Bullies big and small (and one mystery solved!)

Oh, this is going to be one of those days!  It is always hard when all of the bully breeds show up on the same day!  What is a bully breed you ask?  Well, that depends on who you ask!  Most people consider the pitties (pitbulls), staffies (American Staffordshire terriers) and eggies (bull terriers) to be included among the bully breeds.  These dogs are typically stubborn, play rough and are very strong.  I would add most terriers and any breed that begins with the words “toy” or “miniature” to the list!  It becomes one of those days when we have representatives from all categories of bully in the house. 

Currently the biggest trouble maker weighs less than ten pounds.  Finding a place for everyone to play without bloodshed  is tricky on a day like today (now remember, they can’t use their words because they don’t have any, so it’s pretty much teeth in a conflict).  The answer to the inevitable question, “Why do you allow such dogs in doggy daycare?” is that the dogs that are the most difficult are usually the ones that need socialization the most.  Besides with careful management by skilled staff members, every dog can have an enjoyable day at  “school”.

 The little bullies are the hardest to accommodate.  They can’t play with the small dogs because we don’t want the other munchkins to get hurt.  It is also not safe for them to play with the big dogs because they lack the common sense not to bully a dog larger than they are!  We have additional space for just these occasions, but today, with an equal mix of big and little bullies, we are running out of places to put them.  We will spend our day juggling certain dogs between crates, long walks and solo time outside in the hopes that every dog will go home with all the skin and hair they came in with!  

On the research front, the mystery of the workhouse identified on the 1848 map of Buffalo has been solved. One of the biggest resources I have discovered while working on this project is a facebook page called Buffalo and Western New York's Proud History.  This page has over 3,000 very knowledgeable and helpful members who are more than happy to answer questions or direct others to resources that are helpful to their projects or queries.  One of the members posted the picture below, taken from the Courier Express in 1929.  Note the title of the article.

On the 1848 map, the workhouse is located on Pennsylvania, but the side street in not labeled.  A quick check of Google maps (thanks to the suggestion of another BWNYPH member) revealed that the side street was indeed Trenton!  This revelation still does not explain why the Erie County Poorhouse was not represented on the 1848 map of Buffalo, so there is still a bit of the mystery yet to explore (assuming I have not been eaten by dogs!).  

Fun with maps!

With three dachshunds in residence this weekend, I was happy to be able to get a break from the noise and spend some time in the Grosvenor Room at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library http://www.buffalolib.org/content/special-collections).  This room houses all of the rare books, documents, and maps that the library has to offer.  I went there on Saturday in search of maps.  Although some are accessible on line, I was hoping to see first hand their selection of early nineteenth century maps of Buffalo.  I was not disappointed.

Buffalo and Erie County Public Library

My second book in the Orphans and Inmates series takes place between 1840 and 1841.  I have used the City of Buffalo Directory for 1840 to establish authentic locations for various residences and businesses as the story unfolds around the city.  I wanted to understand how long it would take for my characters to get from one place to another.  For example, the poorhouse was located in Black Rock where York, Eleventh and North Streets come together, a few miles away from Buffalo.  While the original Buffalo Orphan Asylum was actually located on Niagara St., I have changed its location in my novel to the same property as the poorhouse because it is necessary to the story.  My main character lives on North Street, and her husband, the orphan asylum's physician, has a medical clinic on Niagara Street.  There is also a benevolent widow who lives on Pearl Street, a boarding house on Beak Street and a school on Franklin St. As it turns out, most of my locations are about a thirty to fifty minute walk from each other, although during the winter months the characters travel by carriage, which speeds things up a bit.

Interestingly, I found a rabbit hole to go down while I was looking at the maps.  On the 1836 map of Buffalo, the poorhouse was marked by the letter Q in the location I just described.  In this picture the letter Q is somewhat obscured by my red dot (still trying to get used to all this great technology!).  However the poorhouse was not indicated at all on the 1848 map, but there was a notation of a workhouse about a mile and a half away.  It was marked by the number 10 on Fifth Street, between Pennsylvania and Husdon Streets (now entirely obscured by my yellow dot!).  So, my next stop after the Grosvenor Room was the Research Library at the Buffalo History Museum (www.buffalohistory.org/), where I spent some time trying to find out if the workhouse and the poorhouse were the same institution. 

City of Buffalo, 1836

City of Buffalo, 1848

                                                   
As I have mentioned before, the Directories for the period contain a wealth of information, like the city charter (in the earliest editions), a list of the city officials, and in some cases, a brief history of some of the city institutions, like the Buffalo Orphan Asylum. After going through several City of Buffalo Directories, I learned that in 1840 there was a Superintendent of the Poor and a Superintendent of the Workhouse (and a coroner, which was unrelated to my current quest, but a valuable piece of information none the less), suggesting that the workhouse and the poorhouse were two separate institutions.  However, that didn't tell me why the poorhouse was not located on the 1848 map or why the workhouse was not located on the 1836 map.  I discovered that the Research Library at the Buffalo History Museum had a recent donation that will be of great use to me in my research.  They are now in possession of the Proceedings of the Board of Supervisors of Erie County for the years that the poorhouse was located in Black Rock (1829-1850).  This is a wonderful addition to an already fine collection, because they include the annual reports of the Keeper of the Poorhouse and other municipal institutions.  No other research facility in Buffalo that I am aware of has municipal reports for the poorhouse going back that far.  So, plans for next weekend include a trip back to the Research Library to spend several hours going through the microfilmed records to learn more about the workhouse and how it figured into the early social welfare system in Buffalo and a discussion with a local historian so that I can add more colored dots to my maps!.

Commitments and deadlines and responsibilities, oh my!

It's August and I am trying not to freak out as I look over the many calendars that keep my life on track. With a target release date of mid November for the second book in the Orphans and Inmates series (as yet untitled) and a 60 hour a week day job, it's time to suck it up and get to work.  A plan is necessary, hence my examination of the calendars.

The first calendar documents of all of the commitments relating to the Erie County Poorhouse Cemetery Project.  We are giving a talk for the Museum of disABILITY  History on August 22.  I am very excited about this because I love this museum's commitment to understanding and preserving the story of the individuals who lived part or all of their lives in various institutions, like the Erie County Poorhouse,during the nineteenth century.

Next on the list is the Western New York Genealogical Society's 40th Anniversary Luncheon on September 20th.  The genealogical community is very excited about the Erie County Poorhouse records.  We have had several requests to search the ledgers by individuals looking to track down family members who were either inmates at the poorhouse or patients in the insane asylum or hospital.  We look forward to introducing these resources to the genealogical community.

The second calendar holds the deadlines associated with the ECPH Cemetery Project.  While the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropology (http://physanth.org/) is in April, abstracts for research presentations are due September 15th (which also happens to be my birthday!).  I am still analyzing data from the ECPH Hospital Records.  We are specifically interested in the frequency, treatments and survival rates of patients who were admitted with infectious diseases.  Time to move this project off the back burner!

We have also committed to writing a chapter in and an edited volume entitled The Bioarchaeology of Dissection and Autopsy in the United States.  Our chapter, which uses a combination of historic records and skeletal data to document how the unclaimed inmates who died at the Erie County Poorhouse were transferred to the area medical schools for dissection,  is due by the end of November. Whew, a bit of breathing room there!

In the old days I would just work into the wee hours and get it done.  Not bloody likely these days as it's fifteen years later and I am fifteen years older!  I also have a day job that takes up a considerable amount of my time and mental energy!  That leads me to the third calendar, the boarding calendar.  In addition to running two doggy daycares, my husband and I also board many of our canine clients.  It started out as a courtesy service, but has grown into an important part of our business.  During the summer months the boarding calendar is full.  Even with the staff to help out, I am still responsible for the morning kennel chores. I can tell you that the enthusiastic greeting of several pooches all wanting out of their kennels at the crack of dawn is not well received after an all nighter of writing or research!

So, what's a girl to do?  Delegate!  As it happens, I have a teenage son who is on summer break!  Many of the time consuming domestic chores (cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc.) will be passed on to him.  I know, I know, I will have to sacrifice my standards a bit. At least I won't have to look around the kitchen to find things, as he crams everything into one drawer, maintaining that if the drawer can close, the dishes are all put away properly!  Anyway, it will be a good life lesson for him and I will have a few extra hours each week.  I imagine the news of his new domestic assignments will not go over well, that's okay, I have a secret weapon called Catholic guilt and if that doesn't work there's always the Xbox privileges to be renegotiated!  Stay tuned...

Research, Research, Research!

At the risk of revealing my advanced age, I have a few interesting comments on the topic of research.  Back in the day, when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, I spent countless days and dollars traveling to different libraries, historical societies and museums in search of the primary sources that would provide me with the historical background necessary to construct a research question and a few testable hypotheses. Those were among the happiest years of my life!  I spent hours pouring over big leather bound ledgers and squinting at blurry microfilm as I collected the data necessary to accept or reject my carefully laid out hypotheses.  These many years later I have made some delightful discoveries, the most important being that many of the primary sources I need to provide accurate historical details to my stories are available online! I can access maps, directories and municipal reports while still in my pj's and in the comfort of my own office. As there are no delicate pages to protect, no gloves are necessary and I can eat and drink coffee to my hearts content while I work!!  What luxury compared to over air conditioned reading rooms, or worse yet, moldy basements!!

For example, one of the characters in Orphans and Inmates owned a seed company.  A point here and a click there and I had the history of seed companies in the United States, where and when certain varieties of flowers were imported from Europe and what varieties people were cultivating in the early nineteenth century.  These details helped give life to the character and his story.

I have particularly enjoyed having access to historic maps via the internet.  As a result of the completion of the Erie Canal in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the city of Buffalo grew rapidly.  Street names changed as the city expanded to accommodate the increasing number of entrepreneurs who flocked to Buffalo to make their fortunes.  It is simply brilliant to have the ability to download a map and use other software programs to plot your character's movement around the city!

Although online research has increased my productivity as a writer, it can't replace good old fashioned leg work (not yet anyway!).  I have still spent plenty of time in research libraries with my old friends the leather bound ledgers and the microfilm machine.  Nothing replaces a detailed study of the lives of the individuals you are writing about.  For me, that means examining the Erie County Poorhouse Inmate Records, Hospital Records, Mortality Ledgers and the Annual Reports of the Buffalo Orphan Asylum.

In these reports I read the names of the people who spent a part of their lives there as inmates, or perhaps even died there.  I learned about where they were born, what they did before they came to the poorhouse, and why they came to the poorhouse.  I know what kinds of clothing they wore, what kinds of food they ate, and what kind of medical treatment was provided to them if they were sick or injured.  I know that they were assigned chores if they were able to work.  Women did domestic chores such as laundry, cleaning and meal preparation.  Men worked the farm and kept the buildings in repair.  I learned that they made a variety of clothing and often sold surpluses of food produced on the farm to defray the cost of their care.

From the administrators reports I learned about many of the challenges the Keepers of the Poor faced in trying to provide care for a rapidly growing impoverished class. They faced over crowding, sanitation issues, food shortages, and shortages of able-bodied inmates to assist in the running of what was supposed to be a self sufficient farm. There was the ever present threat of diseases like cholera and influenza, in addition to the ever increasing frequency of mental illness and alcoholism to manage. 

Some inmates were lazy and apathetic, while others were hardworking.  Similarly, some Keepers of the Poor were benevolent and some were greedy and cruel.  By carefully studying the primary source data, I can weave the experiences of real people and events into the story and provide readers with a more compelling (although fictional) account of the history of the social welfare system in America.

Where do characters come from?

The article above is from the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal and describes how, in 1840, a person came to the Erie County Poorhouse claiming to be a hermaphrodite and that this affliction made it hard to find work.  I found this interesting for a variety of reasons.  First, I thought it unusual that the average person in the early nineteenth century would be familiar with such a rare condition, which lead me to assume that the individual making the claim was far from average.  Also, how desperate would a person have to be to admit to such a condition?  Now remember, this was the early nineteenth century and even in a city growing as fast as Buffalo was at the time, there were still plenty of superstitious folks who would have thought the person cursed, or worse.  It was risky and downright dangerous  to have made such a claim and the individual left himself or herself vulnerable to potential abuse and even violence from the other inmates (however, it is interesting to note that no such abuse was reported in this article).

My original intention was to mention him/her as an incidental character to illustrate the wide range of interesting people who passed through the poorhouse at any given time.  However, my beta readers liked the character and suggested that I develop this particular thread of the story more. I started with the assumption that Michael/Michelle Ketchum was educated and highly motivated to follow through on a preconceived plan, thus the character was willing to do some less than honorable things to achieve these goals.  He/she had a secret, beyond whether or not he was also a she, and was desperate to keep it.  However, I decided that this character had limits in terms of what he or she would do to maintain this mysterious persona.  From there I added some made up details about the character's past, a real life like-minded scholar as a friend and colleague, and some historical facts for color.  I ended up with a fascinating story thread that my readers loved.  Now that Orphans and Inmates is out, many readers have asked if the adventures of Michael/Michelle will continue on in the next book.  I tell them that they will find out in about five months when the second book is released!

This past weekend I had the honor of attending the Grand Opening of the Monument for the Forgotten at the Museum of disABILITY History in Buffalo, New York (http://museumofdisability.org/). This monument is the creation of Brian Nesline and is made up of the images of over 1,000 headstones belonging to individuals who died in institutions like almshouses, asylums and prisons and were buried in what have become unmarked and forgotten cemeteries.

Many of the individuals were not buried with headstones, or even numbered markers like the ones seen below.  For example, the Erie County Poorhouse marked the burial location of inmates who died there with a numbered wooden stake.  The number on the stake corresponded with the same number in a ledger that included the individuals personal information (name, age, cause of death and occupation, among other details).  That stake remained to mark the grave for a year in the event that a family member or friend  might claim the body for reburial in a private cemetery, or, at the very least, reimburse the county for the burial in the almshouse cemetery.  However, at the end of the year, the stakes were all pulled up to be re-used during the upcoming year, thus leaving the individual interred there forgotten forever.  The Monument for the Forgotten is just part of a larger and continued effort of behalf of the Museum of disABILITY History and its parent company, People, Inc., to recover and restore institutional cemeteries across the state of New York and provide identity to those buried there.  This is important because many of these individuals, particularly poorhouse inmates, were employed in occupations such as masonry, carpentry, brick laying, etc., before circumstances beyond their control forced them to seek refuge in the county poorhouse.  In the case of the Erie County Poorhouse, many of the inmates there likely contributed to the building of the city of Buffalo, which was expanding rapidly throughout the nineteenth century.  

I touched on the anonymity of institutional burials in my novel, Orphans and Inmates.  In the later decades (post 1850) of the Erie County Poorhouse inmates were buried in coffins, some very elaborate.  However, it is unknown how the dead were interred during the early years in which the book took place (1830's).  I borrowed from what little I know of the Monroe County Poorhouse Cemetery, in Rochester, New York, and described the inmates as buried in shrouds rather than coffins.  Often these shrouds were made by other inmates as part of the daily chores which all able-bodied persons were assigned.  In the book, Ciara is shocked that most inmates were buried without any religious service or even an individual to say a prayer over their grave. Sadly, this was often true of real burials at the Erie County Poorhouse and even became an issue of public concern in the later decades of the nineteenth century.  The slogan of the Museum is "Forgotten No More" and I am honored that my story contributes in some small way to providing at least some understanding of the lives and deaths of poorhouse inmates.

We have survived the Fourth of July weekend and ten canine guests with our sanity and limbs intact, the details are irrelevant.

It never ceases to amaze me where inspiration comes from.  My friend gave me a copy of Garden Walk Buffalo magazine (the Garden Walk is a big deal in Buffalo, and well worth the trip into the city for historians and gardeners alike).  While admiring the many spectacular local gardens, I read an article on the oldest tree in Buffalo. Said tree, a Sycamore, has presided over Franklin Street (once called Tuscarora Street) for the past 300 years. This tree was there before the Revolutionary War was even a secret thought in the minds of our forefathers.  It saw that very war, it survived the burning of Buffalo after the War of 1812, and the Civil War. Surely it will have something to tell me about life in the early decades of Buffalo if I ask it nicely!  I think something very important needs to happen under that tree in my second book, so ask it I will.  I intend to visit the tree, examine it carefully, sit underneath it for a while and see what it has to tell me.  Can you imagine what it might say?  At the risk of sounding a bit daffy, I used to walk through the forests of a southern plantation that served as one of my first archaeological field sites with my eyes closed.  I took in the smells of the leaves and under growth, pungent in the humid July heat.  I listened to the birds chatter and the small creatures as they scurried above and below me on their important errands.  Just above the sounds and smells of nature, if you were really paying attention, were the sounds and smells of early plantation life. The gentle slapping of bare feet on a dirt path, the slice of the hoe through red Virginia clay, the smell of ham and turkey hanging in the smokehouse.  I could really feel the buzz of life and what it would have been like as the slaves went about the various activities that kept the plantation running smoothly.  More than a few times a chill ran up my spine, stopping me dead in my tracks.  Perhaps one of the occupants of the small, unmarked cemetery had tagged along with me on my stroll through the forest...I am hoping the Sycamore on Franklin St. (and chills!) will provide similar insights for the city of Buffalo during its infancy.

I am honored to have been asked by the Museum of disAbility History to serve as a panelist in a discussion panel on preserving institutional cemeteries this Saturday.  This discussion will follow the Grand Opening of their Forgotten People exhibit.  This exhibit honors all those individuals who were buried in institutional cemeteries like the Erie County Almshouse Cemetery.  I first met the incredible people from the Museum of disAbility History, a project of People, Inc., at the dedication ceremony of the Niagara County Almshouse Cemetery, which they had restored.  I was impressed that there is an entire museum in Buffalo dedicated to helping people appreciate the largely misunderstood concept of disability, and that their historic focus extends to the individuals who sought refuge or were committed to the various institutions and asylums of early Buffalo.  I am looking forward to participating in this important event and learning more about the Museum of disAbility History and its goals.  I am hoping that this is the beginning of a very productive relationship between the Museum (and People, Inc.), my Anthropology colleagues, and perhaps a few other local history groups.

https://www.facebook.com/events/469102553224185/