Author Archives: dgm

I’ve become interested recently in Egyptomania – the sudden engagement of western countries with Ancient Egypt in the nineteenth century. Egyptomania spawned a whole range of things – from the Egypt Exploration Society to the Amelia Peabody novels and is … Continue reading →

Researching family history can be incredibly frustrating, especially when one tries to find people born before the start of systematic record keeping in the 1850’s. Just to make it doubly confusing people in my family line at least kept on … Continue reading →

Well I did the obvious thing and ran the query “spectacle maker” on querypic: Querypic doesn’t differentiate between “spectacle maker” and “spectacle-maker” as a query, so we can say that graph shows usage of both forms of the term. The … Continue reading →

It turns out the whole rural oculist thing is more complicated than I thought. Firstly I was wrong in thinking that oculist was the preferred term in the nineteenth century. Five minutes with Querypic showed that while that might have … Continue reading →

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s quite amazing how many people died of chest and lung related complaints in the late nineteenth century. Not surprising really. I grew up in Stirling, in Scotland, which was at first glance a quiet … Continue reading →

As I’m sure you are all well aware, I’ve been working as a volunteer documenting the contents of Dow’s Pharmacy for the National Trust. A few months ago, I came across a shoe box containing some boxes of old spectacle … Continue reading →

Yesterday, I tweeted a link to a report from Haaretz on the excavation of Napoleonic era graves on Nelson’s island in Aboukir bay off of Alexandria. It’s a good read, but there was one thing that struck me as slightly … Continue reading →

Sometime ago I wrote about the paucity of decorative ceramic medicine pots in Australia. These pots, usually with a nicely printed lid are quite common overseas, but seem to be less common in Australia, and at the time of my … Continue reading →

Now I know I’ve been banging on about the loss of knowledge as regards analogue magnetic media – audio and video tape – but yesterday I was reminded that it’s not just knowing about magnetic media that’s important. Yesterday when … Continue reading →

I’ve recently blogged about digitising analogue tape cassettes, and reading old 9 track tapes, both of which covered the problem of getting data back from old media. The equipment goes, people retire, and suddenly the data’s inaccessible. It’s inaccessible because … Continue reading →