A Midwife’s Tale; An interactive website

Martha Ballard lived through most of the 18th century. The infantile cry of early America pierced the quiet throughout this remarkable woman’s life. Her surviving diary unveils her busy life as a midwife in Maine, detailing nuances of the era and the secret world of childbirth during the 1700s. We see from her diary that a midwife’s role not only entailed assisting in childbirth, but caring for the sick and dying as well. Martha Ballard was an incredibly busy woman. The constant pace of Martha’s work is surprisingly similar to modern ambitious lifestyles.

There is a great website hosted by The Center for History and New Media that enriches the book and movie experience, A Midwife’s Tale at http://dohistory.org/. The site offers a magic lens that can be hovered over the diary pages to instantly transcribe Martha’s script. The diary is also broken down into transcribed relevant categories, some of which include her accounts of a scarlet fever epidemic and a murderous scandal. Especially helpful to genealogists, there is a separate section that provides tips on transcribing original documents and other research information.

Are Books a Modern Anomaly?

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer reading a good book or magazine to the vastness of the Internet. The tools of the information age are great and all, and I’ll admit it’s hard to resist the power of universal knowledge at the click of a mouse, but there’s several things I find unappealing about reading material from the computer. One, the monitor taxes my eyes. Two, search engines offer me too many choices at one time. Three, many websites are too busy blinking and showing off their latest gadgets for me to focus on what I came there for in the first place. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not knocking the Internet’s usefulness. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a Google junky, completely addicted to random, absurd searches that serve absolutely no purpose (I was an only child, I’m easily amused.) When it comes to genealogy especially, my computer sees three times more action than my bookshelf. For research purposes, the Internet is more accessible, more convenient, and wider reaching. But, despite all the Internet’s glory, I still go out of my way to run to the bookstore for the latest issue of Genealogy magazine or a historical bestseller I’m curious about. There’s just something special about paper copy, maybe it’s the tangibility of it, the fact that we can posses it, that makes it stubbornly and timelessly appealing.

I’m curious about how many other genealogists buy or borrow paper copy information from libraries or bookstores. Do you buy magazines related to the subject? Do you conduct research solely from the Internet, or utilize both kinds of material? Is there anything you’ve noticed that certain physical resources have to offer that the Internet does not? Please drop a comment; I would love to hear your thoughts.

Fascination with the book, The Island at the Center of the World

A number of years ago, I learned one of my ancestors was an Englishman, who, around the year 1640 settled in a place called New Amsterdam. After learning this, I was bent on knowing as much as I could about the place. I bought a bestseller called The Island at the Center of the Word, by Russell Shorto.

Shorto’s book is based on the research and translation of Dutch records by The New Netherlands Project director, Charles Gehring. Shorto effectively strips the reader’s mind of modern New York, and builds up a vivid image of a 17th century Dutch Manhattan in its place. He tells the story of several common citizens of New Amsterdam, which pulls the reader into daily working and family life inside the Dutch colony, but his focus is on two prominent figures, Peter Stuyvesant and Adriaen Van der Donck. Shorto, in the forward, makes it clear his intentions are to dismiss the modern perception of Governor Stuyvesant as a peg-legged cartoon, and give him the respect he has deserved. The other main character, Van der Donck, is a forgotten contributor to history, whose 400-year-old documentation of life in New Amsterdam provided much of the essentials for Shorto to write the book.

While reading, I imagined my ancestor walking a street that ran along the wall of the fort, a street that would later be named Wall Street. I envisioned him tipping his hat to say good day to some of the people Shorto plucked from a forgotten past. Knowing my ancestor lived and breathed the same atmosphere in which The Island at the Center of the World was set, only added to my enjoyment of the book. Whether a reader has a connection to New Amsterdam or not, it’s an entertaining, informative book, and it brings to light a part of American history few are aware ever happened.