How to know how old anything is

Dating Old Stuff

man cleans old painting — “How you doin’?”

Learning how to date things is both science and art. Of course, I don’t mean engaging in a romantic experience with the objects, but telling how old a thing is.

Like you’ve probably heard about bank tellers, who are trained to spot counterfeit currency by handling a lot of real currency, the same is true for museum and archive professionals. We learn to recognize things for what they are by handling a lot of similar stuff. Well seasoned collectors are the same. Being able to observe characteristics of an object allows us to learn more than is on the surface.

Curators track not only the history of the artifacts they care for in the way the object was used, but also how it is used after it enters a museum’s collections, like if it was studied for a publication, or if it appeared in an exhibit somewhere. This includes keeping an archive of related materials, like news clippings from exhibits. I recently received a news clipping from an exhibit, but there was no date on the clipping, from the newspaper or otherwise (a handwritten date is also great if it’s done). So, I wanted the clipping, but when did it come out?

Clues

On the front of the article, the gentleman on the left (not in the painting) looked all too familiar. No, he’s not me, but he could have been at one time. I remember the mid-1990s well, and that’s exactly how I dressed and most young men dressed at the time. But, what year, exactly? I can’t really tell from the photo if it’s 1993 or 1998. I know the exhibit and museum are in Nebraska (I am too), so I know wearing a flannel shirt and jeans really isn’t a good indicator of the season, so I’m can’t be sure of the month just from this photo. So, on the front of the article, the part I want, there’s not much to tell me the exact date of the article beyond it’s from the mid-1990s. Probably.

Flipping the clipping over, there are a few other bits that may be helpful, but best of all, there’s a movie schedule!

Today, many of these Omaha theaters are now gone, or if they still exist have been bought out. They also probably don’t have records on hand for when they showed which movies. Luckily for us, we have IMDB. I recognized some of these movies but didn’t remember exactly when they came out. (Who could forget Beverly Hills Ninja? Just me? Ok.) Fortunately, there were enough films here to hone in on a date where movies on the way out, and movies that had just debuted overlap. Charting it, we’ve got it down to the last two weeks in January 1997. That’s a pretty narrow window, and frankly good enough for documenting this article for my files.

To get the date even closer I could go through microfilm/digitized copies from those weeks and find the article, but that would take time I just can’t devote when January 1997 is good enough.

…

Curatorial Pipe Dreams

Admittedly, I lucked out on this clipping. I’ve got many others in our archives that just don’t have much to go on at all. In fact, it’s so obscure I can only hope one day someone develops the technology where I can run an image recognition of the scanned clipping and it’ll find the correct article within the digitized newspaper somewhere online. Wouldn’t that me amazing? Maybe someday.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.

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8 May 201728 April 2017

Guest Post from Radha Vastal, author of the Kitty Weeks Mysteries

Murder Between the Lines by Radha Vastal

One of the most enjoyable parts of researching …

Delving into the details of the past to create a realistic world and a period-appropriate mystery in which challenges and obstacles arise from the mundane realities of life in New York City during the 1910s, is for me, one of the most enjoyable parts of researching and writing the Kitty Weeks Mystery series. So, for instance, in both A Front Page Affair and Murder Between the Lines the central mystery is connected with little-known actual events that occurred during the time, and these events feed into the plot right down to the day and date that they actually took place.

In Murder Between the Lines, the dead girl at the center of the mystery is known to be a sleepwalker and her sleepwalking is attributed to nervous tension brought on by too much schoolwork. That was a perfectly reasonable causal explanation in the 1910s! The schoolgirl’s death was inspired by a news story from late 1915, which I came across while scanning through the New York Times from November of 1915 to about February of 1916. I knew that was the timeframe in which I wanted to set the second book; about 3 or 4 months would have elapsed since the events in A Front Page Affair, and I wanted to open things up with President Wilson’s second marriage. While flipping through the papers I read about the “Girl Somnambulist Frozen to Death” and immediately knew I had found my crime/possible crime.

Most of my research is done through primary sources: newspapers, career guides, self-help books, medical books, etiquette guides, advertisements and so on… I also look at secondary sources, but then always pivot back to read the sources from the period that are referenced. In terms of writing historical fiction, one of the most interesting things for me is not presenting events as we might understand them today, but trying to understand how the same events were perceived during their time. So, in the case of the sleepwalker found frozen to death, in the 2010s, we would immediately question “too much schoolwork” as a cause, but in the 1910s, that opinion was backed up by doctors and medical books. And in fact, in the course of Kitty’s investigations, she speaks to a “nerve specialist” who tells her that girls who study too hard or work too much (like herself) are prone to all sorts of diseases. She has to get past that in order to solve the mystery.

About the Author:

Radha Vatsal is the author of the Kitty Weeks mystery series. Her latest book, Murder between the Lines (Sourcebooks), was published May 2.

19 May 200825 May 2020

The bookseller that started Memorial Day

Civil War era token for Henry C. Welles, Druggist and Bookseller, Waterloo, New York

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Memorial Day was typically a fun holiday for me and mine. It usually meant cookouts and warm weather. These don’t always go together in Nebraska where I grew up. Every few years it would mean a sojourn out to the family cemetery to lay flowers on graves, almost entirely for relatives I never knew. I enjoyed the quiet graveyard by the little abandoned church and read the familiar names- names I had only heard in stories. I liked trying to find the oldest markers, trying to decipher the military markers, and always stopping to admire the stone featuring a detailed drawing and patent number awarded to my kin for some kind of stump grinding device.

What does Memorial Day have to do with books? Henry Carter Welles was a hyphen bookseller. Not another Barber-Bookseller, but a more common Druggist-Bookseller. Welles, born in 1821, was too old to serve during the Civil War. Sure, there are many, many recorded volunteers who were in their 40s, and beyond, but it was not the norm. However, Mr. Welles, like the rest of the nation, was certainly thinking about the war and how many boys from home never returned.

At a social gathering in the summer of 1865, Welles suggested that a day should be set aside to honor the dead of the Civil War. The next year, he repeated his suggestion to General John B. Murray. The two men and a group of local citizens gained the support of the village, and on May 5, 1866, the first complete observance of Memorial Day took place in Waterloo, NY.

On that day, civic societies joined the procession led by veterans marching to martial music to the three existing cemeteries. At each cemetery there were impressive and lengthy services including speeches by General Murray and a local clergyman. The ceremonies were repeated on May 5, 1867.

Henry C. Welles died in July 1868 but had lived long enough to see Memorial Day nationally proclaimed by General John Logan, the first commander of the Grand Army of the Republic. The GAR was the veteran’s organization for Union vets of the Civil War. This was General Order No. 11 establishing “Decoration Day” as it was then known. The date of the order was May 5, 1868, exactly two years after Waterloo’s first observance. That year Waterloo joined other communities in the nation by having their ceremony on May 30.

The Centennial Committee, formed in Waterloo, New York for the 100th observance in 1966, found old newspapers from the 1860s honoring Henry C. Welles, crediting him for suggesting the first Memorial Day. Until that time it was believed that General Murray started Decoration Day.

So, we have one more to remember this Memorial Day. Henry C. Welles, the bookman who helped organize recognition for those who preserved our Union.

At least, that’s how it goes officially. Since I first wrote this, there has been a lot more historical research done in the matter of the founding of Memorial Day.

Pictured above is what coin collectors refer to as a store card. It’s a token advertising a particular establishment, Mr. Welles in this case around 1861, minted these tokens. Tokens were widely used as small change, usually, pennies during the Civil War since there was a shortage of official minted money. This was back when our change actually had intrinsic value, unlike today. So, merchants of all sorts saw an opportunity to spread the word about their particular business. However, the story goes, one saloon keeper in New York City took it too far and minted as many as one million tokens with his name and “Remit for 1 Cent”. When the NYC streetcar company tried to remit the hundreds of thousands they’d received for fares, he told them to jump in a lake. They went to Congress, which created stricter laws about private citizens minting US currency.

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About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.