Organizing Your Stuff

A quilt friend wrote me recently:

I have come to think of your head as a vast vault of "where to find it" information. You seem to know something about everything!

I only WISH I COULD remember 

everything I have ever read or seen!!!

Computers make my research work so much easer now!  I just do a "word search" on my computer when a question on one of the quilt history discussion lists that I belong asks a question.

However, Since I began giving more lectures in the past few years, I have given some thought about what finally enabled me to retain as much as I do about the general history of the industrial revolution, textile production, pattern development, etc. 

I noticed the shift myself right after my first textile study tour to Europe with Deb Roberts in 2006 to France (followed by my 2nd to the U.K. in 2007 and 3rd to the Mediterranean area in 2008).  Those textile study tours truly GALVANIZED me.

I suspect it was because I got to see the REAL thing in cultural context. It made history come alive ----just like I wrote in my most recent blog post about how living overseas for three years in my teens and seeing 19 different countries by the time I was 20 made history come alive for me for the first time. 

How a Family Timeline Set the Mold

I lay my ability to retain all this new information, however, at the feet of my genealogical research begun in the 1980s.  Once I put together all the ancestors on my father's direct male line back to 1500, I created a birth and death Timeline in 1994. I realized in 2006 that the "picture" of THAT Timeline in my head gave me something visual to hook OTHER time-related information onto.

It doesn't always work but it works so much better than any other "memorization" tool that I may have unconsciously tried before. So I just overlay new information on the dates associated with my father's family line. 

This is a family quilt I inherited made up of blocks dating from1840-1890.
This are often called "Pattern" quilts.

The easiest way for me to remember a date is to associate it with one of my great grandfathers. For example, my husband is a historian of financial, economic and music history by avocation and is always spouting off dates to me. But I never remember them. Then one day, I was reading liner notes at a music event and saw that Mozart died in 1791 and that he was working on his "Requiem" at the time. 1791 is the year my 3rd Great Grandfather died in Shenandoah Co, VA and a light bulb went on. Ever since I can remember Mozart's death date and the year Requiem was written. (Just don't ask me any more dates associated with Mozart. I just latched on to that one to impress my husband. LOL)

Anyway, as I took those three tours with Deb Roberts, I read voraciously-- especially on the plane coming and going. My favorite book was Chapman and Chassagne's "European Textile Printers in the Eighteenth Century" published in 1981.   I also began taking copious but BRIEF hand notes (+dates) as I read this and other books about the industrial revolution and textile production, noting important inventions and other "mile markers". (I also write notes in the margins of my books as I read.) Then I started creating a Timeline of the events and dates from my notes. I am constantly adding to my Timeline and I try to source every fact I add to this Timeline, though occasionally I forget. (Not good for a researcher to do. )

Basis for a 20th Century Timeline

I used the TQHF Timeline that Hazel Carter created about the Honorees' lives as the basis of my 20th century "mental imprint" rather than just family history.

Maybe some day I will publish it all. Who knows. For the time being, it's just fun creating it. I use it faithfully, too, as I prepare for lectures and always have a copy with me when I give a talk so that I can refer to very specific dates, if needed.

How do you train yourself remember what you study?

Off to a research conference! My favorite trip every year! Have fun researching and documenting your quilt!!

Karen

PS: Here is the beginning of my Textile Timeline:

INTEGRATED  TIMELINE  OF TEXTILE  HISTORY

35th century BC—An ivory carving, found in Temple of Osiris at Abydos in 1903 and currently in the collection of the British Museum, features the king of the Egyptian First Dynasty wearing a mantle/cloak that appears to be quilted.  (Colby, 4).

600 B.C. Pre-Columbian Peruvian textile fragment exhibition installed at 724 Fifth Ave Jack Larsen, weaver and textile designer and President of the American Craft Council quoted: The Peruvians were the best weavers in history and invented a wider body of structures than any other people. They also happened to have those air conditioned tombs in which their work was preserved for centuries.” The 29 “gloriously colored textiles awash with abstract images, date from 600 B.C. to 1500 A.D. in this exhibit.” (NYT Section H pg. 36; 2 Nov 1986) (KBA archives)

770 – 221 BC—Chinese silk ornamental quilts are excavated from tombs dating from the Eastern Zhou dynasty (Liddell and Watanabe, 1).

327 BC—Alexander the Great invades India and describes brilliant printed cloths seen there (Robinson, 111). 

1st century BC-2nd century AD—The earliest surviving quilted object is a quilted linen carpet found in a Mongolian cave tomb.  It is housed in the collection of the Leningrad Department of the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of the Sciences of the Union of the Soviet Republic (Colby, 5).

1stc B.C. – 2nd A.D.                 

         Scythian chieftan’s floor rug in the style of a quilt         Colby, 6-7

500 to 800         — Mosiac patchwork of silk found in Caves of the Thousand Buddhas in China Colby,  97, von Gwinner, 22

                  and de Koning-Stapel, 8.

800 – 900 AD—A slipper of quilted felt patched with leather discovered on the Silk Road near the present Sino-Russian border. The slipper is currently housed in the British Museum, London (Liddell and Watanabe, 3).