so, I had the oddest (but in a cool way) day at the archives today . . . details IM . . .
Posted by
call me Ishmael (aka pacrat)
Apr 22 '15, 19:39
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so, one of the guys that works at the archives was checking archives emails this afternoon about 1:30. they sometimes get requests for information and that sort of thing, and it's been pretty fun tracking and running down information from people. we even get visitors from all over (yesterday there was a couple from Kansas City that drove all the way to spend the day looking thru some of our stuff, and remember that we're outside of Nashville. . .) . . .
so, anyway, this email today was from someone in the next town over from us, with a link to a blog by a guy in said town who does a blog relating to different things. this particular blog post had to do with a young woman who was born c. 1870 with a rare deformity that made her knees bend the opposite way. she spent time in a for-real freak sideshow for a couple of years as a teenager, making as much as $200 a week (LOTS of money back in the late 1800s !! ! !) before she started to suffer from depression and low self-esteem. there's a lot more to the story about what happened to her later in life that I won't go into here.
the cool thing to remember is that she spent the later years of her life in her hometown, just down the road from here where I live.
now, here's the crazy part . . . not 5 minutes later, a woman comes in who comes in at least once a week to look up genealogy stuff, we get to telling her about this person . . . and she says, 'wait, is she related to such and such and so and so?' yes, according to the information this blogger had, yes, she was. the woman who just came in said, well, then I'm related to her ! and sure enough, some of the people in her family tree are some of these folks related to the girl with the deformity . . .
how is that for crazy timing ?!!??!?!
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