Back again again | Sharon Ruston

Dear Blog,

I really want to get back into writing this. Bizarrely, given that this is a public blog, I think I want to keep it more for myself than for anyone else. I would really like to keep a record of this extraordinary year (the AHRC fellowship year), which may well prove to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but I’d also like to record how to find things out.

Google books really is the most amazing resource. You can see so many contemporary accounts online. In annotating the 1818 letters today I had to find out about an artic expedition that Davy asked John Dalton to go on. I was able to read the account of it by the captain (John Ross) and find out who had gone in Dalton’s stead (Edward Sabine) as well as read Dalton’s reply to Davy’s letter. Amazing. Every day I wonder how people did this work without the internet. I still have a long and ever-growing list of things that I can only read in particular libraries, eg. the British Library. For example, there’s one Davy letter published in a pamphlet so rare that it only seems (according to COPAC, which gives a record of large library holdings in Britain) to only be in the Bodleian. Luckily I already going there on Thursday 9th March so I can read it then.

If I only have a day, I can check which days were on which dates by using one of the many Day of the Week calendars online, such as this one http://www.searchforancestors.com/utility/dayofweek.html. I was able to date one letter to 1816 because it was dated 29th February (topical, given today’s date!) and so it had to be a leap year etc etc. There’s so much work that can go into this stuff.

Very quickly, some of my fave finds so far: Jane Davy spelling ‘Maison Boteux’ when it should have been ‘Botot’ (the name of the person who owned the place), perhaps she had never seen it written down but only heard it. And, I’ve finally – due to the help of a lovely person in Kendal Libraries – found the Bayliff and Bigge (it was actually Bayliff and Rigge, which is why I couldn’t find them!) who manufactured Davy’s new ‘twilled gauze’ in Kendal that was stronger than the stuff he tried before. These are exactly the kinds of people that it’s hard to find much about: working class men and all women (though, I guess you are more likely to find out information about women in the higher than lower classes).