Number Three of 4-Pronged Research Plan

One of my big questions about the Herstory project was whether there would be enough printed materials on women in the seventeen century. I soon found out there are numerous books for me to research.

I have to thank Nancy Price at the Rathbun Memorial Library (rathbunlibrary.blogspot.com) for her assistance in finding some of the books I wanted. Sometimes she had to contact universities to find them.

The CCAR program for libraries is a wonderful program that is a boon to someone like me, who wants books from all over the state. I cannot imagine what it would have cost me to travel around the state picking up books. The CCar brings them right to your library of choice and that is where you return them no matter where they came from.

The State of Connecticut keeps threatening to cut this program and we all need to be diligent in supporting CCar. There are many people dependent upon this program to find the books they need. Just imagine if each library had to go back to trying to keep up with purchasing all the new books. This way if a library has already purchased a popular book, all the other libraries do not have to buy it. I have contacted Gov. Malloy’s office and added my two cents as I hope many others have also.

I quickly learned that there were specific writers that were respected for their research of women’s lives in that time period. Elisabeth Anthony Dexter Ph.D. was one of these writers. Another one was Alice Morse Earle, who wrote a number of books about different aspects of the lives of colonial women.  One good way to find out who the writers to read were was to read the bibliographies of these women and see from whom they got their information.

Of course, there are the printed family genealogies. It would seem that if you want to know something about a certain family you would just need to consult a family history. It is not always that easy. Many of these histories were written in the nineteenth century before there were the communication resources we have today. Some of their information is strictly family oral tradition.