a cold morning at the end of january; i get up and take care of the dogs. the dogs are screaming and running around, until i let them out, let them pee and poop feed them, let them get cold, let them back in, and they all settle in on beds or chairs, or in the case of one, on my lap. he's the little one, soft and fluffy, with no particular appetite in the morning, but if there's a lap, namely mine, he'll find it and let me pet him indefinitely into the morning. he was also there when i woke up. i credit him with my good mental health and sustained ability to carry on.

my research brought me back to this file that my mother gathered, so it has a lot of her handwriting, and i'm thinking about her a lot. in fact both my parents died in late january, my dad a few years back and my mom a few years before him - so it's that time of year. and apparently both my parents went off do research on their ancestors and a lot of their work ended up in this one file that i have in front of me. i am one of the few who can read her handwriting though, so that gives more urgency to what i'm doing. the information i'm after leads me back to oneida county, new york, in about 1863, and it turns out that in the times of those ancestors, the oneida community was big in that area. it was actually big in about 1844, and had dissolved by 1863. all this timeline i still have to put together. and the best i can figure, my ancestors were not involved with that commune.

but the oneida community was a so-called "perfectionist" community, and that doesn't mean they had to have everything perfect, so much as it meant that they believed we were already perfect, and therefore could practice free love (they coined the term, apparently) and this was quite a scandal at that time. they were a community - owned everything as a group, and had a certain philosophy that everyone bought into when they joined the community.

my ancestor, however, bought an old woolen mill and converted it to a factory that made horse hay forks. and he did this right in the middle of the civil war - probably with the encouragement of the union authorities who knew they needed implements and such for the war effort. he was good at that kind of implement manufacture.

as i look at these old books i realize a lot of this stuff is not really freely available on the web. my mom went and found these old books in the library - copied the pages as appropriate - wrote the reference on the page itself in her handwriting. now when i look them up on the web amazon will have a hardback copy for like fifty bucks with no reviews - these are not flying off the shelves - and the information in them is for all practical purposes not available to the public. i search my ancestor and the company he established, and nothing. it's there, but google books hasn't digitized it and made it available at a wider level, as it has done to some others.

i am struck partly by the feeling of reading her handwriting when trying to decipher what i have. also, she appears to have saved an entire newspaper article about the oneida community, and i know she always liked their silverware - as if it was a tangent for her, she'd found maybe just enough to suspect that these ancestors had something to do with them, but in the end, came to the same conclusion that i did. they arrived well before the community did. they farmed or worked in the area. they certainly were aware of the community and the reputation it brought the area. but they went on living their lives around it. if one of those ancestors (keep in mind that within a few generations, i can have eight or sixteen who arrived in oneida county at some time and married within the area if not from the commune itself) is connected to it, i could simply have overlooked the possibility. it's an open book, still.