A late-summer look at Clark House Historian news and upcoming posts…

First, a few stats…

I missed publishing my annual review of CHH stats on the blog’s seventh (!) anniversary last March. But here are a few numbers for those of you keeping score at home, beginning with this year’s (incomplete) numbers, as of August 20, 2023:

• Number of visitors, 2023: 2,262
• Number of views, 2023: 4,660
• Number of posts, 2023: 38
• Number of words, 2023: 50.5K

For comparison, here are the numbers for all of last year:
• Number of visitors, 2022: 2,424
• Number of views, 2022: 5,523
• Number of posts, 2022: 62
• Number of words, 2022: 68.2K

The blog’s all-time outreach on behalf of the Jonathan Clark House Museum (as of Aug.20, 2023), includes:
• Number of visitors, all time: 8,985
• Number of views, all time: 26,819
• Number of posts, all time: 361
• Number of words, all time: circa 382K
• Subscribers: 49

Full disclosure: In addition to sharing Clark House history with you all, I use the blog as a searchable archive of the facts, analyses, and images that I find or create during my work as Clark House Historian. I often search for and refer to previous blog posts as I prepare new posts and other work. So take the “visitor” and “views” stats with a grain of salt, and assume that at least a certain number of visits to the various blog posts are mine.

A bit of a ‘”Bonniwell break”…

I was at the Friends of the Clark House annual meeting back in January, 2022, and I overheard Clark House director Nina J. Look mention a little research project focused on the youngest—and least documented—member of the Mequon’s pioneer Bonniwell family: Clark House neighbor and brother-in-law, Alfred T. Bonniwell. I volunteered to help with a “short series” of related blog posts. After all, when I began this project, I had fewer than a dozen records documenting Alfred’s life. How long could a quick survey of those take? A month or so, at most?

Well…

Well, as things often do here on the blog, one record led to another, and then another. Many of those records were vague or imprecise and needed a lot of study and interpretation. A few months became a year, and now it’s been almost 20 months since I began researching and writing about Alfred and his family (and their involvement in the California gold rush). And 2022 brought us the very special donation of the Bonniwell family Bible, which resulted in quite a bit of research and posts on that topic. (And I still have much more to share with you about that special book and the other donated Bonniwell papers.)

Sure, in the past 20 months I’ve written and published posts on other topics. But week after week I kept finding new Bonniwell sources and writing many new Bonniwell-focused posts for the blog. So, even though I still have a large number of Bonniwell-themed posts in the works, I’m going to put them on hold for a bit.

I’m really overdue to write more about the ongoing search for Jonathan M. Clark’s roots. For the last year or two I’ve been quietly perusing all kinds of records and books, trying to find our JMC’s family amid the hundreds of other Clark families in northern New Hampshire, Vermont, and the adjacent parts of Lower Canada (Quèbec), from about 1790 until some time after JMC’s migration to New York State in 1831. I haven’t found our Jonathan M. Clark’s kin yet, but I have—so to speak—winnowed quite a few Clarks from the (genealogical) chaff, and I’d like to organize that material and share it with you.

Are you seeing stretched-out images on the blog?

Me too. I don’t know why, but some of my posted blog images and maps have been appearing “stretched out” vertically on some of my blog posts. This seems particularly likely when displaying images that are considerably taller than wide, viewed on smaller screens/devices, or on images that appear in the blog-subscriber previews that arrive in your email inbox whenever a new post goes live. (You do subscribe, don’t you? No? C’mon, scroll down and sign up today.)

My apologies if these stretched images appear when you view the blog. I don’t know why they do, or how to avoid this distortion. It seems to be pretty random. Sometimes WordPress implements behind-the-scenes changes and things get weird for a while; perhaps things will return to normal after a bit. If you’re reading the blog on your phone, try rotating the phone 90° and reading the blog in widescreen format; that seems to help, too.

In any case, the good news is that the original images and maps will display as they should if you just click each image to open a higher-resolution version of it in a new browser window. If you have questions or suggestions about this issue, please let me know.

Speaking of questions!

Things have been kind of quiet in the Clark House Historian Leave a Reply (i.e., Comments) and Contact inboxes. Which is too bad, as I really enjoy hearing from you, with your comments, questions and feedback.

Don’t be shy! If you’d like to join the public conversation, please Leave a Reply after any recent post. If you prefer to contact me privately—or discuss an older post with closed comments—the Contact function is the way to go. With either approach know that while I can see your email address, I will not share it with the blog’s readers, or anyone else, for that matter.

Coming up | À venir…

That’s all for now. Next time, we’ll resume our search for Jonathan Clark’s still-unknown parents and kin, focusing on the area along the Vermont-Lower Canada (Quèbec) border in the early decades of the 1800s.

Wish me luck. I’m going to need it.

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IMAGE CREDITS:

• Crawford, Will, artist. Watching the tape or watching the wheel – what is the difference morally? (detail), New York, 1912. Library of Congress.
  
  
• Unknown photographer, Translating a love letter from a Boston girl – “Now, does that mean yes or no?,” stereo photograph, published by Underwood & Underwood, New York, etc., c. 1903. Library of Congress.

UPDATED: August 23, 2023, to fix a few typos and minor infelicities.