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Stumpage Reports
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Tuesday, March 09, 2004 :::
Fun At Work
I can't even begin to explain this. One thing I know for sure is I hate doing genealogy. We got a question from a researcher in the U.S. Congress doing research on a congressman from North Carolina from the 1790's. They sent an entry from their biographical dictionary and said they thought it might be talking about two different people. Their entry said guy was NC Senator, US Congressman, and Mississippi Territorial Governor. His name was Robert, cousin of Marmaduke and brother of Louis. The entry in the North Carolina Dictionary of Biography said essentially the same thing, except that he was brother of Marmaduke and cousin of Louis. Oh, the North Carolina book also cited the Congressional Dictionary as a source.
I dug around, found their old man's will and bunch of deed books with the guy signing them when he should have been in Mississippi. (He was one slave-selling motherf*cker.) I also checked a county history book, but it had been written by the same person who did the erroroneus NC Biography Dictionary entry. Then my boss's boss and I went to the genealogy library on another floor and looked at all these creepy family histories with this guy's surname. (Did you know all family histories start out with "Three brothers came to America ... " and everybody can trace their lineage back to Robert the Bruce?).
We found a family history book with these guys in it that looked pretty good. The best we could figure out, these two dodos were cousins and had the same first name. One of them was the senator guy, and the other was the Mississippi governor. If you're having trouble following this, think how I felt. I had to draw pictures. I wanted to get some of those Fisher-Price little people, put name tags on them, and arrange them in family groups.
So we think we figured this out, these two guys had been combined into one when the US Congress people did their dictionary, and that error has been perpetuated. So the moral is .... don't believe everything you read, no matter how good the source looks. Go to the archives and find the real documents. Of course, those can lie too ...
Quotes of the Day:
How can you not love this guy? I few snippets from Jonathan Edwards:
"Children's coming into the world naked and filthy and in their blood, and crying and impotent, is to signify the spiritual nakedness and pollution of nature and wretchedness of condition with which they are born."
"The extreme fierceness and extraordinary power of the heat of lightning is an intimation of the exceeding power and terribleness of the wrath of God."
Those two little pick-me-ups are from Images or Shadows of Divine Things. Edwards also gets the award for the best New England Puritan sermon title: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
I don't know where all that weirdness came from. I was looking through an anthology of early American lit for quotes and thats what I came up with.
::: posted by tom at 9:19 AM
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