A is for ...

The last couple of weeks have been so busy as the semester started today. I have been working on my syllabi and trying to work on some other of my writing projects. In between I have been reading a couple of books that I hope to use in some form on this project, but this has little time to actually explore the Ethel Index. As this semester is going to be pretty hectic, I wanted to figure out something that I could do with this blog that wouldn't be too time intensive. So my plan is to take one carton and completely digitize it. Sometimes I will present just the cards, while others I will add my thoughts. The obvious place to start is with A, since my grand-mother took so much time alphabetizing her index.

Here are a couple pictures of the first carton, which I have labeled "A-Absolutely TR."





This is another re-purposed laundry detergent box. The bottom, which I neglected to take a picture of, includes the "Arm & Hammer" logo.

Initially I thought I might digitize 20 cards tonight, but then I took a look at the first one and thought that would be enough. Here is the first card in the index:


In the top left corner are the capital and lower-case versions of the letter in print and in cursive. There is also a cut-out included that gives a basic history of the letter. On the right side, she has written different ways the letter has been represented in various languages (arabic, german, hebrew, yiddish, french, and russian). On the bottom she relates the letter to Hawthorn's Scarlet Letter and also has a reference to shorthand which was developed by Gregg and Pitman.

Once again the card folds open to uncover various other tidbits of information about the topic. Here are scans of all the included materials:





I am not going to go into every detail but there are several really interesting things collected here. It is hard to appreciate from the scan because the pencil markings are so light, but her A drawings are really cool. I especially like that she drew a piano keyboard in order to note where the A is. It is also noted on this card (and at least one other) that the A note has 435 vibrations per second. My other favorite fact is from the cut-out with the bull on it. Here we learn that the A was originally upside down. Before the Greeks took the alphabet from the Phoenicians, the point at the top of the A was its root. The Phoenicians named the letter aleph because it meant ox, and the upside down A resembles the head of an ox. Fascinating!

I think it is great that there is so much information included about the letter A. Though it is also important to state that it seems as if much of the information is repeated on various included materials. It might be fun to at some point attempt to edit all the information into a single entry and figure out exactly how much information is presented.

Anyway, I will start finding time to digitize the rest of this box, hopefully updating the blog at least twice a week.

First Interview

I have been too busy the past couple of weeks dealing with some annoying home owner emergencies and trying to get ready for the upcoming semester. As such the blog has suffered. This doesn't mean I have stopped working on the Ethel Index. While I haven't been examining the physical index, I have been giving a lot of thought to the project. Much of my time has been spent reading various books I think that will prove fruitful to my project. Several of these books are related to the process of writing a family history. Partly I am reading these to help me prepare for a series of interviews with family members about their memories of Ethel. Last week my Uncle Jimmy contacted me wanting to visit in order to drop off some additional entries he found while cleaning her house out, as well as some miscellaneous pictures. I invited him over for a bbq on Saturday and asked if he would be ok if I interviewed him. I conducted the interview yesterday. It lasted right around an hour and proved to be very helpful. Now I just have to find the time to transcribe the interview. For now I thought it would be good to just relay some initial thoughts.

If anyone is interested here is the list of questions I came up with before the interview. I started with general questions and then focused in on the index.

I was hoping you could talk about your relationship with grand-mom, especially as a child growing up.
What are your early recollections (before and after the divorce) of the relationship between your parents? What did they have in common, such as sense of humor, thirst for knowledge, etc?
How were education and knowledge viewed by your parents? How was their value enforced in the house? How did this shape your academic pursuits?
Would you characterize grand-mom as a collector? When did her passion for collecting begin? How was her collecting viewed by the family? Did you and your siblings collect things as well?
Was she always a reader? Did she always read the newspaper? How did she talk about her work with various newspapers?
One thing I remember as a child were the gift packages I would receive from grand-mom which would often include items that appeared to be purchased second hand (colored in coloring books etc). Was this tied more to an economic condition or to a personal view of the relative value of things? It is also interesting how this idea is reflected by the recycled nature of the index.

When did you first learn about the index? What were your first reactions?
Did you ever talk with grand-mom about the reasons for her creating the index? Was she proud of the index? Did she actively share it with other people? Did she try to involve other people?
While they don’t appear that regularly there are some entries with information gathered from the internet. My assumption is that these were gathered from her working and volunteering at libraries. Did she ever express a desire to have a internet connected computer at home? Or was it ever suggested and did she show resistance?
Can you talk a little about Grand-mom's interests as related to the topics covered by the index. The thing that strikes me is how general it is. For example did she enjoy watching television and movies?
What are your thoughts about the index now? What is its value?
I was hoping you could talk about your card. Was its creation organic or did you have a role in it? What is the family crest?

While I didn't read the questions to him, I referred to them during the interview and I think I asked most if not all of them in one form or another. I thought the interview went very well and look forward to transcribing it.

If there was one thing that stood out from the interview it was his views on the index. I remember at some point hearing him tell grand-mom that she was wasting her time because the Internet had already been invented. The interview pretty much confirmed that this was how he felt. When he first got to the house on Saturday I took him to see the index and we started talking about his card. I will update this post in a couple of days to include his card (and my cousin Heather's) but for the time being I will just describe it. Basically on the front is a family crest for Snyder, though we don't think it is our family crest but rather some more historically established Snyder family clan. Inside the card are two of Uncle Jimmy's business cards. There is no mention of a family relation. Uncle Jimmy was actually surprised that he had a card at all. His interest was actually in the other people named Jimmy Snyder. According to him, there are five Jimmy/James Snyders of note. The Ethel Index only includes a card for one of them, Jimmy The Greek Snyder. The lack of the other Jimmy Snyders confirmed for my uncle that the index wasn't as exhaustive as it could have been.

I will expand on this at some time, but for now I will just say that I was more surprised that Jimmy was her only child who had a card at all. And even with Uncle Jimmy's card, there is no mention that this is her son. In a way this makes sense because her goal seemed to be to capture facts and persons of note (though while my Uncle has had an interesting career, the information in the card does not justify its inclusion). The index wasn't a way of tracking personal family history, but rather as a way of tracking information worthy of print. Still, her card, as discussed in an earlier post, highlights her willingness to add something personal to the project. This inconsistent perspective will be something that I will continue to think about and look into.

Anyway, back to my reading list for the project. I have been reading A. J. Jacobs humorous memoir, The Know-It-All where he chronicles the year he spent reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) from A to Z. If you haven't read A. J. Jacobs, I highly recommend that you do. He is probably most famous for his book, The Year of Living Biblically, where he reads various religious texts and tries to live by all of their rules for a year. So at one point he finds out a friend has committed adultery and he throws stones at him. Anyway, I have been reading The Know-It-All because the Index is a kind of encyclopedia in itself. It is a very strange encyclopedia but still the same idea is there. As I go on I know I will have a lot more to say about this book as it relates to the index (for example about the accumulation of knowledge as it relates to intelligence and wisdom) but in this post I want to focus on one entry I found especially interesting (I am actually only up to G in the book).

In the book he is writing about reading the entry on Frigate Birds. One thing to know about the book is that A. J. Jacobs rarely completely stays on topic. Frigate Birds aren't mentioned until the last paragraph of his entry. Instead he talks about his interview with Jeopardy host Alex Trebek and how he intended to show him up with all of the knowledge he had gained from reading the EB. Instead Alex proves to be a pretty nice guy so A.J. backs down from his initial goal to make him look silly. As they talk, A.J. asks Alex for his perspective on the philosophy of knowledge. Here is Trebek's response: "I'm curious about everything--even things that don't interest me." I think that this perfectly sums up my grand-mom's index. As I uncovered through an earlier post, she didn't have any interest in the Beatles, but yet there is still a large amount of information about them in the index. Today I was looking at the index with my soon to be 6 year old son Jake and we pulled out the card for Legos, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones. I am positive my grand-mom had no interest in any of these things, but she had enough of a curiosity to include them in her index.

Which brings me back to the interview with my Uncle Jimmy. It was clear he initially felt the index was a waste of time. At the end of the interview I asked him if he still felt the same way about it now. I thought his answer was great. I am paraphrasing until I have the time to transcribe. Basically he said that it would have been a waste of time for him to create the index, but maybe it wasn't a waste of time for his mother.