Woodbury Genealogy
Woodbury genealogy in the United States is not complicated for the most part. All of us are descended from John and William Woodbury (brothers or cousins, it’s not clear) who came to Salem, Massachusetts in the 1620’s. John was first. He was part of a fishing consortium–not a Puritan–and traveled across the Atlantic on the Zouch Phenix in 1624 as part of the Dorchester Company. He settled in Cape Ann, which is basically a barren rock, and then moved to become one of the five founders of Salem, Massachusetts (along with Conant, Balch, Trask, and Palfrey). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Planters_(Massachusetts) He then was granted 200 acres in what is now Beverly, Massachusetts in 1635. http://dougsinclairsarchives.com/woodbury/johnwoodbury1.htm My grandfather was born in Beverly three hundred years later. Not an adventurous bunch, apparently, once they got to Massachusetts. Terrifyingly, I am descended from John and William Read more…
My Dad
My father died Sunday morning, early, after a short downhill slide, the end of a 4 1/2 year sojourn with cancer. Ronald G. Woodbury 3 April 1943-21 August 2011 ? Dr. Ronald Glen Woodbury of Pendleton, Ore., died on Sunday, Aug. 21, 2011. He was 68. Born in Glen Ridge, N.J., on April 3, 1943, the son of Glen and Barbara (Carr) Woodbury, he was raised in Reading, Mass., and attended the Belmont Hill School. He graduated from Amherst College, Amherst, Mass., magna cum laude in 1965. He received his doctorate in Latin American History from Columbia University in 1971. Dr. Woodbury married Melissa Teele in 1965. He started his teaching career at the University of California at Irvine and then taught at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., where he also served as a dean. In 1987 he became Read more…
What happened to silence?
With more than 80% of Americans living in metropolitan areas (and only 2% living as I do in towns of fewer than 25,000 people), very few people know what real silence is anymore. http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Population/ Writing historical fiction requires that you project yourself into that long ago past. As the modern world hurtles headlong into the future, this becomes more and more difficult. Trying to find spaces where it’s possible to get a sense of that historic time is getting harder by the day. Like light pollution, noise pollution is everywhere. This winter in the Olympic National Forest and on the Quinnault Indian Reservation, my husband and I experienced the silence of the natural world, though it is presently threatened by the air routes over it into Sea-Tac airport south of Seattle. In Eastern Oregon, the silence can be complete–and loud–to the point Read more…
Books in the Middle Ages
Books have been around as long as there has been writing–it’s just that in the past, they were less accessible, expensive, and rare. Many, many fewer people were literate, especially as we understand the word (see my post on literacy: https://sarahwoodbury.com/?p=1310). “Every stage in the creation of a medieval book required intensive labor, sometimes involving the collaboration of entire workshops. Parchment for the pages had to be made from the dried hides of animals, cut to size and sewn into quires; inks had to be mixed, pens prepared, and the pages ruled for lettering. A scribe copied the text from an established edition, and artists might then embellish it with illustrations, decorated initials, and ornament in the margins. The most lavish medieval books were bound in covers set with enamels, jewels, and ivory carvings.” Source: The Art of the Book Read more…
Sharing numbers . . . books, sales, and Joe Konrath
I’ve been an indie author for eight months now, and a post by the Passive Guy and another by Joe Konrath got me thinking that my original post for today can wait and it’s time to share something of my journey as an independent author. Some of this appeared in David Gaughran’s book Let’s Get Digital, but not my most recent numbers, and not the money. http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/lets-get-digital/ When I started writing fiction, academic writing had been a way of life for me for a long time. Writing fiction was another story. I wrote my first novel in the spring of ’06 on a whim, just to see if I could. My daughter (then fourteen) had always been ‘the writer’ in the family and I even asked her if it was okay if I gave it a shot too. That first book was Read more…
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