Sounds of the early 1900s

As I have been working on this manuscript, in my mind I can often hear the music that played on old Victrolas around the turn of the century. In those days, before flat wax and ceramic discs, music was reproduced from live performances via cylinder recordings. Typically they have been difficult to even listen to now because of differences in the cylinders and how they needed to be played. But thanks to an effort by the Department of Special Collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara, all you need is your computer.

Have a look at their web site. There are over 6,000 recordings archived there, some of which never made any commercial release. You can hear everything from the Edison Military Band in 1906 to Elizabeth Spencer in 1916. All recordings are in multiple formats (MP3 and WAV) and are in the public domain (no copyright restrictions).

My iTunes media player software is going to be busy.

New Wilson-Bingham Family History Blog

"New Wilson-Bingham Family History what?"

Blog, as I'm sure many of you are already familiar, is the abbreviation for web log, or a journal posted regularly directly to the web. I have decided to publish information about our book effort publicly online to see if it could draw in others researching our lineage and possibly provide more data and historical background to us. All the search engines will be able to find what we put in our newsletters (I carefully edit out anything personal or private like addresses, phone numbers, and emails).

On this blog, found at http://wilsonbingham.tripod.com, you will be able to quickly access past newsletters without having to remember a password or username as with our Yahoo! Group. (That still exists though as a place for storing the majority of our "stuff").

So what's so different? Well, if you don't like e-mail updates, or they keep getting lost in all the spam, you can use a Feed Reader software package to subscribe to our blog and read the posts as if you were subscribed to a newspaper or magazine. You control subscription and unsubscription and there is never any spam to worry about. It's easy to do. Just visit our feed link at http://feeds.feedburner.com/wilsonbingham and follow the instructions there. Very self-explanatory, but if you need help, I'll be happy to provide it.

Seek and Ye Shall Find: Locate original documents on the web

Some of you may appreciate the significance of this list of links, especially if you have librarian blood flowing through your veins like I do. Lifehacker.com, which is a blog like this one, has pulled together a list, however inexhaustive it may yet be, of some sites which contain original documents on almost every subject, ancient and modern. I almost got lost in a trance perusing through high-resolution photos of original texts on everything from the origins of Christianity to some weird sanskrit document written at the turn of the 20th century claiming to be a channeled book about ancient Indian UFOs.

But what will be of most interest to us in writing this book will be what can be found about life in England, Australia, and the United States between about 1530 (and earlier) and the mid 1900s.

Have fun looking through the sites and let me know if you find anything we can use in the book.