! CHANGES !

I have two major changes for my blog.

First --

For five years, during the sesquicentennial of the U.S. Civil War, I posted a separate blog about Michigan's "Fighting Fifth" Infantry, giving newspaper articles about the regiment at the pace they originally appeared in the Detroit newspapers.  The sesquicentennial has ended and I have decided to transfer those articles to my main blog.  Those pages now can be found using the blog sidebar.

Change usually brings both good and bad or, at the least, mixed results.  This has been true as I transferred the old blog.  The usual blog format puts the most recent article posted first, with older articles further down.  Transferring the blog let me put articles in the order they appeared.  I also now take a separate page for each year.  Chronological order is so much more sensible than reverse chronological order when dealing with history!  At the same time my use of Google's free Blogger software produced some of those other results.  It's free other than my time!  It's also almost WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), avoiding html coding on my part.  The problem is some of my original decisions, like the use of this color font, proved difficult to change.  Equally frustrating quirks of the Blogger process made problems, for example spacing and fonts are different than I chose on the original blog.  I took the format as far as I could, but it may mislead the reader into not realizing there is more to come.  Just know each page has an entire year and keep going.  Additionally my main blog has so many search labels it was impossible to add the many labels specific to the former blog.  Those topics, however, are listed right underneath the newspaper article title and date, before the actual article.

Are the actual articles all I would like?  OF COURSE NOT!  To begin with, the original microfilm process recording those newspapers of over 150 years ago had flaws.  Added to that, I used the index Helen Ellis made, during the centennial 51 years ago, of the Burton Historical Collection newspapers in her Michigan in the Civil War, but, I saw different edition times because the Library of Michigan microfilmed newspaper collection gave me the ability to use a flash drive in my own recording.  That meant two different libraries with two different editions.  At times the newspapers didn't publish the same thing in both morning and evening editions.  As if that wasn't confusing and frustrating enough, trips to Lansing gathering the material had to be limited.  Add in my own learning curve on collection and reproduction to correct microfilm flaws.  I apologize.  This process from original microfilming to final reproduction here couldn't be as complete nor as perfect as I wish.

But as they say in "infomercials", That's not all!

My second change --

I love offering the segment I call Keeping the Public in Public Domain.  As of this time, I've posted 135 public domain stories, complete with appropriate background information I prowl to find.  

In addition, at the end I've posted a link promoting Dr. Yoel Perez's online database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I still will include it because it offers probably the most ambitious online listing of public domain international folklore, and also presents online the 6 volume Stith Thompson's Motif Index.  But when I say "That's not all!" I have decided to add to it.  I'm a long-time fan and promoter of the email list, 

now hosted by the National Storytelling Network at http://storynet.org/storytell.html but it dates back to 1995.  Recently it had a discussion of Online Story Sources.

Aside from my mentioning in the list discussion the Keeping the Public in Public Domain segment and Yashpeh, several other sites were mentioned by other list members.  I'd like those sites to be known by other story loving readers.  My sidebar's already jam-packed with the Civil War pages and all my many article labels, so I don't want to post my recommendations there, but will make the Keeping the Public in Public Domain ending include the other major sites, along with a suggestion for finding sites no longer active.  That way if a site has links that are no longer valid, you probably can still find by using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, an excellent resource.