It has been busy as heck since school let out. Let me tell you. I thought I was ready to have the kiddos home all day (I’m working mostly out of the home office this summer), but even with well thought out activities, it is a lot of stop-and-start.

I have two triumphs to report this week:

Not my daughter, but a group of Amish girls. Source: CBSnews.com

On Monday, we had to pry the technology from my oldest child’s hands as she went off to camp in Amish country.

No tech is allowed AT ALL at that camp. The wifi access is probably terrible, anyway.

Heck, she’s the one who said she wanted to go to camp at this place with her best friend. When reality hit on Sunday night, as she realized she’d be without her Kindle and other pacifier devices, she looked actually panicked.

Sage (far right) and her friends on a hayride. Yep, she’s having fun. Source: BRR

“What am I going to do all week?”

I did not want to trot out the old, “When I was a girl back in the ’70s, we did this and such….”

I didn’t. I just assured her there would be stuff to do. So, Monday morning, we drove her to the camp. No news from her, but we were sent some great photos.

She seems to have adjusted to the Luddite life just fine.

You remember earlier in the year when I accidentally deleted several hundred .jpg files from The Pensacola Journal? I had saved several hundred image files with information about Emmett Wilson on them, gathered by painstakingly reading old microfilm and going screen-by-screen to cull the data.

I had resigned myself to rerequesting seven years’ worth of film to scan and capture the images.

Well, on Sunday, I did a check back on the Library of Congress‘ database, Chronicling America. Lo and behold, I found that all of the years I had lost are there, scanned in, and in .pdf image format. Hallelujah!

Two things, though:

• I’m glad I went through page-by-page to locate Emmett’s original information, and document it the first time through, because the search engines are not perfect. There were at least a dozen articles the search engines did not capture for me, even after several tests. You still cannot absolutely rely on search engines to do your research, folks.
• The film is not complete in one of the years. In the original 1912 batch of film, there was a Carnival Booster section (an extra section to raise money for the 1913 Mardi Gras celebrations) included in the November 25 issue. This extra section (and a few other similar supplements) is not in the LOC film. I’m still going to have to request the individual reel.

Having the film available at any time is a great time saver, because microfilm requests take about three weeks between initial request and the time my library receives it for me to read. I still have read through everything, but this is a tremendous help.

Categories: Book Family Recommended Sources

Tagged as: Amish Chronicling America Library of Congress Luddite The Pensacola Journal

jsmith532

Professor,
Communication, Arts, and the Humanities
The University of Maryland Global Campus