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.)
…as I prepare my March 9th Civil War presentation for the Cedarburg History Museum, try to sort out the full story of Mequon-Thiensville’s earliest settlers and landowners (including first postmaster John Weston), and look through a bushel of fresh sources in our ongoing search for Jonathan Clark’s kin who hail, we think, from somewhere up around where Derby, Vermont meets Stanstead, Québec.
The Clark House Historian and his crack research team, searching for answers in the written record…1
As you can see, I’ve got work to do in order to dig out from under—and make sense of—the big pile of historical documents that I’ve accumulated over the past several weeks.
So no new CHH post today, but I’ll be back soon with more Clark House history.
UPDATED (1:30 p.m.): What would the New Year be without a typo? The meeting is, indeed, on Wednesday, January 17th (not the other date that CHH subscribers received in their original email version of this post). So I’m pulling the erroneous post and sending this revised version to all CHH subscribers. My apologies for crowding your inbox.
Let’s see if the weather behaves this time!
Last week’s annual meeting of the Friends of the Jonathan Clark House had to be postponed due to foul weather. The meeting has been rescheduled to this Wednesday, January 17, 2024 at 6:00 PM (note later start time), at Spectrum Investment Advisors Cafe, 6329 West Mequon Road, Mequon, WI. 53092
Want to attend? Please RSVP to JCH Executive Director Patrick Steele at jchmuseum@gmail.com
As the volunteer historian for the Jonathan Clark House Museum, it’s my privilege to investigate, document, and share with you the stories of the Clarks, their relatives, neighbors, friends, and try to bring to life the world in which they lived. Much of my work involves finding, studying and analyzing relevant documents and visual images, and much of that work happens “behind the scenes,” so to speak.
The Clark House Historian at work (note discarded drafts and as-yet unfinished projects).1
Each week (well, “each week” is the goal…) I share some of my findings with you on this blog. Now that the old year is gone, I thought it might be worthwhile to see what we accomplished at Clark House Historian in 2023. Let’s begin by taking a quick look at the numbers…
No new research today. I’m celebrating a big event with family, and taking a few days off from emails and major blog posts while I do.
“They just don’t name ’em like they used to…”
I’m loath to leave loyal blog readers without some Clark House History to while away the time until our next big CHH post, so I made another word search puzzle.
Your assignment today is to find the vintage Stanstead-area settler first names, all of which are documented from Clark-era sources in and around Stanstead, Lower Canada, circa 1790-1840, and many of which will feature in future posts as we search for JMC’s roots.
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:
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?
I’ve searched this database before—and found some interesting bits and pieces—but the enormous quantity of digitized page images (sometimes hundreds of images in a single file), the limited name-only search indexing, and the somewhat quirky image-browsing interface, made results very hit and miss. Which is too bad, because there are treasures of historical and genealogical information to be found in the files.
So—confronted by such a massive pile of documents and files–what’s a historian to do? Well, desperate times call for desperate measures, so…
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.
Clark House Historian 