Random Blog Stuff

Various Odds, Ends, News & Such

Mid-week Miscellany

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Here are a few quick odds and ends while I finish working on the last of our Cyrus Clark and Sarah Strickland Clark posts.

Burying the lede: Cyrus Clark edition

For the last week or so we’ve been looking at the lives of early Mequon and Wisconsin Territory settlers Cyrus Clark and Sarah (Strickland) Clark. If you missed those, you can catch up here, here, here, and here. And in one of those longer posts, I pretty much managed to “bury the lede,” of the breaking news of the week, namely: We found the missing documents that answer the question “who were Cyrus Clark’s parents, and was he related to the builder of the Clark House, Jonathan M. Clark? “

Clark and Strickland descendant Lynette Thompson contacted researchers from the New England Historic Genealogical Society via their site, americanancestors.org, and managed to locate the 1866 will and probate file for one Kellogg Clark of Sandisfield, Berkshire County, Massachusetts. He had been cited as a possible father for Cyrus Clark, but without supporting documents.

But his will and probate papers confirm that Kellogg Clark had a son named Cyrus Clark, and that in 1866 son Cyrus was in Wisconsin. Other information in the documents list siblings of Cyrus Clark, including a brother, Alexander Clark, who was previously known. We are now convinced that Kellogg Clark and wife Charity of Sandisfield, Berkshire County, Massachusetts were the parents of Mequon settler Cyrus Clark.

And, since every clue we have about Jonathan M. Clark indicates that his family lived in either Derby, Orleans County, Vermont or nearby Stanstead, Lower Canada (later Province of Quebec), I am quite convinced that Cyrus Clark is not (closely) related to Jonathan M. Clark. (For now, I will hedge my bets with that “closely” modifier—there are, after all, a whole lot of Clark families in New England and they moved around a lot in the 1800s and who can tell who is related to whom—but I don’t believe Cyrus and Jonathan are related, or knew each other before coming to Wisconsin.)

“Follow Blog Via Email” issues…

According to reliable reports, the “Follow Blog Via Email” widget in the right-hand column of this blog is not working properly. I think my old widget may not be 100% compatible with the current WordPress blogging software. I will look into that and see what I can do.

In the meanwhile, if you’d like to follow the blog, skip the widget and just send me a note via the CONTACT link in the top menu. I’ll be glad to issue an emailed “invitation” to follow the blog and then you will get an email each time new material appears here at Clark House Historian (typically each Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning).

A photo for Wednesday…

As a salute to Cyrus Clark’s roots in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, here’s a photo I took there a few years ago. It’s the Housatonic River near the old town of Stockbridge. Not too far from Cyrus Clark’s boyhood home in Sandisfield.

Photo by Reed Perkins, October, 2010. Click to open larger image in new window.

And by the way, “The Housatonic at Stockbridge“…

is also the title of the last movement of Three Places in New England, one of the masterworks of the great American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954). Standing on a small bridge over the river reminded me of the composer’s own description of the piece: … River mists, leaves in slight breeze river bed–all notes and phrases in upper accompaniment…should interweave in uneven way, riverside colors, leaves & sounds–not come down on main beat…”

Here’s a link to a video of a fine performance by the New England Conservatory’s Philharmonia orchestra, Hugh Wolff, conductor. Enjoy.

Updates, Corrections and other Miscellany…

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

Recently, I’ve made a few corrections and comments on previous posts, and I’ve gathered some here for your convenience, followed by a few suggestions so that you may get more out of Clark House Historian.

Lesen Sie Kurrent?

I’m not sure how I forgot this, but if you are really interested in reading or writing Kurrent, I highly recommend the 28-page A Guide to Writing the old German “Kurrent” Script, by Margarete Mücke, available in English as a free download at her website Ms. Mücke’s explanations of the Hows and Whys of the letters and their use in Kurrent are clear and thorough. If you read German and are interested in the old writing styles, you may find the rest of her website fascinating.

Spelling in the 19th-century: surnames

Something worth remembering when reading 19th-century (and earlier) documents, is that early spelling varied widely, even (or especially) for family names. One example, from the post on a “new” Jonathan M. Clark document, is Barnet Clow’s surname. It is found on other Wisconsin documents variously as CLOW or CLOUGH, and back in his Dutch- speaking home of Greene Co., New York, as CLOW, CLOUGH, CLAW, KLAUW, and KLAW. But it’s all the same family and surname.

(And if you think that’s confusing, I also have ancestors who migrated to the southern states and territories in the late 18th- and early 19th-centuries. And holy cow!, no one on those southern censuses spells given names or surnames the same way twice. And some of the name spellings are amazingly…creative, to say the least.)

Spelling in the 19th-century: long-S

In the recent post on a historic German cursive style and its relevance for American researchers, we discussed the various 19th-century forms of the letter S, including the long-S, as also found the U.S. Constitution:

“and secure the Blessings of Liberty” from Preamble, U.S. Constitution
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Happy (Blog) New Year!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Clark House Museum sign, night, Version 2-cropped

Jonathan Clark House sign, Mequon. Photo by Reed Perkins.

Even if the New Year is already 1/12th done – and we’re still two months away from the blog’s fourth (!) anniversary – Greetings and Best Wishes for a fine 2020 to all of you.

As always, I continue to be busy researching a large number of Clark House related subjects, and I look forward to sharing my findings with you in the coming year and beyond.

The new year is also a fine time for making changes, and I decided it was time to make a big one here at the Clark House Historian blog — no more ads! I don’t know about you, but I was getting pretty tired of reading posts and looking at historic documents while surrounded by images of nasty foot conditions and ambulance-chasing lawyers. So I finally took the plunge and shifted from a free but ad-filled blog to a paid plan with, finally, no ads! I hope you enjoy the more reader-friendly experience.

Continue reading →

Still Here! Watch This Space!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Well the third anniversary of the Clark House Historian blog has come and gone without new posts in, er, quite a while. Sorry about that!

Although I haven’t posted new blog content lately, I have been busy behind the scenes, collaborating offline with Jonathan Clark House Museum staff and friends as we try and solve a number of vexing Clark house, Clark family history, and Mequon area history questions and mysteries. I hope to be posting regularly again with lots of new documents and information for Jonathan Clark House Museum friends in the coming months.

Meanwhile, if you are new to the blog, please see our second anniversary post for background on the blog, the Jonathan Clark House Museum, and links to all kinds of interesting Mequon area historical information.

And be sure to visit and support the Jonathan Clark House Museum! Come to the house and do your 19th-century farm chores at the final Heritage Days event on August 17th: Continue reading →

Happy Anniversary!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

The Clark House Historian blog is two years old today!

Our first post, “Welcome!,” was posted on March 29, 2016, and can be found here; it is also anchored at the top of the home page. More substantial posts (with photos!) followed  in April, introducing Jonathan M. Clark, his wife Mary Turck and the Clark House. In the years since, we’ve published 29 blog posts, almost 20,000 words, and dozens of historic images and maps. We’ve had over 2000 views from 512 visitors. Our readers are mostly from the United States, but we also have readers in Canada, the EU, South Korea, Germany and the Netherlands. Thank you all for your support!

Whether you are a new reader, or you’ve been following the blog since the beginning, here are some suggestions for catching up on missed posts or finding specific information that interests you: Continue reading →

An Explanation in Advance

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

or, the Author’s Lament…

I am once again working on new posts for Clark House Historian and apparently WordPress, the platform I use for this blog, has instituted a number of “improvements” to their site since my previous posts. This has resulted in several new inconveniences that make the creation and posting of new content more troublesome and time-consuming than before. One issue involves how images are displayed (and sometimes open as larger images in new windows). I think I have that fixed; we’ll see once the next post is published.

More importantly, I can’t always get draft posts to pre-publish in preview mode. This means I sometimes need to officially “publish” the post to the wide world before I can really see if there are formatting problems or proofreading mistakes.

So, as always, please excuse (and let me know if you find) any errors or formatting problems in the posts. I will make corrections and updates as soon as possible. Thanks.

Well, that took longer than expected…

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

It’s been half a year since the last Clark House Historian post! My apologies for the long pause. Various professional and personal commitments (all good) may have kept me from writing, but not from researching. So now I have an even larger backlog of Clark House related discoveries and topics to write about…

So look for new Clark House Historian posts coming soon. Meanwhile, follow these links to the Jonathan Clark House homepage and Events page for upcoming Heritage Days events.

And if you support the mission of the Jonathan Clark House, consider becoming a donor and/or a supporting member of the Friends of Jonathan Clark House, Ltd.

Check back here soon and I will have more to say about Finding Your Mequon Roots and about Jonathan and Mary Turck Clark’s young family and early neighbors. Thanks for reading, and for your support of local history.

Blog Stuff

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Random blog stuff, FWIW:

• I’m still getting the hang of WordPress’s blog platform and features. I create the posts on a Mac desktop, and I’d love to know how the blog looks and performs on various platforms: smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, Mac and PC, and such.

• So far, I’ve transcribed a few original documents and posted them as WordPress block quotes. The block quote tool is limited in its formatting choices, and often does weird and unpredictable things to indents, spacings and font sizes. And the dark-ish gray font on the light gray block quote box could pose readability problems for some readers. Question for you readers: would it be better if I posted black and white pdfs of word-processed transcriptions (which would also allow more precise transcription of the original document format), or are the block quotes OK?

Continue reading →