Goodspeed Histories: January 2022
**January 22, 2022
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The website is working! I must thank Phyllis Hartzell, who also manages the website of the Hunterdon Co. Historical Society, for getting me out of what turned into a pretty big mess. Communicating with GoDaddy takes a special skill and a language which is foreign to me, but which Phyllis has mastered.
There may be some oddities with the restored version of the website. For instance, I discovered that the sketch of the Green Sergeants Covered Bridge by Eric Sloane was not appearing. (He’s back.) Please let me know if you come across any quirks or missing items so I can restore then.
COMMENTS: Or lack thereof. Unfortunately, in order to make the website safer, a very powerful firewall was added, which shut out any new comments. This is very unfortunate, as far as I am concerned, because so much useful information turns up in comments.
Finding a solution will be tricky. First of all, the strong firewall stays in place for at least a month, to discourage the hacker from trying again. In the meantime, please email me any comments you have (with notation about which post it is intended for). I can then publish those I deem useful to researchers in the next newsletter.
While waiting for the website to return, I got started on a far too ambitious project of writing about Hunterdon’s taverns, based on the tavern licenses available on Family Search and in the County’s Hall of Records. The first one to get this treatment is the tavern that once thrived in Locktown. It was once known as the Spread Eagle, but later was called:
The Inn at the Swamp Meeting House (https://goodspeedhistories.co
People sure had a way with names back then. It’s been a long time since Locktown had a functioning tavern. I did not even think of it when writing the introduction to the page on the website for the village. ‘Tavern’ has since been added to the list of 19th century village features. Here is the page for Locktown articles (https://goodspeedhistories.co
My minor website disaster reminded me how important it is to print out all my articles, so I started going through my notebooks to make sure I had them all. Inevitably, I ended up editing them at the same time. One of the older articles that has been polished and slightly revised is Opdycke’s Mill (https://goodspeedhistories.co
NEW TREES
Along with the article on the Locktown Hotel, I’ve published two new family trees, for families of two of the innkeepers of Locktown: the Servis Family (https://goodspeedhistories.co
Many thanks to the readers who noticed the website was down and out, and shared their concern. It certainly reminded me of how fragile this way of communicating is.
Regards and best wishes,
Marfy