Description: Alien: to transfer property title or ownership; this is a specific use of a word that at the time could mean “to separate,” which is how our modern words alien meaning “extraterrestrial” and alienate are all etymologically related to this older word. Annuity: an annual payment or allowance. Henrietta Maria Walker received an annuity from her brother, Lumley Hungerford Keate,
Description: Happy National Trivia Day! January 4th is the perfect day to break out all those endless bits of knowledge stored in your noggin and share them with others. As for the history of National Trivia Day, it's thought that the creation of the game Trivial Pursuit in 1979 sparked the beginning of our fascination with trivia, and everythinge else is history, as they say. To feed our
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Photo shoebox upset, by Stephen Cummings, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] I recently took a position as photograph archivist at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and hope to be able to share through this blog some of the processes we are undertaking to make our photographic collections more useful and
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_12311,size=230,right]These records are amongst the most frequently used collections, and the most historically important records, in the Archives. US National Museum (USNM) incumbents included: Spencer F. Baird, 1850–1881G. Brown Goode, 1881–1896, including the years 1881–1887 when he served as Assistant Director of the Museum without the title of