Hello again! Sorry for the long blog silence. I hope all is well with you. I’ve been busy offline, in part answering some interesting questions from CHH readers.
I’ve also been doing a lot of reading, as I try to get a clearer understanding of several ongoing Clark House Historian research topics. It’s going well, but I haven’t got much written up yet. More coming soon. Watch this space.
Under repair
By the way, if you’ve been to the official Jonathan Clark House website in the past few days, you may have seen this 404 error message, in place of our usual colorful and informative pages:
I contacted Clark House director Nina Look, and she assures me that they are aware of the problem, working on a solution, and expect the Jonathan Clark House museum website to be back up shortly. (It’s even possible that the problems may be fixed by the time this blog post goes live on Friday morning.)
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…
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?
Here’s the Summer | August, 2023 edition of the Jonathan Clark House Museum newsletter. It’s filled with Clark House news, notices of upcoming events, and recaps and photos of a variety of summer happenings. Click the image below to view and/or download your own PDF copy of the complete newsletter.
Thanks to all involved in producing a summer full of Jonathan Clark House activities, especially museum director Nina J. Look and our wonderful crew of docents, volunteers and board members. And a tip of the hat to Nina (and our savvy graphic designer, Shayla Krantz) for this latest edition of the newsletter.
I’m finishing up a few longer posts focused on new discoveries about the Bonniwells and other Mequon-area families and the 1850 federal census. More on that shortly.
Save the dates!
Meanwhile, I’ve received some news about upcoming Jonathan Clark House Museum activities for spring and summer, 2023:
UPDATE, Nov. 30, 2022: The discussion of the William Bonniwell signatures and dates, below, is not correct. I have lined-through the incorrect paragraph and added the correct info in two new paragraphs below the original misinformation.
It may not look like much on the outside. It’s old. Not very big. Whole pages are missing, others are damaged. The binding is worn.
Bonniwell Bible, front cover. Photo credit: Kendalyne Gentile, 2022
But this modest book was—for over 300 years—the family Bible for Mequon’s pioneer Bonniwell family, their ancestors and descendants. And last month, the Bible’s most recent owner, Bonniwell descendant Kendalyne Gentile, generously gave the Bible and other Bonniwell family documents to the Jonathan Clark House Museum where they will form an important part of our permanent collection.
Hello, readers! Sorry for the long blog silence. I hope you are well.
It’s been a busy summer at my house, filled with the usual demands of job, summer garden chores, lots of behind-the-scenes history research and, alas, an unexpectedly large number of mundane but unavoidable tasks, most of which are now behind me.
I have a backlog of half-written posts to finish and share with you. In the meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this photo.
Cedar Creek, looking north from the Columbia Road bridge, Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Photo credit: Reed Perkins, July, 2022.
The view looks north along Cedar Creek from near the historic Cedarburg Mill, about two miles north of the Jonathan Clark House. Turn off the electric lights, and this is a view that the Clark family would have known well.
Summer has finally settled in here in Wisconsin, and the Jonathan Clark House is ready to host you once again on Saturday, July 16, 12pm – 3pm to enjoy all the old fashioned fun in the very spirit of the season for the second installment of our summer series event Heritage Days!
In addition to our favorite features, our special attractions for July include:
UPDATED, April 9, 2022 to fix a minor typo and two unclear phrases.
I haven’t published much here in the last month or so. My apologies. There were some unavoidable but relatively harmless distractions involved, the sort of things that we all deal with from time to time. But the ongoing slaughter in Ukraine, unprovoked, inhuman and inexcusable, made writing and blogging…impossible.
But now it seems even more impossible to not write about the largest conflict in Europe since the end of the Second World War. So today’s “Monday: Map Day” will be devoted to some basic information about Ukraine: its location in Europe, its main cities and geographic features, and a few facts about the country, at least as it was prior to the Russian invasion.1
Maps
This map2 was downloaded on April 3, 2022, and shows the borders of Ukraine as understood by the United States and most of nations of the world, and includes all the portions of Crimea, Donbass and Luhansk that Russia seized at the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014.
Not quite sure where we are? Here’s a map showing Ukraine’s location in eastern Europe:
Clark House Historian 