The Second Blog Post - The Projects

Jack of all trades or curiosity killed the cat?

I have a couple active projects - The Ryves Holt House and The 19th Century Rensselaerville Letters. These are projects that I will probably be posting about the most. I may also be posting about others - my published project about a set of scale armour, my thesis on the use of wood at the Forbidden City, and a volunteer project for the Nautical Archaeological Society in the UK. I’d like to eventually add pages to this blog that will summarize my research on some of these projects so you can follow along as I discover new facts and synthesize new hypotheses. It's also important to note that when I work on all these projects, it's after work. I do not have funding, institutional support, or any incentive beyond my own interest in history.

The Ryves Holt House

According to the NPS website, this house was built in Lewes, DE in or around 1665. This makes it the oldest in situ building in the oldest town in the oldest state. So when I first visited in 2018, I just had to go see it. ...It's not a pretty building, per se. Over the centuries it has settled, drooping from the center line to the left and right. It has a series of additions to the left, rear, and upper levels. I was fascinated from the get go. My research on this house started with trying to see if I could confirm or find a more accurate construction date. But as I went along, I realized there were very few scholarly works about Lewes or the Ryves Holt House in contemporary publications. Now, my research has expanded to exploring the history of Lewes AKA the Whorekil, and the surrounding area in the 17th century as the land traded from the hands of the Lenapes to the Swedes, then the Dutch to the English (a tug of war for a few years). Its complicated.

The 19th Century Rensselaerville Letters

These are a series of letters between siblings and cousins of the Nile family in Rensselaerville, NY. These belong to my father’s half-sister and her children. Since I am the ‘family historian,’ I was given the privilege to transcribe the letters for my aunt and cousins. What followed was a revival of my ability to read cursive, and a lot of squinting at cross-hatch writing. As I worked my way through the letters, little and big stories started to appear: sibling squabbles, adventures to the Wild West, even references to Confederate spies and Abraham Lincoln. I only have a dozen or so letters, but there could be a lot more hiding back in RVill. Stay tuned.

The Scale Armour

A project I started in undergrad with my twin and our mentor. We finally published right before I earned my master’s degree. The armor was found in the basement at the Nebraska History Museum, and no one had any idea what in the world it was or where it came from. So we tried to figure it out. ...We basically still have no idea. We traced it to El Paso, but we could not figure out who wore it and why. Our paper goes through several hypotheses and our data collection to try to find something plausible. We even found a second, although disarticulated, set of scale armour at the Met in NYC (I’ll see it one day!). This is really an open case and I hope to discover more about it over time.

Wood and the Forbidden City

My graduate thesis. I would love to return to this and explore some of the things that truly fascinated me. I started with a series of questions - Why were Imperial Chinese buildings constructed of wood? What impact does the construction in wood and Imperial Chinese traditions of reconstruction mean to the field of Architectural Preservation? I was also just plain interested in the construction phases of the Forbidden City, how often the buildings were rebuilt, and how they kept the buildings in good condition. The thesis didn’t quite do what I wanted it to, but I finished it and I defended it. Maybe there will be a remix.

NAS and the Small Boat Archive

This is a volunteer project at the Nautical Archaeological Society. They have an archive of drawings, photos, interviews, and documents of a collection of small boats from all over the world. The physical boats have since been sold off to China, Gdansk, and various private collections. But the paper archive remains at the University of South Hampton. I stumbled across this project by accident. I have always had a soft spot for marine archaeology. They requested the help of volunteers to catalog the digitized files. Since we have all been trapped in our houses for most of 2020, they opened the volunteer opportunities to international people. I immediately signed up. I do occasionally have to either stay up all night or get up very early to match their time zone, but it's worth it. 

It's a disparate group, I’ll admit. I just can’t seem to sit still. There are just too many interesting stories to discover. Are there any history stories you’d like to share? Or historical events/people/places you have always wanted to learn more about?