Deep Thought: Look Back in Curiosity
Created | Updated Nov 8, 2020
Deep Thought: Look Back in Curiosity
A few hours before I started writing this, I got a phone call from the pastor. He's keeping in touch with people by telephone. While a few folks mask up and attend services, these days, most of us are visiting 'in spirit' via the internet. (He says they're going to get a better camera soon.) It's kind of a struggle in this annus horribilis of 2020 for people to keep doing the things that bring them togetherness without giving each other communicable diseases.
I commiserated with him about the difficulties, and pointed out that I'd been doing some research on our local area as part of the November writing project. One story I found was by a Presbyterian minister who had come to Pennsylvania from Ireland as a little boy in 1832. His first memory of the United States was in Philadelphia, where the streets echoed with the cries of 'Bring out your dead!' It was a cholera year. There were fields full of mass graves in the City of Brotherly Love. Fortunately, then as now, northwestern Pennsylvania wasn't seriously affected.
The point I'd like to make is that yes, Virginia and everybody else, there is a point to finding out about the past. They may have done things differently: they declared a day of fasting and prayer, courtesy of then-Governor George Wolf, something that now-Governor Tom Wolf may not want to do because it might be misinterpreted. But they faced some of the same problems. Maybe we could learn something.
New York state was hard-hit by the epidemic. It travelled along the Erie Canal. When people saw that it was in their midst, they fled from town to town, bringing the plague with them. The symptoms were spectacular and violent: everybody was terrified, especially since nobody knew how it spread. Nobody had ever heard of germs back then. Nobody knew about washing your hands, or your fruit.
Epidemics aren't the only things people in the past dealt with that we do, too. My November serial deals with the year 1844, which was an election year in the US. A very polarising election year. The town in my story is split about 50/50, Whigs v Democrats. They were arguing about Mexico, and Oregon, whether to expand the country, about civil rights issues. Stop me if anything sounds unusual. Okay, they didn't have a war on drugs. Er, wait: they were arguing about Temperance, which is sort of the same thing…you take my meaning: Nihil sub sole novum.
For me, there's another, better reason to go traipsing among the records to find out about the past. I'm not just interested in picking our ancestors' brains. I'm interested in meeting them. You see, h2g2 connects geographically-separated people by means of the internet. Online historical research connects temporally-separated people. At least, it connects us to the ones in the past, even if we can't figure out how to send them an iPad so they can respond to our questions.
History books are often full of jerks: the Julius Caesars of this world. Forget them. Those are the nincompoops on the statues. It takes some hunting to find the others: the ones you'd actually want to have a pint with. The ones whose stories you are dying to hear.
Try this one:
1839. Peggy McIntosh (Mrs Thompson) taught school. We had a good season, and fine crops, which were much needed to relieve the hard times. Another winter of deep snow – abotu four feet. Dillas Allen came, with his company, to be married to Jane Brown. Rev G. Bishop could not get there. Frederick Brown started for Squire Tibbets. They did not arrive till the afternoon of the second day. Queen Victoria was married the same year, but how her wedding passed off I do not know, and perhaps the reader does not care. It was published in the papers that he handkerchiefs cost seventy thousand dollars. I believed the story then, not now. Finley McCormick taught school.
This, from someone who lived out in the boondocks and wrote an epic poem about the conversion of Ireland to Christianity by St Patrick. It starts:
My tale is one of long ago,
Ere Charlemagne drew conquering bow,
Before the Moors set foot in Spain,
Or Alfred checked the plundering Dane;
Before that Gregory, good and wise,
Saw English slaves with pitying eyes,
And sent the gospel o'er the wave,
Their long-neglected sires to save.
Rev McCullough was interested in the people up the timeline, too. Now, I don't know about you, but I like meeting these people. They make good one-way pen pals. I hope you're enjoying the Holes in History stories. You might find a kindred spirit.
