Okay, this is a long shot, but I'm trying to find any of the Seacoast or Portsmouth newspapers for the summer of 1902 ( Read more... )

There are several small cemeteries on Star Island, not counting the fact that the entire eastern end of the island is an unmarked graveyard. The most obvious is the Caswell Cemetery, a collection of 11 marked graves just in front of the hotel. There are other pieces of slate and basalt that bear no names, but line up in rows with the marked ( Read more... )

John Downs’ book Spray of Salt provides a different view of Shoaler women, though his account is just as strongly biased as that provided by Celia Thaxter. Downs portrayed all of his female relatives as sterling examples of virtuous Victorian domesticity. [...] Downs devoted nearly a full page to descriptions of the “cornucopia of food” put up by ( Read more... )

The Boston Transcript published an alleged letter from the Shoals in 1843 in which the inhabitants were described as though they were newly-discovered savages. The letter asserted that the Shoalers wore their hair “very long, in rough matted locks; in hue it is whitish and bears a strong resemblance to tow.” Men went about the island shirtless and ( Read more... )

Google Documents has a "Collaborate" option. I could, theoretically, post the whole thing there and invite volunteers by email. That way, you'd have an email in your inbox, and could (possibly?) see what changes anyone else was suggesting, so there wasn't too much duplicated effort. I can't seem to find an efficient "Track Changes" option, but that ( Read more... )

I wrote 5,000 words today in my thesis. I'm now up to about 110 pages, and still have several chapters to go. I figure this will top out around 150 pages or so. There are 270 citation-footnotes so far, and nearly 125 items in the bibliography ( Read more... )

Okay, this is really dorky, but I'm looking for someone to read ~5 pages (two separate opinions) of legal commentary to see if I'm missing something. I found the insurance lawsuit from when the first hotel on Star burned down ( Read more... )

I nearly had heart failure this afternoon - I went to open up my thesis-in-progress, and got the "Unable to open file" message. I tried again, with another file in the same folder. Same thing. Tried to open some of the Excel spreadsheets where I've been keeping annotated timelines... "Unable to open file ( Read more... )

I now have a new icon for thesis-related work.

For those of you just joining us, I'm writing a master's thesis on the rise and fall of Gosport, the fishing community that used to be out at Star Island, one of the Isles of Shoals (off ME/NH) - the factors that drew people over here to fish, how the communities fit together and created the fabric of ( Read more... )

One of Barb's coworkers had a windstorm a couple of months ago that took out a lot of his trees, including a number of Black and Honey Locusts. He has offered them to us if we want to come get them out. Hey you nuns, wanna meet the Pope? Locust wood doesn't rot easily and is perfect for certain aspects of boatbuilding. There are at least three ( Read more... )