Database Chaos to Preserved Fish: Adventures in the Legislative Biographical File

For the last year, I have been working on the Massachusetts Legislative Biographical File Database correcting errors, researching defunct political parties, and untangling all manner of information knots to get it ready for launch. My first task was to clean up the list of political party names in the database. There were a lot of overlapping and duplicate names listed, which meant that the members of some parties were unhelpfully spread across multiple designations and some were labelled incorrectly altogether. I started by determining which name was correct for each party and which party names were connected to each other. Then, I looked at the entries in the now-extraneous listings and reassigned them to their proper places.

Now that the database had a correct and decluttered list of parties, I could begin digging into all those odd ones that said multiple party names in one menu listing. Some were simply people that switched parties between office terms, which was a fairly easy fix. But, after looking at many election results in historical newspapers, it turned out that the United States actually had a period of dabbling in coalition politics in the latter half of the 19th century. So, a lot of those entries that said “[major party]/[third party]” weren’t mistakes at all, though they did require a bit of extra double-checking for accuracy.

Before they were in a database, every catalog card that makes up the Legislative Biographical File was a row in one of a group of spreadsheets. Each of these spreadsheets had a tab for cards with correct information and a tab for “problem” cards. One of my primary tasks working with the database was to go through each of these tabs and attempt to fix the issues within. These turned out to need a wide variety of different solutions, from decoding old county acronyms and fixing undiscovered typos to archiving duplicate entries and disambiguating people with the same name whose entries had been conflated. Many of the issues were with birth or death dates and locations. The majority of these people were ordinary folks from 150 to 200 years ago, so finding the answers to these questions meant a lot of searching around on genealogy and obituary websites for primary sources, if I could find them.

The longer I worked on the database, the more I noticed patterns of issues in certain spots, especially with place names. So, when I was done sorting out the major problems, I went around to fix them. First up was Maine, which was part of Massachusetts until 1820 and, as such, was represented in the Massachusetts legislature before then. This meant that there were a number of town and county names, some of which overlapped with Mass ones, that were not properly noted in their entries as now being in another state. Next on the list were towns that had changed their names, split, or merged with neighbors. For each of these, I found both the old and new names and the year of the switch, so I could verify that any relevant entries were not listed anachronistically to their time.

A major issue I noticed was that the Democratic-Republican party, one of the two first political parties in United States history, appeared to be absent from the database entirely and most of its members were listed as Democrats and/or Republicans. Fixing this required more effort than my previous party corrections work because I had to do all the research myself, more or less from scratch. I then had to comb through the entries in the database from the party’s time frame and reassign anyone I could verify to their proper listing.

Last up, once everything else was out of the way, a variety of small data errors revealed themselves, so my next task was to fix those so someone else wouldn’t have to do it later. Additionally, I attempted to wrap my head around the full evolution of political parties in Massachusetts, so I could write up short descriptions for each one listed in the party menu as a reference guide. The bulk of this work involved extensive Wikipedia rabbit holes on various movements and figures central to parties in question. In the end, I had to even make my own flowchart-style diagram in an effort to map out and keep track of all of the major parties’ relations to each other.

Bonus fun: Most of the entries that needed correcting (and thus, most of the ones I was working with) were for people from the 18th or 19th century, simply because it’s harder to find information about them. Going back that far in New England tends to surface a number of odd sounding names, so I started writing down the ones that particularly tickled me and I’ve shared a few of my favorites below.

• Captain Staples Chamberlain
• Polycarpus Loring
• Consider Dickinson
• Frederick A. Mann
• Pliny Arms, Esq.
• Pardon Seabury
• Parley J. Prindle
• Thaddeus Clapp
• Knight Day
• Preserved Fish
• George Costanza (No, seriously)
• Elvira Edgell (I’m not kidding)

Sasha Tekeian

Technical Services Intern

Join Us As the State Library Turns 200!

This March, the State Library will celebrate its 200th birthday! We have an exciting line-up of events planned to mark the occasion. Check out our save-the-date and mark your calendars to join us!

The best ways to keep up-to-date with our upcoming events are by following our social media channels (Instagram, Facebook, and X) or signing up for our newsletter. We look forwarding to celebrating with you in March!

Resource Highlight: The Northeast Collection in Newpapers.com

If you ever have ever used our Guide to Compiling a Legislative History, you’ll know that it goes over all the major resources the State Library has, e.g. Acts and Resolves, Bills, House and Senate Journals, etc.

If you scroll down a little farther in the guide, you’ll find information on accessing the State Library’s collection of Boston newspapers, like the Globe:

Old newspaper articles can be especially helpful if you are researching historic legislation. Understanding the context of the law, e.g., contemporary events may provide insight into the legislative intent. While the State Library has collections of microfilmed newspapers, you can only access those if you are onsite at the library. Additionally, microfilm can be finicky, especially if you aren’t familiar with using it – and you can forget about key word searching!

Thankfully, the State Library also subscribes to the Northeast Collection of Newspapers.com. The Northeast Collection contains local newspapers from all over New England and portions of the Mid-Atlantic, with some of these papers dating back to the end of the 17th century.

You can search by newspaper, region, date, as well as keyword. The database also provides helpful tutorials for effective searching.

If you have a State Library card you can access these newspapers from anywhere. To access the database, visit our homepage and select the tile that says Search the State Library’s Databases.

This will take you to the following landing page:

Tip: you might need to scroll down a bit before the Additional Resources section becomes visible.

From the drop-down, select Newspapers.com – Northeast.

If you run into any issues accessing the database, please reach out to the State Library’s Reference Department (Reference.Department@mass.gov). Our librarians will be happy to help!

Maryellen Larkin
Government Documents Reference Librarian

Massachusetts State Bird on Display!

In honor of the country's 250th birthday, we'll be sharing the state birds of some of the thirteen original colonies in our Audubon case throughout the year. Of course, we're starting off with Massachusetts state bird, the Black-capped chickadee. At first pass, we couldn't find this bird in Birds of America, but that is because it is labeled as  "Black-capt Titmouse." The titmouse and chickadee are part of the Paridae family, and older language referred to both as titmouse, which explains why there are no chickadees found in Birds of America. Plate 353 shows the Black-capt Titmouse (bottom center, detail below) along with the Chestnut-backed Titmouse and the Chestnut-crowned Titmouse. They are shown with an impressive nest in the branches of the willow oak tree.

The Massachusetts Legislature designated the Black-capped chickadee as the state bird on March 21, 1941 (1941 Mass. Acts Ch. 121). These are hearty non-migratory birds, which means that they can withstand Massachusetts' harsh winters and can be spotted throughout the year (and in all corners of the Commonwealth). 

Read more about them on the Mass Audubon website, and visit us from January 13 through February 10 to spot one in the library!

Elizabeth Roscio

Preservation Librarian

Resource Spotlight: List of Committees of the General Court

In this week’s blog post, we’re highlighting a little-known, but extremely useful resource: our collection of List of Committees of the General Court volumes. These books are exactly what they say they are: they contain the members of each committee of the General Court for a particular year. The State Library has volumes for 1883 to 2020 (please note this title was not published from 2003 to 2006).

Each volume is broken down by committees of the Senate, committees of the House, and Joint Committees. You’ll see the name of the committee followed by the legislators who are on that committee.

Not only do these volumes list each committee with its members, but they also break this information down a second way. Each member of the Senate and then each member of the House is listed individually and alongside their name are the committees of which they were a part of. Having this information in two different ways is great for us as Reference librarians and for our patrons as well. For example, a researcher may want to know who was on the Public Safety Committee in 1991. Someone else may want to know which committees Senator Kathleen Teahan was on in 1998. Having committee membership recorded in two different ways is extremely helpful in cases like these.

You can also find legislators and their committee assignments in the Massachusetts Political Almanac, along with a host of other information. If committees are what you’re interested in though, these Lists of Committees volumes are a quick go-to source with easy-to-find information.

Questions? Reach out to us at reference.department@mass.gov and we’ll be happy to help!

Jessica Shrey
Legal Research Reference Librarian

State Library Newsletter - January Issue

Welcome January with the latest issue of our monthly newsletter! In it you'll find updates on our newest displays, upcoming events, a fun recently cataloged item and more.

Pictured here is a preview, but the full issue can be accessed by clicking here. And you can also sign up for our mailing list to receive the newsletter straight to your inbox.

On Display: An Astronomical Diary or Almanack, 1771 and 1778

Our tradition of starting the new year off with historical almanacs on display in our Collection Spotlight case continues this year. We're featuring both the 1771 and 1778 editions of An Astronomical Diary; Or, Almanack by Nathanael Low.

These are the only two issues of Nathanael Low’s almanac in our collection, though he began publishing them in 1762 and continued into the 1800s. We are displaying our two copies closed and with facsimiles of the January pages so that we can highlight a small detail found on their respective front covers. Published leading up to and then during the Revolutionary War, 1771 is listed as "In the XIth (eleventh year) of the Reign of King George III" and then 1778 is described as "The second Year of American Independence, which began July fourth, 1776." As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of American Independence this year, it is moving to see this contemporaneous and significant change in wording.

The 1771 edition was printed and sold by Kneeland & Adams on Milk Street in Boston and the 1778 edition was printed by J. Gill on Court Street and T. & J. Fleet on Cornhill, all locations that are near the State House. On the cover of the 1771 almanac, Low lists the contents as containing information about eclipses, lunations, sun’s and moon’s risings and settings, courts in the four New-England Governments, feasts and fasts of the church, spring tides, judgement of the weather, time of high water, roads with the best stages or houses to put up at, some necessary rules with regard to health, and many other things useful and entertaining. These almanacs seem like a one-stop shop for all your needs in the 18th century! The header for each month also includes a few lines of verse from various poems, spread out over a few months. January leads off with the first few lines of “Friendship: An Ode” by Samuel Johnson. 

The 1778 edition includes much of the same practical information, but does begin with an address to the reader, on monopoly and extortion, in regard to the war that was being waged at the time of publication. While the young country was united in its feelings of patriotism and a shared enemy against the British, the essay draws a critical eye to the personal gain that some were making from the war, writing that “it is the poor chiefly that feel the calamitous effects of monopoly and extortion; tho’ it is evidence these men were never more necessary than now, never more useful, and their services were never yet of greater importance. Surely such men are worthy of some notice. They claim some attention. They deserve all possible encouragements.”

Almanacs largely included practical information or republished poems/verses from other sources, but they did also grant the author some leeway to include personal essays and anecdotes that were of interest, like the 1778 essay, which gives each almanac in our collection a slightly different slant. Nathanael Low was a physicist and astronomer who lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts before removing to South Berwick, Maine (which would have been part of Massachusetts at the time). He enlisted in the war in 1780, serving from Berwick. His home, built in 1786, is part of the South Berwick Village District, and you can read more on the Old Berwick Historical Society webpage.

January's pages from the 1771 edition (left) and 1778 (right)

Last year, these two volumes, along with other 18th and 19th century almanacs from our Special Collections holdings, were sent to the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts to receive conservation treatment. They were cleaned and mended and then rehoused in custom enclosures. Their original binding remains intact and they are still somewhat fragile for handling, but while at NEDCC for treatment, they were also digitized and will be added to our digital repository in the coming months, making them available for researchers to examine them remotely (and safely).

If you are in the Boston area, then be sure to visit the library from January 6 through February 3 to see these almanacs on display, and catch up on all of past almanac posts here.

Elizabeth Roscio

Preservation Librarian