The following quick blogpost is to provide some tips on our location projects. I decided to go to the Brooklyn Historical Society today and start my search on my location (120 Prince Street). The first step I recommend is by starting with your designated year of your location and find it in Atlas Map. It will guide your investigation throughout the day.

For every Atlas map you look at, get the following information:

1. Year plus Volume – It’s important you label your data and notes as things can get confusing very quickly.

2. Your block number

3. The page you found your location

4. The area which can be found in the first couple pages of your Atlas map. Think of it as the Index.

5. Get the cross streets and intersections NEAR your location. This will help your search and when you move to other time periods, you are able to correlate location data.

6. Count how many houses from the corners is your location

7. Note the color of the structure which will identify the material

8. How many floors does your structure have?

This is not everything list but this should give you some ideas. I highly recommend drawing a picture or taking a set of photos. My location is weird, my streets were renamed and my block was divided by another street. I am thankful that a Elizabeth helped me put the pieces together.

After you have found your location on all the maps, you should move to the Land Conveyances.

Find out your block number start searching. You may have to refer back to your map data to make some sense of the land conveyances.  You should be looking  for key information like:

1. A particular buyer or sell that shows up a lot

2. Changes on the structure of your block and the day they occurred.

3. Any Whitman names in the Grantor/Grantee lists. One of our classmates found Whitman’s father which gave him an additional lead.

4. Any landmarks or important buildings

The building numbers may change but you should be using your main location from the Atlas map and try to find the physical location, the number is secondary.There isn’t one way to do this kind of research. Different locations will yield different results but I have to be fairly thorough and methodical in the ways I look for information. As I continue to do my own research, I will post some tips for my classmates. If anyone has any questions, just comment so I can clarify on my post. That way, everyone can benefit. Refer to the “How to do House and Building Research at BHS” handout. I think the key thing is to collect as much relevant data and search through all the different resources available to continue finding leads and piece everything together.

The following post is some reflection regarding the novel Franklin Evans written by Walt Whitman. Many people till this day don’t even know that he wrote this novel. I quizzed some people in the Apple store and to no one knew…

Franklin Evans is

Franklin Evans is certainly a different novel It has an underlying message and it’s delivered in dramatic fashion. We all know the evils of alcoholism today but it can be viewed as even more destructive in the nineteeth century. The epsisodes that Evans are caused due to his love affair with Brandy and the like. After reading the introduction, I had an idea of what the book is about; intemperance. Professor Gold graced us with a primer to intemperance and reminded us of different movements to abolish alcohol. With this sort of historical context in mind, I proceeded to read the novel.

Whitman presents intemperance from a Washingtonian perspective. Each chapter has a dramatic episode where those who drink are possessed and become demons. In the beginning of the novel, there are descriptions of intemperate folks. He judges characters by their eyes and levels of redness in their faces. In speaking about a person,Evans (our main character use to know)

“The truth is, that  habits of drunkeness in the head of the family, are like an evil influence- a great dark cloud, overhanging all, and spreading its gloom around every department of the business of that family, and poisoning their peace etc.”

He clearly dissaproved of drinking saw situations that intemperance lead to the destruction of families, especially in the father. Every character he meets is under examination of consumption of alcohol. He looks for redness in the face and bleary eyes, the byproduct of a few too many drinks many nights.

Despite some resistance from the offset, Colby drags the inexperience Evans to the bar. Evans problems with alcohol began after ” We took our station at the first vacant seats, and called for our drinks. How delicious everything seemed!!”

The next morning. Evans woke up remorseful. He regretted those drinks he had but he’d inevitably would drink again. Evans gets a nice paying job and loses it because of his intemperance. He was to deliver a package for Mr. Lee and failed to so,  intemperance now costs him his job. In each episode, the price he pays for his intemperance escalate. He loses a wife to his intemperance later in the story and in another drunken rage is arrested for attempted theft.  In the novel, Evans starts to blame Colby for introducing him to the thrills of alcohol. Evans made his own decision and didn’t have the fortitude to limit his consumption of the deadly drink. You’d think he would turn around at this point but I will leave that discuss for the next blog post.

On a related note, I stumbled upon a website dedicated to moderation management. Most approaches to vices are pure abstinence but this website takes a realistic approach. You can have a drink or two and not be an alcoholic.

Test

New York City College of Technology Whitman class made a field trip to the Brooklyn Historical Society on November 3, 2009. We met in front of the Brooklyn Historical Society with Professor Gold where we greeted by Elizabeth Call. She is the Special Collections Librarian and has immense knowledge of resources available at the Museum. Some of these resources are:

1. Historic Atlases
2. Land Conveyances
3. Brooklyn Directories
4. Brooklyn and Long Island Scrapbook Collection
5. An extensive image database
6. Real Estate Brochure Collection
7. Architecture Books

I will see if I can get a digital copy of  the handout discussing these sources.

Thanks to the generosity of the NEH Office for Digital Humanities, we have a semester pass to the museum and library. We can find sources from Brooklyn we can’t find anywhere else. This blog post is a highlight of some of the things we saw.

Upon entering, I wondered why the class made a trip here. Professor Gold told us we would be using this resource for our next project. We are going to become experts of a particular historical Whitman location. We will be looking for pieces of history around the city, especially Brooklyn using the aforementioned resources.

This library was literally old school. It had card catalogs and microfiche repositories; I haven’t seen one of those in years.

From Wikimedia

We took a look at the Atlas maps from different time periods. I didn’t know that such precise records were kept of Brooklyn in the 19^th Century. The class saw Atlas maps from the 1820s up to the 1920s. Brooklyn has changed substantially. This will make our historical location project more difficult. In some cases, some streets may not exist in the past.

In the diagram above, you can see small boxes that are pink and yellow. Yellow stands for wood while pink stands for stone. The building numbers and block numbers are even on the map along with another slew of details.

The library has the Brooklyn City Directories that are something like our phonebooks today. These were published periodically in the past. This link is an example of the physical resource. You can look for someone’s name and find out where he or she lives and their profession. I could link the name to an address and then pull up a map to see where they lived. With their name, I can do research on them and do some follow up work. Elizabeth even found Walt Whitman’s father but not his son.

The Library even has the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1841-1950s. I can be sure I can find many of Whitman’s journalism articles in that collection in their original form.

Because this library has so many resources, many people visit it to prove that an area or a building is a landmark. Elizabeth Call (our guide) gave us a helpful tip when it comes to researching our sites. She said, “check  if the address is in a landmarked neighborhood”. If it is, you can find a wealth of information due to its landmark status and significance. Anyone can get a historical perspective of Brooklyn through the library’s historical documents.

The library was particularly cold, old books don’t like moisture and the air conditioner was on full blast the duration of the trip. From the Atlas maps to the articles, and scrapbooks down to the deeds, we can uncover pieces of history and bring them together.

The library is open Wednesday to Friday from 1-5 PM. My classmates will be sure to visit this incredible resource that I didn’t know existed in our search for Whitman.