, Anna Carpenter Spencer, nee Garlin, was an early suffragette (see,  http://filiopietismprism.blogspot.com/search/label/Anna%20Carpenter%20%28Garlin%29%20Spencer ) and so I have had an interest in the suffrage movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  This week, The Vault, published a pamphlet that was entered in the Records of the House of Representatives in 1866 that refutes each common objection to giving women the right to vote -- and this a full 54 years before the 19th Amendment was finally ratified!  Read the very humorous and pointed 2-page pamphlet here. 

6.  This summer marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, the "Great War" and the so-called "war to end all wars." We will undoubtedly see a lot of material published relating to WWI over the next few years -- and much of it will be re-discovered material of tremendous interest to genealogists.  This week The Weekly Genealogist of NEHGS provides a link to this NPR interview about a collection of over 100,000 letters written during all American wars from the Revolution on.  The collection is by historian Andrew Carroll and it is being donated to the Center for American War Letters at Chapman University in Orange, California. Who knows what some of us might find in this collection for our genealogies.      

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*  Read about the repeated votes to grant women the right to vote between 1915 and final ratification of the 19th Amendment in August 1920 in the Wikipedia article here.
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Copyright 2014, John D. Tew

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