This week hasn't been as productive as I was hoping, unfortunately. A good portion of my time was spent finishing up my conference poster for the Florida Historical Society Annual Meeting and Symposium this coming weekend. Below is a preview of my poster. I'm still working on updating my surveys to collect some new data points from this different group. Since the audience is mostly educated and already historically inclined, I want to make sure to take the inevitable bias into account as I reformulate my questions. I don't really need to ask things like "Do you think history is important?" because they obviously already agree with that sentiment!
I also visited the Orange County Regional History Center to view the Mayor's court dockets from the years 1907-1909 which were fascinating! I was able to locate the entry from Mayor Jewell's appearance in front of himself. This source added a crucial detail. While he never entered a plea of guilty, he ordered that he "be fined five dollars, sentence suspended on four dollars of the fine." He then paid his $1 fine and was released by the Marshall. As I was flipping through the docket, I uncovered two other interesting things. The first was that another research subject of mine, Fred Wilmott appeared in the Mayor's court for fighting and another was the apparent lack of women in the record until a certain point in 1909 when three women were charged with "disturbing the peace of others." I want to revisit these three women at some point in the future because not only was it so unusual to see no women in the record other than them, but the charge is intriguing as well. I wonder what they were up to and if any other sources might shed some light on it...However, it will have to wait until another day to dig into it!
I'm still hoping to make it to the West Oaks Library soon for that source on Jessie Branch, however, this week is already jam-packed so I'll have to push it out until next week. With any luck, we'll be holding our grant kick-off meeting in the next two weeks so we can get things squared away on that end. I've also planned a field trip to Greenwood for my intern and me to photograph our research subjects. I want to be sure that he gets to see the cemetery in person since he's never been before and I also want to make sure he takes the images for his essays so he can receive photo credit.
That's all for now! More to come next week.
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