I was hoping to have a Monday: Map Day! post up for you yesterday as the opening item in a series of posts focused on new—or reevaluated—evidence from our continuing search for Jonathan M. Clark’s still-mysterious roots in northern Vermont and/or southern Québec. As you can tell, that didn’t happen. Instead, I spent some time ironing out a few wrinkles on the blog…

Improving CHH content seaches

One of the nice features of Clark House Historian (CHH) is its SEARCH function. Go to the search box, type in a keyword or two, click on the green “Search” button, and the search function will provide a list of any and all related CHH posts. For example, if I search for JMC I’ll get these results, a list of links to CHH blog posts with the search term JMC in the title and/or body of the post.

While researching my planned map post, I searched for Monday: Map Day! and, as I expected, I got a lot of hits. But there was a problem. Because many of my earlier Monday: Map Day! posts were simply titled Monday: Map Day!, my search results included about two dozen posts simply listed as Monday: Map Day!, followed by the date of each post’s publication on the blog. The search results displayed no additional information that distinguished one Monday: Map Day!, from another, and thus were not really helpful, like this:

Monday: Map Day!
April 19, 2021 / 5 Comments

Monday: Map Day!
April 12, 2021 / 5 Comments

So, to make searching easier, I went back through all my previous, generically-titled, earlier Monday: Map Day! posts and moved the first descriptive “headline” of each of these posts up and into the title line itself. Now when you search for Monday: Map Day! posts, you’ll find more informative titles, like this:

Monday: Map Day! – The railroad next door, c, 1857
April 19, 2021 / 5 Comments

Monday: Map Day! – 1874 map of Washington and Ozaukee Counties
April 12, 2021 / 5 Comments

Much better, don’t you think? And the good news is that the content of the posts has not changed, and all of my cross-post embedded links (should) still work.

Back to the ironing board…

…metaphorically, at least. I still have a lot of reading and organizing to do to re-start the search for JMC’s family roots in the Derby, Vermont/Stanstead, Lower Canada, area. I have new vintage maps of Lower Canada and Vermont & New Hampshire to share with you, along with some familiar and new books and documents, including a better-quality reproduction of a key land grant index.

I’ve also been doing a lot of genealogy work, trying to sort through and chart some of the Clark families that may (or may not) be related to our Jonathan M. Clark. The records are scattered, incomplete, often not indexed, and sometimes contradictory, but we do have some tantalizing leads to examine.

See you soon with more details. It should be interesting.

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CREDIT:

• Today’s photo is another interesting daguerreotype from the Library of Congress: Unknown photographer, [Occupational Portrait of a Man Pressing Cloth With Iron], circa 1840-1860. I have cropped and lightly adjusted exposure and other levels.
  
  The name and exact occupation of the young man posing with a (very large and heavy) clothes iron are unknown. Presumably he does this work for pay, perhaps at a cloth manufacturer’s factory or a tailor’s shop. The working end of the iron would have been heated on a trivet over fireplace coals, or on top of a wood stove. Mary Clark and some of the older and stronger girls in the household would have used irons like this—but probably somewhat smaller and lighter—to press the family’s clothes