Puffer adventures

So there is this vicious, oft repeated rumor that Edward Cyrenus Bagley is the son of Esther Puffer, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. About six months ago, I had deleted the connection in Family Tree and about three weeks later one of my well meaning cousins ignored all the notes and discussions and conscientiously restored the link. OK, they are working with the best information they have and they've been told their entire lives this is the TRUTH. I threw up my hands and went on to work on other challenges.

So, I recently was lured back to the Edward Bagley parentage conundrum. I had this thought - what if I carefully documented Esther Puffer to show she never married, never had any children, in fact never left Vermont? Would that be good enough? I dug up the Puffer family history, linked her family to their page, looked up the family in various census records and found some very interesting things:

1. Esther lived in Grafton, Vermont in 1850 with an Ann Puffer - most assuredly her older sister, Anna.
2. She was still living with Ann in Grafton in 1860, and a Sally Darling had moved in - most likely younger sister, Sally Puffer who had married Roswell Darling. 
3. Esther died in 1863. 
4. Sally died in 1861. 
5. Ann continued to live in Grafton, and we find her in 1870 with Amos Puffer - her widower brother and his son Winchester Sydney.
6. Ann and Amos are again together in 1880 in Grafton and Amos is feeling the effects of old age.
7. Ann dies in 1881.
8. Amos dies in 1889.

Very nice story - siblings pull together and care for each other through old age - probably signifying they were close. It would be nice if we could be on good enough terms with our siblings that we could take care of each other after our spouses died. 

I found something interesting with Amos record. Someone had carefully married him to Ann (no known last name). Apparently, they saw the census records from 1870 and 1880 and assumed two people with the same name and different genders must be married. They must not have had the complete death records for Amos and Ann, which listed the same set of parents, nor did they notice the widowed marriage status for Amos and the single marriage status for Ann in 1880. I guess the moral of the story is be careful and be ready to change something if further evidence shows your assumption is wrong.

Correct 18 May 2015, original stated Esther's sister was Ann Bagley, not Ann Puffer.

Academic Best Seller and Sustainable Publishing

I just finished reading Capital in the twenty-first century by Thomas Picketty. The title came up in a discussion about academic publishing. I was curious about what an academic best seller is like.

Goldhammer's translation is very readable. It flows naturally and the only time I could hear a French voice was when the author made reference to distinctly French history. The graphs, charts, and notes did not detract from the narrative and made a strong case that we are coming out of a unique time.

One of Picketty's data sources is the endowments of U.S. Universities. He uses them to illustrate the economies of scale for investors - rich endowments have a higher return on investment (ROI) than more modest endowments. (For me, it is conceptually difficult to think a $100 million endowment as modest.) The important applicable fact was most endowments only make about 5%. This is the estimate Picketty also makes for the total ROI for most capital.

So, I started thinking, if a University is funding Library materials with an endowment how much of the endowment is needed? The basic answer is 20 times the price.  Which works well with fixed expenses. For example if you want to spend $1000 on books each year, you need a $20000 endowment. Or $21000 - $1000 to spend and $20000 to generate $1000 for next year. If I'm dealing with an ongoing commitment, like subscriptions, using this rubric is going to get you in trouble.

A simple approximation, is to subtract the inflation rate (N) from the ROI. So, if a librarian locks in the low rate of 3% inflation - most publishers offer 3-5%, the library needs to have an endowment of $50000 for each $1000 of new spending. And if a publisher wants 5%, the library can't take the journal in good conscience - the fiduciary responsibility is to preserve the endowment to continue to support the university, not hand it over to the publisher. This creates a problem. Investor's in publishers want a ROI of 5%. If the publisher can create the 5% from increased productivity, every one will be happy. If not the system will collapse as universities cut spending and publisher's raise prices in response to drops in revenue. This is a good definition of unsustainable.

Essentially, without increased productivity, we're pitting university donors against publisher shareholders. Each group may contain the same people. One model, we could adopt for dealing with the problems is the regulated monopoly model used for some public utilities. Publishers could be guaranteed steady, but modest profits. Prices would be transparent and would not increase unless approved by a public oversight board. It would remove a lot of the budget stress at universities and could actually increase the number of subscriptions sold by academic publishers.

The Mysterious Jennie C. Granger

About a year ago, I found an interesting and short blurb in the legal notes of the Chicago Tribune:

Louis E. Granger was ordered to pay alimony to Jennie C. Granger.₁

OK, so who is Jennie C. Granger? Who is Louis E. Granger? It's taken the better part of a year to partially answer these questions.

My great great grand father, Louis Edwin Granger. was living in Chicago at the time - his daughter Gladys was born in Chicago a month earlier.₂ Upon doing a quick search for Louis E. Granger with a wife named Jennie C., I found a marriage record for Beatrice Genieve Granger.₃The maiden name for Jennie Granger is Jennie C. Niles. The births for both parents are listed as United States. 1920 and 1930 Census records indicate Beatrice G. [Granger] Tator's father is from Massachusetts and mother is from New York.₄ Louis Edwin Granger was born in Hardwick, Massachusetts.

Looking through digital papers from New York, I was able to piece together a picture of Jennie C. Granger's family. I knew from her obituary₅ and personal notices around her 1932 death, who her parents were, when and where she was born and who were some members of her family. Here is what I had:

• Jennie's parents were George W. Niles and Lucy Randall.
• Jennie was born in Berlin, Rensselaer county, on May 21, 1859.
• She died March 18, 1932, at the house of her sister, Mrs. Elmer Melio in Round Lake, New York.
• She had lived in Saratoga County, NY for twenty years. She moved in from New York City.
• Her daughter, Beatrice G. Tator, son-in-law, Dr. Tator, and grandson arrived to attend the funeral.
• Her sister, Mary L. N. Curtis, travelled from Florida to attend the funeral.
• At some point she may have been married to a Louis E. Granger from Massachusetts.
• Their daughter Beatrice was born some time in May of 1882.₆
• Jennie or a proxy was in Chicago to sue for alimony.

I still had no indication whether this Louis E. Granger was or was not my great great grand father. I even tried sending a letter to an individual who could be one of Jennie's grandsons. Last month, I tracked down a lead in the Troy Daily Times:

Col. L. E. Granger, late recorder of the United States mint at San Francisco, was married last week to Miss Jennie Miles of Hoosick.₇

Louis Edwin Granger was living in San Francisco starting in about 1877.₈  According to the 1880 census Jennie Niles is living with her mother and step-father in Hoosick.₉ She is listed as a school teacher. So it looks very likely, Jennie C. Niles of Hoosick is the fourth wife of Louis Edwin Granger.

Update 11 February 2015: I found a divorce announcement in the Chicago Inter-Ocean, dated September 16, 1887. Next stop. Cook County Circuit Court Archives.

Notes:
¹"Legal Notes", Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1922); Feb 11, 1890; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Tribune (1849-1990) pg. 9, accessed 17 March 2014
²See "Illinois, Cook County Birth Certificates, 1878-1938," index, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/NQT9-JJC : accessed 4 February 2015), Gladys Granger, 10 Jan 1890; citing Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States, reference/certificate 3424, Cook County Courthouse, Chicago; FHL microfilm 1,287,896. and "Illinois, Cook County Birth Registers, 1871-1915," index, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/N7QQ-SM9 : accessed 4 February 2015), Gladys Granger, 10 Jan 1890; citing v 21 p 82, Chicago, Cook, Illinois, Cook County Courthouse, Chicago; FHL microfilm 1,287,734.
³"New York, County Marriages, 1908-1935," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/V6HP-QYL : accessed 4 February 2015), Arthur Earl Tator and Beatrice Genieve Grauger, 08 Jun 1911; citing , New York, United States, county offices, New York; FHL microfilm 1,287,480. and "New York, County Marriages, 1908-1935," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/FFT4-2BT : accessed 4 February 2015), Arthur Earl Tator and Beatrice Genieveve Granger, 14 Jun 1911; citing Saratoga, New York, United States, county offices, New York; FHL microfilm 1,287,474.
⁴See "United States Census, 1920," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/M4YR-NZ6 : accessed 4 February 2015), Beatrice Tater in household of Dr. A E Tater, Summit Ward 1, Union, New Jersey, United States; citing sheet 12B, family 245, NARA microfilm publication T625 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.); FHL microfilm 1,821,072. and "United States Census, 1930," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/X4NX-FS4 : accessed 4 February 2015), Beatrice G Tator in household of Arthur E Tator, Summit, Union, New Jersey, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) 0153, sheet 2A, family 30, line 50, NARA microfilm publication T626 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2002), roll 1389; FHL microfilm 2,341,124.The 1900 census lists both parents from New York. At that time Beatrice was living with her Aunt, Mary Curtis.
⁵"Round Lake", Ballston Spa Daily Journal; April 2, 1932; Old Fulton County Postcards (http://www.fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html accessed 30 May 2014) pg. 3. "Round Lake News", The Saratogian; April 1, 1932; Old Fulton County Postcards (http://www.fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html accessed 30 May 2014) pg. 9. "Village shocked by two deaths", The Saratogian; March 29, 1932; Old Fulton County Postcards (http://www.fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html accessed 30 May 2014), pg. 10. "Round Lake", The Troy Times; March 29, 1932; Old Fulton County Postcards (http://www.fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html accessed 30 May 2014) pg. 2.
⁶Beatrice birthdate is something of a mystery. I don't currently have a birth certificate, but census records and her marriage record indicate May 1882 as the best guess for her birth. May 1882 is the date given on the 1900 Census, and she is 28 when she marries Arthur Earl Tator in April 1911. Later she would claim birth dates in 1884 and 1886. She consistently lists her birthplace as New York City.
⁷Troy Daily Times; October 4, 1880; Old Fulton County Postcards (http://www.fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html accessed 30 May 2014) n. p.
⁸Louis registered to vote 31 July 1877 in San Francisco. See California State Library, California History Section; Great Registers, 1866-1898; Collection Number: 4 - 2A; CSL Roll Number: 44; FHL Roll Number: 977100
⁹"United States Census, 1880," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/MZF8-PYH : accessed 30 May 2014), Jennie C Niles in household of Marshall Haynes, Hoosick, Rensselaer, New York, United States; citing enumeration district 160, sheet 254D, NARA microfilm publication T9 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.), roll 0922; FHL microfilm 1,254,922.

Sustainable Academic Publishing

Sustainable has become the buzzword for libraries lately: sustainable buildings, sustainable collections, sustainable instruction. We think about  budgets, the environment, and services. At some level there is an anxiety that libraries can't keep doing things the way we are doing them. There is an equal anxiety that libraries are not doing what we should.

There are four problems that keep activities from being sustainable:₁

• Creating more waste than natural cycles can handle - the "horse manure" problem₂
• Extracting more materials from the earth than natural cycles can handle - the "heavy metal poisoning" problem
• Using resources faster than they can be generated - the "clear cut" problem
• Inhibiting people from accessing basic needs - the "everyone wants to eat" problem

Sustainable academic publishing would addressed all these problems. Right now, in my opinion the biggest problem keeping academic publish from being sustainable is "every one wants to eat". Academic publishing requires a distinct set of services: creation, peer-review, copy editing, distribution and preservation. At each step of the way, the people providing these services need to be able to meet needs. The scholars, excepting those with non-academic day jobs or large estates, want paid academic positions as either teachers or researchers. Publishers coordinating peer-review, copy editing, and distribution have a host of employees and owners, unless heavily subsidized, need to at least meet costs and possibly turn a profit for the owners. Librarians coordinating distribution and preservation want to live free from poverty and have time to spend with their families.

None of the models - not open green, not open gold, not membership, not traditional publishing, address preserving meaningful work and ensuring all the people in the value stream have the means to support themselves. One possible solution would be to change publishing business models back to individual subscriptions only. Libraries would have the responsibility to archive materials. This would function as a de facto embargo - materials wouldn't be freely available until they were sold to libraries for archive purposes. It's not a great solution, but it is workable, given agreement between all of the players.

¹Sustainability Illustrated, 4 Root Causes of Unsustainability, accessed 16 January 2015
²Horses were a real pollution problem in 19th Century Cities. For example, see: When Horses Posed a Public Health Hazard, City Room Blogging from the Five Boroughs, New York Times, 9 June 2008, accessed 19 January 2015

Looking for Richard and Esther Bagley

Little is known about the parents of Edward Cyrenus Bagley. We believe their names were Richard and Esther. There are records that indicate Edward was born in either 1800 or 1810, possibly in Hartford Connecticut, or in one of the Hartford's in what is now the Atlantic Provinces of Canada. Richard may have had a brother Samuel who may have had a son named John. The first actual written record of Edward I have is his marriage in 1833 which lists neither parent. The first record of his parents I have is from his patriarchal blessing in Utah, more than twenty years later.

Here are some interesting leads:

• The name Cyrenus is unusual.  It is a New Testament name from the Christmas story.₁ So anyone with the name could just have Bible reading parents. However, there is a Cyrenus Bagley living in Ontario,₂ who was born in New York. It is possible he could be a cousin. His son, also Cyrenus, moved the United States and settled in Iowa.₃ As far as I know this family has no living descendants, his second wife was childless. Cyrenus may have had a son by his first wife, who may have had children.₄ The last I record I've found for them is in Michigan. Most of the living family of the first Cyrenus are descended from his daughters and could still be living in Canada.
• DNA tests indicate the family is related to the family of Samuel Bagley an early settler in Massachusetts.₅ He had three sons - one stayed in Massachusetts, one settled in Providence, Rhode Island,₆ one settled in Fairfield, Connecticut.₇ The son who settled in Fairfield had three sons - all married. One of the son's moved to Long Island is probably the ancestor of Joshiah Bagley,  a New York patriot during the Revolution.₈ Fairfield had an Anglican/Loyalist contingent during the revolution. Fairfield was burned during a British raid.₉ It is possible that Richard could be from one of the Fairfield families, if any remained in Fairfield. If he is from Fairfield, he could have ties to the Loyalists which might have influenced a decision to migrate to New Brunswick. It is also possible one of the other son's descendants could have moved to Connecticut.
• There is a Richard Bagley in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania in the 1790 Census.₁₀ He is the head of a household consisting of one boy and a woman. He living next to Ezra Bagley. Luzerne county was claimed by both Pennsylvania and Connecticut prior to and during the Revolution.₁₁  In 1798 when a direct tax is raised, Richard is living on land owned by Elias Bagley.₁₂ There are other Bagleys in Providence at that time: James Bagley and Elias.  James is important - he is a veteran of the continental Army who served in Valley Forge.₁₃ His unit was raised from Connecticut.  If Richard, Ezra, and Elias are related to James, they would likely be from New England. By 1800, there is no Richard in the federal census.
• There is a mention of a loyalist named Richard Bagley. He apparently was the surgeon for General Howe.₁₄
• There is a Richard Bagley who entered New York in 1825.₁₅ He is a merchant. This may or may not be the Richard Bagley from Amesbury.

Any of these could potentially lead to a possible Richard Bagley who married or had a child with an Esther and is the father of our Edward Bagley. With this in mind the following next steps seem to be:

• Visit the library of the Fairfield Historical Society to look for Church records from the area. Hope to find Anglican and Congregational records with a possible Bagley name in the congregation, or to find grandsons or great-grandsons.
• Visit the Connecticut State Library to look at tax records - Congregational Churches were the established churches in Connecticut, if there are tax records they would let us know who was paying taxes to the Congregational churches and if they weren't which denomination the taxes were going to support.
• Visit the New Brunswick provincial archives to see if we can find a Richard Bagley in the Loyalist records. This is a long shot - there are extensive indexes on line.

Notes:

¹Luke 2:2
²Archives of Ontario. Registrations of Deaths, 1869-1938. MS 935, reels 1-615. Archives of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
³"Iowa, Marriages, 1809-1992," index, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/XVSP-1Z1 : accessed 6 May 2015), Cyrenius C Bagley in entry for C A Bagley and Ada Russell, 25 Dec 1882; citing Winnesheik, Iowa, reference ; FHL microfilm 1,026,661.
⁴Family Trees on Ancestry list children for the marriage, but no supporting sources: http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/441864/person/6115975137
⁵Bagley YDNA project on Family Tree DNA https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/bagley/
⁹British Burn Fairfield – Today in History: July 7, ConnecticutHistory.org, http://connecticuthistory.org/british-burn-fairfield/
¹⁰ Year: 1790; Census Place: Luzerne, Pennsylvania; Series: M637; Roll: 8; Page: 144; Image: 335; Family History Library Film: 0568148
¹¹ See The Susquehanna Settlers, Luzerne County: History of Luzerne County, Fort Wyoming Historical Marker
¹² United States Direct Tax of 1798: Tax Lists for the State of Pennsylvania. M372, microfilm, 24 rolls. Records of the Internal Revenue Service, 1791-2006, Record Group 58. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. available on Ancenstry

¹³ Revolutionary War Rolls, 1775-1783; (National Archives Microfilm Publication M246, 138 rolls); War Department Collection of Revolutionary War Records, Record Group 93; National Archives, Washington. D.C.

¹⁴p. 283, The North American Review, Volume 59, 1844 https://books.google.com/books

¹⁵ Records from Record Group 287, Publications of the U.S. Government; Record Group 85, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS] and Record Group 36, Records of the United States Customs Service. The National Archives at Washington, D.C. (https://www.ancestry.com/interactive/8758/40910_29396-00654?pid=8106264&backurl=https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv%3D1%26dbid%3D8758%26h%3D8106264%26tid%3D%26pid%3D%26usePUB%3Dtrue%26_phsrc%3DXTv82%26_phstart%3DsuccessSource&treeid=&personid=&hintid=&usePUB=true&_phsrc=XTv82&_phstart=successSource&usePUBJs=true)

Entrelib 2014 - Collection Development

On Friday, 17 October, I attended the 2014 Conference for Entrepreneurial Librarians at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, NC. The sessions were thought provoking.

A New Collection Development Culture: Focusing on Individual Faculty by Sharon Holderman, Coordinator of Public Services at Angelo and Jeanette Volpe Library at Tennessee Tech University stood out for me. When Ms. Holderman arrived at Tennessee Tech, the collection policy could be summarized as doing what we’ve always done base on what we did twenty years ago. This include a well entrenched but poorly documented allocation formula and a culture of last minute spending to avoid losing allocated funds. This was replaced with a book policy of “if you want it, we will buy it” (within reason). There were no more allocated budgets, but items were tracked for purposes of understanding expenditures. The policy empowered faculty to add to the collection based on actual needs. Librarians were empowered to fulfill faculty wants and desires and the library received goodwill from the faculty. The library changed processes making the entire program more transparent and removing obstacles to selecting books.

At the same time several high cost per use subscriptions were cancelled and the Library instituted unmediated Get It Now for faculty and graduate students. Faculty were empowered to purchased urgently needed articles, but often still opted to use ILL to acquire materials. Materials that had been underutilized were replaced with access to more journals from many publishers. The changes in the policies allowed Volpe Library to save money in the serials budget and shift allocations to the departments the desperately needed additional materials. I believe the changes were largely successful because librarians were able to effectively communicate the changes to the faculty in a way that created goodwill.

Hopefully, Ms. Holderman will follow up with a full paper in the Journal for Library Innovation. I look forward to thinking about patron driven approaches like this further.

Census Records

Census records are interesting documents - I find them fascinating because of what they can't describe. In 1900, my thrice great grandmother was living in Chicago. The census lists her relation to the head of household as "roomer". While not being inaccurate - the head of household was running a boarding house and she may have been paying rent - it is incomplete. You see, the head of household was previously married to her daughter, my thrice great aunt. This aunt died thirty years before. So, my thrice great grandmother could be described as either his mother-in-law or his former mother-in-law. The census worker probably called this too much information or recorded the information from talking with the neighbors. (It is not the only inaccuracy on the part of that census taker - his second wife - I found the marriage license, is listed as "wage hand". I suspect if I reported my wife as a wage hand I wouldn't be married for much longer. She was still with him when he died eight years later and inherited the property.)

Thirty years later, in the 1930 census, the same family once again stymies the census worker. The second wife owns the property. She is the head of household. All the other occupants of the house are initially listed as "roomer". The first two - both teenagers with the same last name, are crossed out and replaced with "relative". Again this is incomplete. The head of house hold is a widow. The two teenagers are her stepson's children. They are either her step grand children or her step son's children. Too much for the census.