Help the Historian!

Help the Historian: Mysterious (Bible?) Fragment – a clue!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Among the real pleasures of writing a blog like this are the comments I receive from CHH readers. Recently, I heard from reader James Cornelius of nearby Grafton, Wisconsin,1 who had some thoughts about our January 24, 2025, post “Help the Historian: Mysterious (Bible?) Fragment.” 2

As the original post explained, I had been examining a number of loose Bonniwell papers, scraps, and other ephemera that were donated to the Clark House along with the Bonniwell family Bible itself, and I was particularly interested in one little fragment of printed text that had me baffled.

The mysterious fragment, sides A & B, photo credit: Reed Perkins, 2022.

In my original post, I examined the text and typography of the fragment and estimated that the it was published sometime between the late-sixteenth century (at the very earliest) and—at the very latest—the first decades of the nineteenth century. And the mentions of “Moon” and “motion” and such suggested a source that might be more scientific or philosophical, and not necessarily a sacred text, but I couldn’t think what that might be.

A new possible source: Almanacs!

In his comment, James observed: My hunch is that this triangular scrap /bookmark came from an almanac, likely as common in 1800-1820 U.K. as in U.S. a half-decade later. Many fairly good or detailed ‘scientific’ discussions appeared in the old almanacs or ‘farmer’s friends.’

I think James is on to something. Almanacs seem like a very plausible source. But how common were farmer’s almanacs in the UK, and how likely was it that the Bonniwells had access to these annual “farmer’s friends” in Chatham, Kent, England, in the years before their 1832 immigration to North America?

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Help the Historian: Mysterious (Bible?) Fragment

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

I’m spending some of my time this winter on projects related to the cataloging, interpretation and display of our historic Bonniwell Family Bible. One of the items on my “to do” list involves the study of a number of Bonniwell papers and other ephemera that were donated along with the Bible itself. Some of the miscellaneous papers are self-explanatory and easily understood. But one little fragment of printed text has me baffled, and I need your help, history lovers!

The fragment, sides A & B

Photos credit: Reed Perkins

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“Dear Santa,”

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

The Clark House Historian’s Christmas Wish List…

Kriss Kringle’s Christmas Tree [title page], E. Ferrett & Co., Philadelphia, 1845. Library of Congress

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and I remember the holiday thrill of riding the Chicago & Northwestern commuter train downtown with my parents, and then walking into the majestic State Street headquarters of Chicago’s grandest department store, Marshall Field & Company. Our mission? A trip up to the “toy floor” at Field’s, where we would wait in line to tell Santa all the wonderful things we would like to receive for Christmas that year.1

It goes without saying that I haven’t been able to fit on Santa’s lap for a very long time. But as the Clark House Historian, I still have holiday dreams and wishes, and today I’d like to share some of them with you. Who knows, perhaps Santa will work his magic once again?

(Official disclaimer: I do not serve on the JCH Board of Directors, or any of its committees. This is my Christmas daydream, a fantasy of what I’d like to see unfold at my favorite museum, given unlimited resources. And besides, as the great Chicago architect and city planner Daniel Burnham famously said: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood!”)

My list is organized into several parts, the first of these is…

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JMC: The missing years, 1836-1839

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

I’m still on the search for Jonathan M. Clark’s parents and other kin somewhere in the early-19th-century wilderness of northern Vermont and southern Québec. I hope to publish more about that here in the near future.

As part of that project, I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past few months organizing and re-examining the many research materials that I’ve gathered about JMC and his world, and I’ve constructed a whole bunch of genealogies for early Vermont, New Hampshire, and Lower Canada families named Clark that turn out—alas!—not to be related to our Jonathan M. Clark.

More mysteries…

Along with the mystery of JMC’s still-unknown family and childhood, Clark House museum director Nina Look and I have been trying to chase down some rumors that suggest Jonathan Clark may have spent his three years between mustering out of the U.S. Army (in 1836), and purchasing land at the land office in Milwaukee (in late 1839), as a surveyor in or near the area around Fort Winnebago, Columbia County, Wisconsin Territory. At the moment, that story remains a mystery, too. I’ll let you know if we find out more.

Anyway, with all these facts, rumors and mysteries—and many, many others—rolling around in my head, I thought it might be useful to outline JMC’s life in a handy, chronological timeline. Here’s a draft of that timeline, including what we do—and don’t—know about Jonathan M. Clark’s whereabouts and activities during his lifetime, as of July 1, 2024. I’ve included links to some relevant Clark House Historian posts where possible; please click on them for more information.

Childhood & Youth

November 28, 1812, (possibly, 1811) born to unknown parents, in or near Derby, VT, or Stanstead, Lower Canada

• Late-1812 to early-1831: JMC’s childhood whereabouts and activities unknown for 18+ years, with one possible exception:

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Searching for JMC’s roots: another (!) Stanstead Associates petition, 1792

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Our previous post, Searching for JMC’s roots: Stanstead’s original Associates petition, 1792, went into some detail about the creation of the original petition to the Crown for the township that would become Stanstead, Lower Canada. In order to avoid repetition—and keep today’s post to a manageable length—I’m going to recommend that you read that post before reading this one. Because today we have another, competing petition, by a (mostly?) different set of Leaders and Associates, also signed in Rutland, Vermont, not quite two weeks after the previous petition.

I’m not going to examine all the aspects of this second petition today, but there are some features that we should note as we search for Jonathan M. Clark’s kin along the New England and Lower Canada border regions in the 1790s and early 1800s.

John Prentiss…and Associates

Library and Archives Canada, Petition of John Prentiss, detail showing government notations. See below for full citation.

The organizing meeting for this second group of would-be Stanstead (and Hatley) associates appears to have been held in Rutland, Vermont, on April 16th, 1792. As you’ll see (below), the ink and handwriting of the first signer, John Prentiss, appear identical with that of the petition statement itself (and many of the other signatures at the head of the petition!).

According to the Land Committee clerk’s handwritten notes (above), the petition was presented by and endorsed with the signatures of [presumed Leader] John Prentiss, [presumed Associates] Asahel Blanchard, Andw. [Andrew] Mills, Festus Hill and 325 others in Rutland, April 16th, 1792. It was received by the Lieutenant Governor’s office on May 28th and referred to the Land Committee the next day.

The petition, front side

Below is the front side to the original, complete, Associates petition for the two proposed townships, as found among the Land Petitions of Lower Canada, 1764-1841, RG 1 L3L, Vol. 160, archival page number 78473. As with the previous (Josiah Sawyer) petition, it appears that the microfilm camera operator needed two exposures to capture the full contents of the front side of this oversized page. I have used software to stitch the overlapping images back together, so that you can view the page as it looked in 1792:

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Searching for JMC’s roots: Stanstead’s original Associates petition, 1792

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 5 Comments

UPDATED: 25, 27 and 28 Oct. 2023. See note 8 for details.

Under the unique Leaders and Associates land grant system of early Lower Canada, one of the first and essential steps in obtaining a grant of land from the Crown was to assemble at least 40 (purported) would-be immigrants—often from northern New York and the New England states—and have them sign an official petition requesting a grant of such land. The leaders might be directly involved in the signature gathering process, or they might delegate their tasks to an “agent.”

In 1791, when the Constitutional Act creating Upper and Lower Canada was passed by the British Parliament, Stanstead’s original leaders Eleazar Fitch and Issac Ogden were living and doing business in St. John’s and Montréal, respectively. It’s probable that neither man ever got close to the future Stanstead Township, or northern New York and the New England states1. As we suggested at the end of an earlier post, Fitch and Ogden appear to have delegated the petition process to a farmer (and would-be “Leader” of yet another Eastern Township or two) named Josiah Sawyer.2

Library and Archives Canada, search results for today’s petition. See below for full citation.

Josiah Sawyer, agent

From what I can surmise, one of the main functions of an Agent in the Lower Canada land grant process was to begin the new township project by obtaining the signatures of the required minimum number of Associates on a petition to the government for that land. As we learned earlier, this would usually include a payment from the Leaders to each petition-signing Associate, and—for those Associates that did not intend to actually settle in the new township—the collection of the necessary signed forms deeding the Associates’ hoped-for 200 acre allotments back to the Leaders, for them to hold or re-sell as they deemed most profitable.

The organizing meeting for Stanstead’s associates appears to have been held in Rutland3, Vermont, on April 3rd, 1792. The ink and handwriting of the first signer, Josiah Sawyer, appear identical with that of the petition statement itself, suggesting that Josiah Sawyer was, indeed, the man that organized the signing of this document.

The original petition, front side

Here is the front side to the original, complete Associates’ petition for the proposed Township of Stanstead, as found in the Land Petitions of Lower Canada, 1764-1841, RG 1 L3L, Vol. 175, archival page number 84887. Originally, the microfilm camera operator needed two exposures to capture the full contents of each side of this oversized page.4 I have used software to stitch the overlapping images back together, so that you can view (and try to read!) the document as it looked in 1792.

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Finding JMC’s roots: Word Search

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

I’m currently (happily) distracted as I get ready for a special family event, and blogging may be sparse for the next several days. But I’m still chipping away on our search for Jonathan M. Clark’s roots, looking for possibly-related Clark names in the early Land Petitions of Lower Canada, 1764-1841. Which is kind of like doing a Word Search puzzle, only with faded documents and sometimes-illegible 18th-century handwriting.

Beginner Level

Would you like to join in the search and Help the Historian? Here’s a “Searching for JMC’s Roots”-themed word search puzzle I made, just to get you warmed up:

Click the image to open and print your own copies of this version of the puzzle. Or, if you’d like to play online, just click this link: https://thewordsearch.com/puzzle/6172120/clark-house-word-search/

Look for the Clark House related words in all directions: horizontally, vertically or diagonally, both forwards and backwards. You can solve the online puzzle as many times as you like, and each time you play again, the layout of the puzzle changes. (If you play online, ignore the big orange rectangular button at the bottom of the screen that says “Next→”. It’s just a link to a page of unrelated ads.)

Each time you play you can also change the level of difficulty. Once you’ve developed your word-finding skills with our online puzzle, it’s time to Level Up!

Expert Edition

Here’s one of my current “puzzles,” the original 1792 Leaders & Associates’ petition to the Crown for a grant of land that would eventually become the Township of Stanstead, Lower Canada. Continue reading (below) to view the front side of the petition page. How many “Clark” signatures can you find? And can you transcribe all their first names accurately?

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Bad Handwriting: not just a problem from the past

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

I hope you enjoyed Monday’s post Help the Historian — what’s Nellie’s last name? and that you’re now working on your best guess for Nellie’s almost-illegible surname.

A historical handwriting puzzle like this is fun when the stakes are low and you don’t have any pressure to get the job done quickly. But did you know that there are several hundred federal employees in Salt Lake City who decipher thousands and thousands of bad or damaged printed and handwritten addresses every day? Let’s let YouTube’s excellent experience-it-yourself man, Tom Scott, show us how it’s done:

How the U.S. Postal Service reads terrible handwriting

It’s an amazing system, when you think of it. To begin with, the speed and accuracy of optical character recognition (OCR) technology has improved dramatically over the years. But when the writing is really bad, or smudged? Then the mail is viewed by the men and women of the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City process, and they read and key in 1.2 billion (that’s billion with a B) images of mail every year. My hat’s off to the USPS employees that can do this fast-paced detective work so efficiently, day after day. Meanwhile, how about you and your deciphering skills?

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Help the Historian — what’s Nellie’s last name?

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

Today was supposed to be a lavishly illustrated “Monday: Map Day!” post, to accompany our recent posts on the Bonniwell family’s roots in Chatham, Kent, England. But, of course, I ran into some interesting—although pretty much off-topic and confusing—Bonniwell documents. These records added a previously unknown1 second marriage to the story of early Mequon pioneer, Jonathan Clark House neighbor, and Washington/Ozaukee county mover-and-shaker William T. Bonniwell.

It’s a complicated story. A second marriage for him, a second marriage for her, and there is a seven-year-old child named Nellie (of somewhat obscure parentage) living with them. So, of course, I dropped what I was doing and dug in to try and solve these new mysteries. I’m now close to understanding what happened with W. T. Bonniwell’s short-lived second marriage, but I have a problem.

Cn u rd ths?

Can you read this?

As always, click the images to open higher-resolution versions of each.

I read a lot of handwritten documents, mostly from about 1600 to the present day. I’m pretty good at deciphering most English and German writing styles from those years, but every now and then I’m stumped.

This is an 1870 document in the hand of young Nellie’s trustee, one Jedd P. C. Cottrill (sp?), acknowledging the receipt of her share of the estate of her deceased foster father, Nelson Webster. Nellie’s name is inside the red rectangle: Nellie J. [hmm?]. What do you think Nellie’s surname is supposed to be? Is the first letter an F or a T or something else? And after that? Is it ?urck, ?urch, ?inck, ?inch? I’m leaning toward Finch or, maybe, Finck. But I’m not sure. Perhaps if we compared other examples of Nellie’s surname from the same probate file…

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