April 5, 2011

A Rosetta Stone

Taylor's Memorandum of Weather

Sometimes one document unlocks another—a Rosetta Stone, of sorts. Recently we were reviewing a teacher’s journal from the summer of 1880. The journal entries showed the days of the week but not their calendar dates. Fortunately, she noted the weather on rainy days, creating a pattern (e.g. rain all day Friday, evening rain on Monday, rain all day on Wednesday). By itself, this would be meaningless, but with a daily history of local weather we might be able to place the journal entries on the 1880 calendar.

Among the unusual items in our collection is just such a set of local weather observations between 1876 and 1886. By matching rainfall patterns from the two sources, we could see that there was only one period of frequent rains during that summer, and we found that the first rainy day noted in the journal probably fell on Friday, July 2, 1880. Using that as a calibration point, all the other days in the journal slid into place.

But who would keep a decade’s worth of weather observations? In early September 1880, the unidentified observer mentions that he took “Abbie” into town for school. The Colby Academy catalog for 1880/81 lists a student named Abbie Frances Taylor. Lord’s History of New London identifies her as the daughter of John W. Taylor, by then a widower and owner of a cloth-dressing and wool-carding mill in the village of Otterville. Why he kept the weather observations in the first place we may never know, but his record has certainly proven useful today.

On a related note… The British National Archives is supporting an ambitious project to cull handwritten weather observations and other data from almost 1,000,000 pages of Royal Navy logbooks—adding them to a database of climatic and naval history. More interesting, perhaps, is the way volunteers from around the globe are providing the digitization workforce.

Check out www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news/503.htm or www.oldweather.org for more about this project.