• Category Archives looking back

  • As in “looking back in time,” things which have a historical connection.

  • Indian Paths Update

    Posted on by Don

    I’m still cruising along on this project: I’ve got just over 110 paths in the database (of maybe 150 total), about 130 towns or other path endpoints, and 92 motorway routes. I have added no actual paths yet, but the motor routes are starting to look like a real network.

    My current plan is to parse the book three times: once (this time around) to capture the paths, path endpoints, and motor routes; once (the final, and probably most difficult, round) to try and develop the original foot paths; and in between these rounds I will go through the paths/chapters and try to capture all the cross-references between them.

    I noticed early on that there were a lot of things like “this is an extension of that other path,” “so-and-so path also goes by this name,” “this path intersects with these others,” and such like throughout the text; the path descriptions are festooned with these kinds of cross-references.

    (I also finally picked up on the fact that paths without a path/chapter number are not actually part of the previous chapter, but are basically “chapterless,” just the next path name in alphabetical order. They act sort of as placeholders, the alternate names of other, more fully fleshed-out paths — that is, more cross-references.)

    I want to hold on to all this cross-reference information in my database, so I set up a bridge table to work something like a resource description framework, with the referring path as the subject, the referenced path as the object, and for the predicate I would use a description of the relationship type, such as “[subject path] is a continuation of [object path],” “[object path’s name] is an alternate name for [subject path],” “for more info see [object],” and so on. I now have all of this set up and ready to go, but before filling it in with information I want to have all the paths already in the database. Soon…

    Meanwhile, the details, of each path or town I add, have all been real eye-openers. I often do a little internet research on each town, or village, or Native name I come across, and each bit of info, each piece of the puzzle is another portal into that era.


    looking back tech talk 📎and tagged

  • Native Paths Update

    Posted on by Don

    I kept at it, and am now about a quarter of the way through the trails — the motorway parts, at least — in my Indian Paths of Pennsylvania project. I have a pretty good idea of how the book is organized now, and came up with a pretty decent workflow that gets me through a single path in just under an hour. I do one or two a day. It’s pretty easy to get absorbed, trying to find the tiny old roads and landmarks based on their descriptions in the book, and I’ve been totally sucked into the history of that Colonial-Revolutionary era. (I picked up Mason & Dixon again, since it goes right through the middle of that time and place.)

    I also think there will be some epic rides this summer, based on these routes — I’ve been drooling over some of the scenes I see in Google Street View.


    day by day looking back tech talk 📎and tagged

  • Foiled Again!

    Posted on by Don

    I have a love-hate relationship with Paul A. W. Wallace’s Indian Paths of Pennsylvania. I love reading the individual chapters on each path — their descriptions, and the accounts of them in the letters and diary entries of early Colonial explorers, but any hard look at the specifics and the trails themselves become frustratingly vague. This is all the more frustrating because the information looks specific and authoritative enough, until you take that close look…

    Some of this is because the original information is vague — nobody was tracking their steps with a GPS back then — so the actual trail location is not perfectly known, and partly it’s because the trails themselves are long gone (though some are at least partly followed by modern roads), so it’s hard to search them out without trespassing, but there also just seems to be some missing ingredient needed to define a trail network.

    A few years ago I thought that this last part could be solved with a little bit of GIS detective work, so I started a QGIS project to define the trails and see about building a network, but I sort of ran out of steam — I basically foundered on the vagueness of the trail descriptions. I did one or two in the Lehigh Valley, and realized that the sleuthing needed was a lot more laborious than simple data entry, and the project languished after those first few paths.

    I was thinking about all this again recently, and realized that there is a critical first step I ignored: the book serves primarily as an automotive guide, with detailed instructions for driving in the vicinity of each path. I also thought that if I broke the task down to a set of database tables, I could link these auto routes to their various paths and book chapters . (Some trail chapters actually describe multiple trails and subtrails, while some motorway descriptions continue across multiple chapters, so many-to-many relationships abound but that’s what databases are for. Furthermore, most of the trail chapters have a start and an endpoint, yet more data I can use to cross reference.)

    This scheme fell apart within the first few trails. The very first trail, the “Allegheny Path,” has Philadelphia as the start point and “Pittsburg and Kittanning” as the endpoint — so which is the endpoint? Apparently neither, because the trail is only described as far as Harrisburg; the “Allegheny Path” chapter ends with references to several other trails (different chapters, in other words) heading West from Harrisburg as possible continuations. So OK, I can deal with this: my endpoints are really Philadelphia and Harrisburg, and I’ll stuff the rest of the info into my “description” column. (There is a second path listed in that first chapter, but it is little more than a historical aside and a reference to another path/chapter. This is going to get tricky.)

    Luckily the motorway for the Allegheny Path is easy to follow. I used an open routing plugin to follow along a bunch of control points, and voilá I had my linestring. This ain’t so bad!

    The very next chapter, I ran into motorway difficulties: the route description made no sense. Either the routes were not prepared with adequate ground-truthing (unlikely, though I was starting to feel uncharitable), or the roads (and their designations) had changed at some point in the 55 years since the book came out. This seems the more likely explanation, since I-80 goes right through the area in question, was only finished in 1970, and probably changed a lot of things in its wake. I actually found the Wikipedia article on the Bald Eagle Creek Path more useful.

    So I’m back to deciphering and making judgement calls rather than strictly converting the information from one format to another, even for these road descriptions. I didn’t expect this project to be done in an afternoon, or even a week or so, but “going to take forever because I’m not really working on it” is now closer to my expectation.

    (Note: I found that someone already took these paths and put them into a GIS, but it’s on PA-Share and that’s proved difficult to work with — and deliberately limited, unless you pay — so far. We’ll see…)


    looking back tech talk 📎and tagged

  • Another Milestone

    Posted on by Don

    I ran across this entry the other day on my old blog: it was ten years ago today that we had our first (non-test) firing of the wood-fired oven. The oven is in pretty rough shape right now, we haven’t used it more than a year — it’s something we usually do for parties (the same is true for brewing beer) and we haven’t had a party in, well…


    looking back pioneer arts

  • This Old Video

    Posted on by Don

    Here’s the video I did of our memorial ride for Brian. I made this about eleven years ago and put it on Facebook, where it sort of languished ever since — FB “memories” just brought up some of that trip’s photos, and so I went rummaging for it. I just added it to my Youtube channel, where it will have a home — maybe a more accessible/discoverable one — with my other videos, if I ever actually make any.

    So anyway, there it is. I can’t say “enjoy;” it was a pretty somber moment but I sometimes like to look back at that day. I would love to know what happened to some of Brian’s own ride and vacation videos, he was a master at that sort of thing, and his videos were almost as much fun as the trips themselves.


    looking back the sporting life 📎and tagged

  • Kathryn Kerrigan Kelly (1900-1967)

    Posted on by Don
    • Kathryn Kerrigan As A Child
    • Kathryn Kerrigan As A Young Woman
    • Kathryn Kerrigan
    • Kathryn Kelly (with baby) and Mamie Murphy
    • Joseph and Kathryn (Kerrigan) Kelly
    • The Kellys on Vacation

    That’s my paternal grandmother, who passed away on this date, fifty four years ago. I was only four at the time, so I don’t really remember her. I have one vague memory of a visit to the nursing home, probably not long before she died: she was in a wheelchair, and I climbed up onto her lap and gave her a hug.

    There’s no point to this post. I just happened to launch GRAMPS for other reasons, and there was an “on this date in your family’s history” notification about her, and I thought I’d remember her (as best I can) for a moment.


    looking back

  • Twenty Eight Years Later

    Posted on by Don

    I visited my parents about three weeks ago, and before the visit I rode at Allaire State Park:

    The soil there is pebbly/sandy, and pretty smooth, and the trails are twisty but easy singletrack for the most part — though I was gratified to find a few more challenging sections. Here are a few photos from a trail near the entrance, a section I’ve ridden many times over the decades:

    A trailside selfie! The place has evolved a bit (new trails have been built, older trails have worn in), but it hasn’t changed all that much. What has changed is me.

    Allaire used to host a mountain bike race every year, an important one in the state race calendar — maybe even the NJ State Championship? — and it was an important part of my riding/racing life back in the day. My very first race was with Mike K, at the God’s Country MTB Classic (in Potter County, October of 1992), but here is a photo of me with Mike after our very second race, at Allaire that November:

    That’s me on the left, in my “lucky racing shirt.” I don’t look like that guy anymore, but sometimes I still feel like him.


    looking back the sporting life 📎and tagged

  • COVID Memories II

    Posted on by Don

    Some more things:

    • It was early March, just as things were starting to look bad, and my mom needed a procedure done, so I thought I’d go down to help out for a few days. My dad and I hung out in the hospital waiting room, half-watching whatever 24-hour news station they had on, which seemed like updates from Armageddon.
    • Masking wasn’t a big thing early on, but hand sanitizing sure was. There was no longer any sanitizer to be found in the stores of course, but my mom had already scored some for all of us.
    • The Great Toilet Paper Shortage: we usually buy in bulk, and purely by coincidence we had a pretty good supply on hand when things went crazy. That was the weirdest panic…
    • For about a week or so before the lock-down, people were basically on their own in terms of guidance for business closures, going to work, etc, and there seemed to be a great deal of confusion and anxiety about it until the lock-down made the rules easy — easy to know at least.
    • In the very last days before the lock-down, we went down to Philly for a socially-distant visit with Ben and Candace. We brought bikes, and rode things like Kelly Drive and MLK Boulevard, and out through Manayunk, which was hopping. That was my first hint that not everyone was going to take the pandemic seriously.
    • When masking became a thing, there were not a lot of N95 masks to go around at first, and crafters and sewers came up with a lot of DIY mask projects to fill the gap. Anne made a ton of these for family and friends.


    looking back