News

CHH news and updates: August 28, 2024

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

I know it’s been a while since my last post, but I’ve been busy! Jonathan Clark House executive director Nina Look and I just finished the latest JCH newsletter, and there’s a lot of Clark House history coming your way this fall, both here on the blog, and “live and in person.” In particular, I’m currently racing to finish not one, but two, illustrated presentations that I’ll be giving in September.

JMC, the Old Military Road, and the DAR

I’ve been asked to speak at the Fall Workshop of the Wisconsin Society, Daughters of the American Revolution. My topic will be “Building the Military Road, Wisconsin Territory’s First Federal Road.” I’ll be incorporating much of the 1830s and ’40s army and road-building information that I’ve blogged about here at CHH, as well as new primary source materials and contemporary illustrations.

The presentation will take place after dinner, Friday, September 13, at the WSDAR Fall Workshop in Oshkosh. The event is limited to registered DAR members and their guests. My thanks to Wisconsin State Regent Sandra Snow and the members of the WSDAR for their kind invitation to speak.

But wait…there’s more!

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News…

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

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.)

Meanwhile…

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Ironing out a few wrinkles…

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

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…

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Blog News! – August, 2023

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins.

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?

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Clark House News – August, 2023

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

JCHM Newsletter is here!

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.

But wait—there’s more!

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The Bonniwell Bible comes home to Mequon

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 5 Comments

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.

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Summer evening…

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins.

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.

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