A memory. I am at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. It’s one of my favorite museums: 17 acres of maritime exhibits, historic boats, nautical trade shops, a planetarium, a working shipyard and wharves lined with the country’s largest collection of 19th-century sailing vessels.
Museums
The Death of an Oologist
The incident that led me to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago was the tragic death of a young bird egg collector in 1909. His name was Richardson P. Smithwick and he was from a family of amateur bird, bird egg and bird nest collectors that lived in Bertie County, N.C. late in the 19th and early in the 20th century.
Wonderful Labyrinth: A Great Museum’s Hidden Archives
I am at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. I’ve come to look at the field diaries of a Smithsonian biologist named Remington Kellogg. In the 1920s he visited and studied a bottlenose dolphin fishery on Hatteras Island, N.C. that I am researching.
An Introduction: Love in the Archives
This is the beginning of a new series that I am calling “Love in the Archives.” Here I’ll chronicle what happens as I explore history in museums, archives and libraries around the U.S. and beyond.
David Cecelski 