Museum Newsletter - 8 Nov 2008

Friends of the Bullitt County History Museum E-Newsletter
November 8, 2008 , (Volume 4, Number 11)

Dear Friends,

Announcements...

>> Bullitt County Genealogical Society Meeting Saturday, November 15. Special Salt Works Field Trip!

Genealogical Society President Barbara Bailey has arranged a special field trip as part of the November meeting. After conducting our regular business portion of the meeting, we will be going over to western Bullitt County to visit some of the site of the old Bullitt's Lick Salt Works. The area, located on private land, is said to still hold pretty extensive remains of the old pioneer industry...the first industry in Kentucky, supplying salt as far away as Illinois from the late 1700's to about 1830. I have never seen the site myself and I'm excited at the opportunity! (For details about our salt making history, check our web site.

Be sure to dress appropriately for the weather and for walking through rough fields. We will car pool to the site from our usual meeting place at the library.

Meeting time is 10:00 a.m. Saturday, November 15. (We meet every month at that time on the third Saturday of the month.)

Meeting place is our usual location, Ridgway Memorial Public Library, located on the corner of Walnut Street and Second Street in Shepherdsville.

>>December meeting date & location changed for annual potluck dinner.

Instead of a regular meeting in December, the Bullitt County Genealogical Society usually hosts a potluck-dinner social gathering instead. This year is no different except for the location, time, and date.

My wife and I will be hosting the social at our home, starting at 5:00 p.m. on Saturday evening, December 13. There will be no 3rd Saturday meeting that month or in January (we take a meeting break in January).

More details on this in the next newsletter, but for those of you who live close enough to come, please do! We look forward to seeing you!

Activity

>> New Additions to our Genealogical Research Collection.

** Obituary collection donation. Rosetta Whitaker made copies of a large collection of old local obituaries and donated them to us. The obits, dating back to the 1930's, will be filed in a special drawer in our obituary file cabinet. The obits are copies from the scrapbook collection of Gladys Lloyd. Ms. Lloyd once lived in the "Lloyd House" in Mt. Washington. The house is today a museum operated by the Mt. Washington Historical Society.

Many thanks to both Ms. Whitaker and Ms. Lloyd for the donation. They will no doubt be useful research tools.

By the way, did you know that volunteers have been clipping obituaries from the newspapers since about 1980? Thanks to Doris Owen, who has been clipping them for several years, and to Barbara Bailey, who has been placing them on file cards and putting them in an alphabetized file cabinet here at the museum, we have a quite useful genealogical research tool. Obits often hold very useful information such as family members, burial location, and sometimes even family history.

We are needing a new volunteer to take over the important work of clipping obits as Doris is needing to retire from the work. Let us know if you might be interested in helping.

** New Owen Family Resource. Howard Owen has donated several large binders of genealogical research on the Owen Family. The collection is so large that it nearly fills an entire file cabinet drawer! We are just beginning to explore Howard's papers, the result of many years of research work. We have placed them in a special file drawer next to our other family files. This will be a great addition, and we thank our good friend from Canada for this important donation.

** Garnette McDonald, daughter of William Edgar Calvert, donated his bookkeeping book spanning the 1930's to the 1950's. The old book, from the Mt. Washington area, lists many names. It will be stored in our old books archives for now.

>> Cemetery Documentation Team Continues Work.

With frosty weather killing off the chiggers and ticks for another year, our cemetery documentation team of volunteers is stepping up its work, documenting another eight cemeteries just this week. Check our web page for updated records (something on this later in this newsletter).

>>Eighty Students Tour Museum.

Eighty 2nd & 3rd Graders from Shepherdsville Elementary School recently toured the museum and courthouse. I hosted at The Old Stone Jail (always a hit with young folks), and Barbara Bailey hosted at the museum display rooms.

>>Booth at Nichols Festival.

The museum will host a booth today (November 8) at the Nichols Elementary School in western Bullitt County from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.. The school festival there serves as a community festival and I am happy to attend. I plan to unveil a special Lincoln exhibit there.

>>Lincoln Exhibit on Loan for November.

Thanks to the "Museums to Go" program produced by the Kentucky Historical Society, we have a special exhibit at our museum for November. "Museums to Go" is a series of free exhibits that are portable and loanable to organizations around the state. We have hosted several of those over the years. I am proud to have gotten this brand new one for our museum. Titled, "Discovering Kentucky's Abraham Lincoln", the exhibit consists of several free-standing, six-foot tall, display posters about the life of Lincoln. The Kentucky Historical Society continues to be a vital supporter of small local museums, and we are very grateful for them.

New to Our Web Site.

First, allow me a prideful comment. I was speaking to a friend who is a state official recently in Frankfort about history projects going on around the state. She told me how the state hopes to someday be able to look up a cemetery on the internet and actually get a map showing its location. I pointed out that "someday" had already arrived in Bullitt County. Thanks to our creative web master and the cemetery team, that is already done on our web site.

>>More cemeteries are added each week to our own cemetery web pages as our very active cemetery documentation team continues their work. Check it out.

>>Census Data. Also recently added to our web site are Bullitt County Census Data from 1840-1880. This data includes overall info such as population figures, etc.

>>Bullitt County Prominent People in 1847.

>>Frank Pierce Straus - a biographical sketch.

>>The T.C. Carroll Plat Index. Updated with corrections, this is an exhaustive index of every name found on the old county plat maps dating back to the 1700's. Microfilm of the plats can be found at the museum and at the nearby county library. The originals are next door at the County Clerk's office.

For Your Information...

>>A friendly reminder to put dates on your news clippings and photos. It seems like such a small thing that we put it off, only to never actually get it done. But when you cut a news article or obituary out of the paper, or store away a photo, remember to put a date on it. We get many old news clippings in the museum that have useful information, but are far less useful because we don't know when they were written, or for what paper. A date and newspaper name jotted on the clipping makes the information far more useful, even allowing us to look it up on microfilm if need be. Time passes swiftly, memory fades, and soon no one knows even what decade something came from. The same goes for photos. I myself have old photos that, if marked at all, might say something like "Uncle Fred". or "Grandma". But no one remains to say exactly who they were or when. Great photos and clippings, but often almost useless without a date.

>>Books on line. Ivan Baugh was recently a guest speaker at our monthly meeting. One of several useful web sites he suggested was www.books.google.com. It is a source of many books, many of which have the full text available on line.

>>State Dueling Law and Bullitt County. In what seems silly to some and traditional to others, all public officers in Kentucky must, to this day, swear in a lengthy statement that they have never fought a duel with deadly weapons. Did you know there is a Bullitt County family connection to that law? I'll try to write about that next time.

Finally...Veteran's Day

Veterans Day comes this November 11 as it does every year. It was originally named Armistice Day, created to mark the end of World War One, "The War to End All Wars". Traditionally, a moment of silence was observed at 11:00 a.m., the time at which firing ceased in Europe on November 11, 1918.

Sadly, there have been many, many terrible (and sometimes wrong) wars that have followed. In 1954, "Armistice Day" was officially renamed Veteran's Day, recognizing all wars, and eventually becoming a holiday for many people in the U.S.

WWI was obviously not the war to end all wars. Within months of the first Armistice Day, new wars were already breaking out in little places all over the world. And far greater ones were soon to follow.

As with most holidays, we too often forget the history and the memory, and just use it as a day off work.

This November 11th, let us take a few moments of our day, perhaps at 11:00 a.m., and remember those tens of thousands of dear souls who lost all for their country in far too many wars over the years.

God bless them.

And to use the term that is far too often abused and misused, God Bless America.

We might not deserve the blessing, but we sure could use it.

Thank you for being a Friend of Bullitt County History.

David Strange
Bullitt County History Museum
Executive Director
Museum Phone: 502-921-0161
David.Strange@BullittCountyHistory.org
BullittCountyHistory.org