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Research trip

11/20/2010 17:57


I took the day off reading for my oral exams, to visit an archive in Albany. Got up really early, and drove across the bottom of Vermont, from NH to NY. It was cold but the roads were dry. A very pretty sunrise ride, over the Green Mountains. The drive reminded me that Ethan Allen was said to have been able to get from one side of these mountains to the other in less than a day.

SUNY has a collection of papers from a family company called “Abraham Bell & Sons.” Brian and the people who run the archive were very welcoming, in spite of the fact they were running a big, all-day seminar. A Bell & Sons were brokers and exporters, primarily of cotton to Liverpool. But they also ran a banking company that moved money between the US and Ireland, and they brought a lot of Irish people over to America during the early part of the famine, around 1840.

I already had about 130 pages of material linking A Bell & Sons to the guys I’m studying, dating from 1855-57. I was hoping to find additional letters, account ledgers, shipping manifests, or other documents to expand the range of this relationship, and give me more details about it. I was partly successful.

There were dozens of cash books, checkbooks, books filled with lists of promissory notes A Bell & Sons had received from a variety of sources over a wide range of years covering most of the second half of the 19th century, and letters. Incoming letters were pasted into scrapbooks, and outgoing letters were preserved in several letterbooks. A letterbook is a book containing sheets of very thin, semi-transparent blotter paper. Before carbon paper, these were used to make a copy of a letter by absorbing some of the wet ink from the freshly-written page. They’re generally blurry but legible. I didn't think to photograph the book itself on this trip; but I think I have a photo of one from my Michigan trip, which I’ll try to find and post sometime soon.

The A Bell & Sons blotters were very helpfully indexed at the front by the writer. These books frequently contain index pages at the front, where the writer can note the pages containing letters to particular people, since they’d be chronological in the book itself. I was able to find letters that extend the relationship between the Bell company and my guys by at least three years. But I’m happy I have many of these letters already. Some of them are completely illegible, and even the ones that blotted well are much less easy to read than the originals.



Didn’t find anything really earth-shattering on this trip. Learned that A Bell and Sons was a very big, successful company, though. This helps me understand why my guy would have been interested in using them as his “bankers.” And, they were Quakers, which helps explain how they had the patience to put up with him. And I think I found out how they got together in the first place, which will probably be helpful when I write my story.

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Bradlaugh in cartoons

01/05/2010 09:44
From May 9 1883 Judy, or The London Serio-Comic Journal, p. 226

"Bradlaugh" is apparently a proper noun among Londoners, meaning irreligious. "Are you a religious man?" "No, I believe in Bradlaugh." And his face is recognizable enough to be funny on the dog.



More like this at http://www.bradlaugh.com/primary/primary.html

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