My New BFF: Elijah Boardman

Today, I went in to work with Cathy at the Litchfield Historical Society. I always have a great time when I go in with her, and today was no exception. I started out doing some scanning of old pictures -- photographs & portraits of an old Litchfield family for the archives. Kind of repetitive, but I think it was helpful (C. told me to do it, so hopefully it was of some use). And some of the pictures were great: the clothes worn were wonderful. One woman -- I'm guessing turn of the century? -- was wearing a huge silk dress that was massively poofy in the skirt & shoulders. It had a couple of huge bows on the front of the skirt connected by these streams of flowers that wound around the skirt up to the neck. Outrageous.

After a while, Cathy pulled me away from that to work on another project. The LHS has been given Elijah Boardman's papers. You may recognize the Ralph Earl portrait of him.  The account books below his desk by his legs were lost for a long time, and recently recovered and donated to the LHS. They've been kind of explored, although not very thoroughly: they are waiting for someone to come along and analyze them. You can learn more about that here.

Anyway, my project is to go through his books from 1790 - 1795, when he was building his new house, and look for references to the building of it. So I'm flagging anything that might be interesting. It is incredibly fun. I'm enjoying so many things about it -- the names (Erastus!), the sales (so much rum! and also tea, sugar, ribbons, labor, and recording deliveries sent & received by Boardman), the people who appear regularly, the settling of one man's accounts on his death, when Ralph Earl (!!!!!!) came in to purchase things, and so forth. It's slow going (for now at least) since I'm not yet used to his handwriting, but I hope it will pick up as I go. And I'm learning his writing style, so that's helping. It's a really cool resource, and it's a shame that it's not been explored more.

Cathy had a "do" this evening that she had to go to, so Rufus and I wandered around West Hartford for a while (very cute, although most everything was closed). Then we had dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, which was fun -- we'd neither of us been there before & he had a card as a teacher gift, so that was nice. We had a great time. Then we picked Cathy up & got back here, so that was it. I'm really looking forward to getting back to the books tomorrow. Laugh all you want, I'm a dork and I'm proud of it.