Who Knows?

A question posed in the Oct 25-26, 2008 weekend York News-Times Wonderline about Dean and Company in York illustrates the value of anticipating local history questions and preserving the information that will answer them in the future.

If the link in the last sentence goes "dead," the sentence will at least have clues about where to start looking to recover the reference.

From personal knowledge, Dean & Company was operated in various forms by three generations of the Dean family through the first half of the 20th Century. Most of the information that would document the company's operations is buried in back issues of the local newspapers.

By sheer coincidence, my personal hobby interest in old tools has led me to collect old hardware catalogs and the like. A 1946 Annual Directory issue of the National Hardware Retailer included a four-page article about Dean and Company because Earl Dean was that year's national president of the Association.

Information can be forgotten and history "lost" if indexes and other "finding aids" are not maintained on an ongoing basis to make it easy to recover those snippets of "old news" that become our history.

One of the books for sale in the museum shop at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum was a recent "reprint with modern introductory essay" of a 19th Century "tell all" autobiography by a former White House employee. The employee was a self-made entrepreneur who became personal confidant to a well known 1st Lady.

To paraphase the premise of a 1960s T.V. series, "your challenge should you chose to accept it" is to use the clues in this to figure out who was the 1st Lady, and who was the scandalous "tell all autobiographer." The museum store's online catalog does not list the book, so the search will involve serious sleuthing. If you figure out the book in question and the author's identity, you'll gain an understanding of the travails of researching history. You'll also gain an appreciation for the importance of collecting and preserving the raw materials for future historians , and generating the finding aids for them to work with the materials so collected and preserved.

(posted from soggy north Florida)