Correction regarding Black Fork photos

I did a little nosing around with Google Maps and learned that I made an error in describing the scene of John Miller Martin's homestead in Black Fork, Arkansas. When I was looking over the fence and thought I was looking southeast, it was more like south, so not all of the empty field was JMM's land, just part of it. I've created a custom map that shows the layout of the property with respect to the Google map. Be sure to view in hybrid mode to see the landforms, including the field.

VA Excursion: Day 5

I left Dandridge, TN bright and early this morning (8:00am EDT) for the start of what turned out to be a beautiful day. Driving up through the Shenendoah Valley (between the Cumberland range and the Smokey Mountain/Blue Ridge range of the Appalachians was a spectacular sight to behold. Of course, getting good photos was a challenge given the traffic and lack of designated overlook points.

The Smoky Mountains as seen from Dandridge, TN

After turning southeast onto I-64 for the final push into Richmond, I found myself heading downhill for much of the remainder of the trip, dropping down through the Blue Ridge mountains into the gentler foothills. Along this stretch of road, I finally found a decent overlook to stop and photograph the scenerey.







The closer I got to Richmond, the more subdued the terrain became, or at least what little I could see of it for heavy woods. I finally rolled into Richmond, VA around 4:00pm (EDT) and got to the Doubletree around 4:30pm (EDT), after being completely lost for a while. Nice room on the 15th floor, but the parking is valet only, and I hate not having ready access to my car.


Richmond, VA, as seen from my room on the 15th floor of the Doubletree

Shortly, the Pace Society members will be gathering for a group photo, then a dinner featuring a presentation by a research archivist from the Library of Virginia. I should also find out at that point if I've been elected to the Board of Trustees.

Tomorrow: Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Pace's Paines!

VA Excursion: Day 4

(Tonight, I'm blogging from the Jefferson Inn in Dandridge, TN, just east of Knoxville, located squarely between the Cumberland Mountains and the Smoky Mountains, in a valley that I'll be following up to Virginia in the morning. The clock on my laptop says 10:34pm, but it is actually 11:34pm. The eastern third of Tennesse is in the Eastern Time Zone. Miles travelled since leaving Leander, TX: 1,545.9! My poor car. Heck, my poor backside.... )

The drive from Memphis to Nashville was thankfully uneventfull. I say "thankfully" because I-40 continues to be clogged with tractor-trailors, which makes for some nerve-wracking driving. Needless to say, I avoided risking snapping photos on the road, but picture the landscape just east of Bastrop, TX, but with a greater assortment of trees, and you'll have a good idea of what the western half of Tennessee looks like: gently rolling hills, covered with forests with occassional clearings for pastures and fields, much like central Arkansas was.

Since I overslept a bit, I didn't roll into Nashville until about 1:30pm. I spent most of this afternoon at the Tennessee State Library and Archives (immediately adjacent to the Tennessee State Capital building) looking through the Rhea family papers, but did not have time to dig all the way through them. I’m looking for the original references to Matthew “the Rebel” Campbell, the progenitor of the Rhea line. I had previously viewed the microfilm of the collection via Interlibrary Loan, but the images were of such poor quality that they were largely illegible. Having seen how difficult some of the originals are to read, it is no wonder. I’ll probably go back there Monday (after spending Sunday in Lincoln Co.) to pick up some requested photocopies and continue looking through them. I made sure to request photocopies of the Rev. Joseph Rhea’s journal describing his passage from Ireland to America aboard the “George” in 1769. It is fascinating material, and at the end he even jotted down some sea shanties sung by the crew (yarr!). The whole collection should be published in print or on the Internet. The political and military correspondence from the Revolution and the War of 1812 alone would make worthy fodder for history graduate students looking for a dissertation topic. I wish I had more time to delve a bit more deeply into the collection, or at least permssion to make digital photos of the items.
The Tennessee State Capital Building



The Manuscript reading room closed at 4:30pm, so it was time to hit the road again. It was rather bad timing for leaving Nashville, as their rush hour traffic seems to rival that of Austin. Once clear of the city, I grabbed a bite to eat, then pushed on. Gradually, the hills started getting larger and larger, until they began to resemble the Ozarks of northwestern Arkansas. Suddenly, I found the road taking a long steep grade up to the top of the Cumberland plateau, where the terrain levelled off a bit (it being, well, a plateau). After a while, the road pitched downward again for another long, steep grade off the plateau and through the Cumberland Mountains. By the time I reached Knoxville, night had fallen. I pushed on for a little while longer until reaching Dandridge, where I decided to stop for the night.
Heading towards the Cumberland Plateau

Heading down from the Cumberland Plateau through the Cumberland Mountains


Tomorrow, the final push through to Richmond, VA!

VA Excursion: Day 3

Another full day, and now I'm kicking back and relaxing at a Super 8 Motel just east of Memphis, Tennessee.

I started off the day with a drive from Fayetteville, AR to Siloam Springs. Once again, a beautiful drive, especially since it clipped through part of the Ozark Nationional Forest. (No point in trying to get photos: you literally can't see the forest for the trees.) Passing through the outskirts of Siloam Springs, I continued on to Gentry and found the old Bloomfield Cemetery. Based upon various signage, I've concluded that Bloomfield was an old Mennonite community, but all that is left now is a church and scattered houses. At the Bloomfield Cemetery, as I had expected, I found the graves of my great-great grandfather, Lewis Sion Glenn, his second wife, Amanda, his son John M., grandaughter Norma Jean, and daughter Una May Moore.







Next, I continued on to Bentonville. Despite the controversies over Wal-Mart's medieval labor practices and negative impact on locally-owned businesses, there is no denying that being the headquarters of Wal-Mart has benefitted Bentonville. This small city is bustling and growing like mad, with suburban housing developments and clusters of hotels and big box stores normally only found in towns at least twice as large (or nearer major population centers). This buzz of economic activity is a far cry from the economic stagnation that I saw back in Scott county the previous day, where I had overheard a couple of locals talking about how Wal-Mart had put most of the mom and pop stores in the area out of business.

Anyway, I headed to Compton Gardens, a botanical attraction located in a draw just a few blocks north of the Benton County courthouse, where the net had told me I would locate the Benton County Genealogical Society Library. Upon arrival, I was struck by the beauty of the place, and felt it had to be the coolest place possible for doing research. Sadly, when I got to the door, I found a sign indicating that the Society Library had moved to the public library. Oh well...




The Bentonville Public Library is a newish structure, built with funds donated by Wal-Mart. I found the genealogical reading room within, but found the pickings a bit poor. I couldn't find my Glenn ancestors on the county death index, nor any mention of them in any history books about the area. I did, however, find mention in a collection of stories about Siloam Springs of what I believe to be a related Glenn family, who, like Lewis, lived in Flint Creek Valley. However, the article in question kept making references to Deleware County, which is just across the border in Oklahoma. My nagging suspicions that Lewis lived in Oklahoma were reinforced. Next, I headed back over to the courthouse to see if I could find him in the probate indices. No luck. If I am to find out anything more about him, I'll have to search in Colcord, the county seat of Deleware County, OK. But that would have to wait for another day. For now, I needed to make tracks to the other side of the state of Arkansas.

I headed in the direction of Little Rock, with a side excursion to the north of Clarksville, in Johnson County, where my Martin ancestors first settled in Arkansas upon arriving from Tennessee sometime in the late 1830's. I had found mention of Solomon Perry Martin having been buried at Red Lick Mountain in Mt. Vernon Cemetery, not far from his home at Martin Spring. (I've found nothing definitive on the subject, but it is my assumption that Martin Spring was named for our family.) Sol, who served in the Union Army during the Civil War, was killed by bushwackers during a visit home to check on his family. Stories passed down through the generations indicate that he was killed at a place in Spadra Dry Creek Hollow called Blood Rock, located about 5 or 6 miles northwest of Martin Springs. I would love to get a photo of that site as well, but, unfortunately, I've never been able to obtain directions more definitive than that, and I fear that all who once knew where it is are long dead.

I had no trouble finding the cemetery, although it is a mystery to me why a cemetery (and community) would be named Mt. Vernon, when the geographical feature it sits upon is called Red Lick Mountain. (The cemetery is just over the peak, on the other side of the Mountain from Martin Springsand the bulk of the Mt. Vernon community.) There, I not only found Sol's marker (no dates, only the unit in which he served), but also the headstones of many other Martins, my kin. There were also quite a few Bean graves, who are linked to the Martins by marriage.




Knowing the property description of Sol's land from a federal land grant, and having located it on a General Land Office platt map drawn when Arkansas first became a state, I had come up with a rough guess as to where it is located physically, by comparing the platt map with modern ones. Unfortunately, landforms have changed, and rivers have been diverted. There is even now a man-made lake at the foot of Red Lick Mountain. In any case, I knew my guess was crude. At a crossroads at what I though must be Martin Spring, I flagged down a local to ask. He grinned, looked around, waved his hand about and indicated that where we were was pretty much it. He pointed to a field nearby that to this day is owned by Martins, and to a house next to us that he said was built on the site of where the old Martin homestead once stood, but had since burned down. I thanked him and snapped a few photos, then hit the road again.


Martin Spring as it is today: a church, a crossroads, and...


...a house built where the old Martin homestead once stood.


A Martin-owned field, part of Solomon P. Martin's original land grant.


Looking west across Ludwig Lake, a manmade reservoir at the foot of Red Lick Mountain.

A view of Red Lick Mountain looking NNE from the SSE side of Ludwig Lake.


As I neared Little Rock, the landscape continued to be dominated by wooded hills and mountains which diminished in size the further I progressed. Past Little Rock along the way to Memphis, the mountains were pretty much gone, replaced by scattered rolling hills and the flat (and sometimes swampy) flood plains of the Mississippi. It was well after dark once I crossed the Big Muddy. I would have loved to have snapped a photo of the night-time Memphis skyline shining over the waters of the Mississippi, but driving conditions at the time were far too dangerous to permit that. Let us just say that there are FAR too many semis on I-40 between Little Rock and Memphis.

And so, another day of exploration is concluded. I had planned to go to Fayetteville to research the Isoms tomorrow, but tonight I realized that the Lincoln County Genealogical Society library is only open on weekends. I'll have to do that on the return trip. Instead, I'll be continuing on tomorrow to Nashville to visit the Tennessee State Library & Archives to examine the Rhea family papers. I had previously examined microfilm images of them thanks to the Interlibrary Loan progam, but most of the images were of far too poor quality to read. Now I can examine the originals in search of clues about one of my more mysterious ancestors, Matthew "the Rebel" Campbell, who fled Scotland after fighting on the loosing side of the Monmouth Rebellion and changed his last name to something that would eventually evolve into Rhea. (My ggg-grandfather James Isom/Isham was married to Altamira Rhea, one of Matthew's descendants.)

VA Excursion: Days 1 & 2

(Internet access at last, albeit painfully slow as far as image uploads are concerned.)

Herein follows the first entry in my account of my trip to Richmond, VA, for the annual meeting of the Pace Society of America (with misc. side trips for further genealogical research.)

Day 1: Sunday, June 17, 2007

I had planned on leaving at 8:00am, but there were so many things to do to finish my preparations that I wasn't able to hit the road until after noon. Starting at Temple, it rained on me off and on for the remainder of the trip. That wasn't so bad until after dark when I found myself traversing a winding road through the Ozark mountains in Quachita National Forest south of Waldron, but I managed to arrive safe and sound at around 9:30pm. A sad thing that this part of the drive was at night. There was just enough light that I could see only hints of gloroius mountain vistas around me.

Crossing the Red River into Arkansas.

Day 2: Monday, June 18, 2007

After a rough night of sleep (the mattresses at the Coachman's Inn in Waldron seem to be made from the finest quality concrete) I got up and had breakfast at the Rock Cafe on main street. This is the sort of rural hole-in-the-wall where the local old folks gather to gossip. I saw a lot of that kind southern rural flavor in this area, at times quite bucolic and charming, and at other times to a degree that conjured up every redneck stereotype touched upon in a Jeff Foxworthy comedy routine: trailer houses with multiple non-functioning vehicles and hunting dogs in the yard, confererate flags, you name it.

Once breakfast was over, I had some time to kill before the Scott County Genealogical Society offices opened, so I decided to go ahead and make the jaunt southeast of town to Parks Cemetery to visit the graves of my great-great-great grandparents, John Miller Martin and Lovinia (Lipe) Martin, my earliest known Martin ancestors. Once out of Waldren, I was able to catch a glimpse of what I had missed the night before. At Parks, I could see the Quachita Ozarks looming to the south. (Picture the Texas Hill Country, but with the hills twice as big, and covered with dense forests.)

Parks Cemetery, looking south with the Ozarks in the background. The graves with the wrought-iron fence belong to my ggg-grandparents, John Miller Martin and Lovinia (Lipe) Martin. Adjoining the fenced-in area are three graves marked only by rocks and bordered-in my a concrete barrier.
A closer look at the Martin graves.
A close-up view of the gate.
John Miller Martin's grave.
Lovinia (Lipe) Martin's grave. The top portion with her name is missing, but a second, smaller stone with her initials is right next to the headstone.

Unfortunately, I was unable to locate any other Martin graves, although I did find a large batch of Wisenhunts (linked by marriage). Many of the graves in this cemetery are marked only but rough stones, and many of the shaped stones are degraded so badly that the markings on them are illegible.

Next, I headed back into Waldren to visit the Scott County Genealogical Society. Unfortunately, they only operate from 11:00am until 1:00pm. I could easly spend a week there researching their collection, so I'll be obliged to come back sometime when I can stay longer. I did manage to procure a copy of "From Memory's Scrapbook: A History of Early Days of Scott County Arkansas" by P.M. Claunts (1938) which contains some first-hand recollections of some of my kin, as well as a collection of Lipe family research. The latter document contained a gold-mine for me: detailed directions to John Miller Martin's property in Black Fork, where he homesteaded prior to moving to Parks. I already had the property description and had located it on 19th century platt maps, but I had been unable to correlate those maps with modern roads and landmarks. With these finds in hand, I proceded to the Scott County Courthouse County Clerk's office to peruse county records. This being my first attempt to search county records myself, rather than relying on the fruits of other people's labors or conducting Internet searches, most of this time was a learning curve, and I didn't really find anything in the short time that I was there. Again, I'll need to return when I can spend more time. But, it was well into the afternoon, and if I wanted to see Black Fork by daylight, I needed to get moving, but not before snapping some shots of the SCGS building and Waldron's Main Street.

I suppose I should explain for a moment my excitement at finding the directions to the Black Fork property. For me, place holds deep meaning. In terms of genealogical research, actually seeing where my ancestors lived tells me far more about how they lived than reams of deeds, wills, and death certificates. Now, I had directions to the very place where my earliest-known Martin ancestors lived. The catch is, the only currently-existing road leading in or out of Black Fork comes in from Oklahoma. Specifically, from a little town called (and I'm not kidding here) Hicks, Oklahoma. (On the way to Hicks, I passed a turn-off leading to Broken Bow, OK. It is pretty clear that the opening scenes of the first episode of "Enterprise" were NOT shot on location in the real Broken Bow. Instead of flat farmland, the real place is mountainous and woody.)

On the Oklahoma side, just east of Hicks, Black Fork Road crosses a TINY iron bridge with a road bed made of wooden planks. To be perfectly honest, I was pretty apprehensive about driving across this rickety relic.

Once Black Fork Road crosses the border into Arkansas, it is unpaved, and I still have the mud spatters encrusting my car to prove it. Black Fork township is the most southwesterly portion of Scott County, although all that remains of the township proper are a church, a few cemeteries, and a handful of scattered houses. The John Miller Martin propery consists of a quarter of a section (a section being one square mile) consisting of four 1/8 of a section chunks arranged in a "T" configuration, with the stem of the "T" pointing off to the west. That portion of the property, marked by where the road crosses the Black Fork of the Poteau River and intersects with a crossroad, lies just over two miles in from the Oklahoma/Arkansas border. The map I found showed a full crossroads, but where Black Fork Rd. should have continued was blocked by a gate leading into pastureland. Judging by the signage on the fence, the property is now a hunting lease.

Everything you see in this photo was once owned by John Miller Martin.

The Black Fork of the Poteau River.


Over the fence looking east....

Over the fence looking southeast. The ridge in the distance is Black Fork Mountain, which forms the southern boundary of the valley.

Just as I was getting into my car to leave, this huge bird swept over the road and landed in the river.

The road back to Hicks just short of the border. The transition back to pavement doesn't show well in this shot.

Back across that acursed bridge!

Having satisfied my curiosity about Black Fork, I set course back to NW Arkansas. I wish I had my camera ready at the time, but just before crossing back into Arkansas just outside of Fort Smith there was a HUGE Choctaw Nation casino. Failing to find a public WiFi access point in Ft. Smith, I continued north along I-540 towards Fayetteville, where I was determined to stop for the night there instead of continuing on to Siloam Springs as planned in order to ensure that I stayed at a place with Internet access. The drive up to Fayetteville was gorgeous, and included a trip through a tunnel through one of the mountains.

Once in Fayetteville, I checked into a Holliday Inn Express and found a fairly decent Thai restaurant. (They definitely moderate the spices. The Pad Prik I ordered had three pepper icons on the menu, but I found it pretty mild.) Tomorrow, after what I hope will be a good night's sleep, I'm heading to Siloam Springs (nothing really to see since I haven't located where my gg-grandfather Lewis Sion Glenn actually lived, but it is along the way), then Gentry to see Lewis' grave, Bentonville for searching the county archives, then a dash across the state to Memphis, TN.

While I'm in a Steampunk mood... Steam Trek!

This is absolutely hilarious. Star Trek meets Georges Méliès.

Do I have time for a new hobby?

I have so little free time, but electrolytic etching of patterns onto brass plates looks horribly fun to me (not to mention the steampunk monitor and keyboard also featured on the site, as well as this steampunk mouse and "Telecalculograph" featured on another site)....

Watch "The Dark Side" Online

This has been available online for sometime now, but well worth mentioning. "The Dark Side" is an episode of PBS' FrontLine detailing Vice President Dick Cheney's involvement with intelligence manipulation during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This is essential viewing.

Two of the coolest videos ever

The first is an extraordinary CGI visualization of the internal biomolecular activities of a white blood cell, entitled "The Inner Life of the Cell":



The depictions of the transcription of mRNA into proteins and of vesicles "walking" along microtubules via motor proteins are particularly fascinating. This video has garnered a great deal of interest of late, both in the educational community, and in Hollywood. Have a gander at the Wired article.

The second is a startling bit of micro-cinematography of the real thing, made possible by the use of fluorescent-tagged proteins:

How Microsoft Botched DST 2007

Well, March 11 has come and gone. The mini-Y2K has passed. As expected, nothing major has gone wrong, but there are many minor glitches, and people will be missing a lot of meetings for the next few weeks. After a huge push by IT folk (I've personally put in about 100 hours on DST remediation), we've passed the hump, but Microsoft has a lot of seriously peeved customers. The question is, do they realize just how annoyed we are?

Design Flaws

Before I go into the problems with Microsoft's handling (or mis-handling) of the DST transition, I suppose I should touch upon some underlying design flaws in Microsoft's products which contributed to the issue, and, admittedly, limited Microsoft's ability to respond to the issue in a timely manner.

• Windows Boxes Tick Local Time - Due to the desktop-centric origins of Microsoft's offerings, the system clocks on Windows boxes tick local time (a design flaw shared by OpenVMS), instead of ticking UTC. Systems which tick UTC instead of local time, such as Unix and related operating systems (including Mac OS X), only have to worry about DST issues in the presentation layer.
• Exchange Calendar Data Stored in UTC - Ordinarily, storing Calendar data in UTC would be a good thing, except that combining this with the aforementioned fact that Windows systems tick local time makes rebasing (correcting Calendar items for changes in DST rules) problematic. This is because differing DST rules may be in effect between the time that the Calendar item is created and the time it is displayed. When the item is created, local time is translated to UTC. When the item is subsequently displayed, UTC is translated to local time, potentially (as in this case) under different DST rules. Remember, when we shift in and out of DST, we don't want the local time of an appointment to change, just the underlying UTC time. If a meeting was at 10:00am before, it should still be at 10:00am after DST kicks in. So why bother with the translation to UTC?
  
• Multiple Timezone Data Fields Associated With Exchange Mailboxes - Exchange Calendar objects have timezone data associated with them. Specifically, there are four timezone fields: OWA timezone, CDO timezone, Outlook timezone, and recurring meeting timezone. ( Please note that if rebasing is performed after the Exchange server is patched, the OWA timezone data is not correctly updated. Unfortunately, this guidance was not provided until fairly late in the process. More on that later.) So, why four fields (not all of which are properly readable by the rebasing tools)? Only a handful of people in Redmond likely know why.
• Windows Stores Only One Set Of DST Rules - Most other operating systems are capable of simultaneously storing multiple sets of DST rules, including specifications of when given rules take effect. This is why most Unix vendors were able to release DST updates shortly after the energy legislation mandating this change was passed in 2005. However, Windows can only store one set of DST rules at any given time, so Microsoft had to wait until after DST ended in the fall of 2006 to release DST patches containing the 2007 rules.
  

Microsoft's Response: Belated and Incoherrant

With these fundamental design flaws out of the way, we can now go on to discuss Microsoft's tardy and uncoordinated response to this issue.

I've already touched upon the reason why Microsoft was unable to release the OS-level DST patch until November of 2006 (well behind other OS vendors), but that is no excuse for the fact that the Exchange patch was not available until January, nor were the rebasing tools available until February, and, as mentioned earlier, the guidance for using them kept changing right on through into March. All of these tools should have been fully completed, debugged, and documented in time for release in November, instead of forcing IT departments all across the nation to go into a last minute scramble to prepare for March 11.

This lack of coordination and preparation raises some troubling questions: were the OS and Exchange engineers even coordinating their efforts? Why were the tools not all released at the same time? Why were they not properly tested, leading to changes in vendor guidance for their deployment at the eleventh hour (after it was too late for most of us)?

Speaking of testing, the Exchange Calendar Update Tool is extremely buggy. Not only does it not reliably correct Calendar items (a weakness shared by the Outlook Update Tool for which it serves as a wrapper), but it does not properly extract all four timezone fields for all users. I wasted nearly two weeks on the phone with Microsoft PSS trying to resolve the 0x80004005 errors that the tool was generating whenever I tried to extract timezone data for the users on my Exchange server, only to eventually learn that the solution was to only attempt to extract timezone info for recurring meetings. In other words, when running msextmz.exe, the msextmz.ini file should always have ExportTimezones set to zero or commented out. Just use the ReadCalendarTimezones value for running in export mode. In other words, don't bother trying to use the tool to correct anything other than recurring meetings.

To top everything off, when the tool runs in update mode, it spawns a new Outlook instance for each mailbox being updated, instead of simply using the underlying MAPI libraries. This to me demonstrates the last-minute approach that was taken in putting this tool together.

A Bad Idea Implemented Badly

Of all of the brilliant ideas that Ben Franklin had, Daylight Saving Time, well, wasn't one of them. Sure, it made sense in a world lit only by fire where candles were precious comodities, but it makes little sense in our modern world of 24 hour lifestyles, not to mention the energy lost having to run air conditioning longer in the hot south.

Congress may have had good intentions when they extended DST in the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005, but any energy savings that may have been realized have been more than offset by lost productivity. Businesses, especially their IT departments, have had to put countless projects on hold to address this situation, and Microsoft's late and lackluster efforts in this area have certainly not helped matters.

Note: This article is written primarily from the perpective of an IT administrator. For an end-user viewpoint, take a look at http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9689890-2.html?tag=nefd.aof .