Sunday, April 2, 2023

Diary of Thomas Stratford, coal miner, great grandfather

Diary of Thomas Morgan Stratford

Born 13 January 1884 in Bridgend, Glamorganshire, Wales, Somerset, England
Died 6 September 1948 in Avoca, Luzerne, Pennsylvania, USA

Wife was Elizabeth Wilce, who was born August 6, 1888 in Simpson, Pennsylvania and died January 22, 1980 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. 

Thomas Morgan and Elizabeth are buried in Maplewood Cemetery, Carbondale, Pennsylvania. The headstones are located around the southern 1/3 mark. I was there when my great grandmother was buried though all I remember it that it was a cold and cloudy day.  

I was given this diary by my uncle Tom Stratford, who passed away a few ago. Rather that having the diary sit somewhere in  drawer I thought I was share it as I read through it. I will also add pictures as they are discovered. Dates are a bit of an issue as there are many entries that only have the month and day and some with no date. 

I read through the diary and it is not a daily record. Rather, my great grandfather used to the diary over several years to record different events. I will use this space to put events in chronological order so this is a working document and I will annotate accordingly. 

January 1, [1924]






Entries in chronological order

June 14, 1924 
"Rec'd check for 30.00 interest on Gen. Mot." 

August 21, 1924 
"Born to Mr. and Mrs. Kirt Birch (sp?) a baby girl at Emergency Hospital Carbondale" 

September 28, 1924 
"Mrs Brain had baby christened at Carbondale. Lizzie and I stood for her. 

December 15, 1924 
"Rec'd check for $31.25 interest on Gen Mot

September 1, 1925 
"Started coal strike"

October 1, 1924 
"Loaned H.H. Kudleck twenty dollars $20.00 on this date.  
Feb. Rec'd check for $20.00 from H.H. Kudleck

(Updated 3 April 2023)



 

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

Wilkes University Arthropod Collection 2022 Summary

 When I arrived at Wilkes University in 2007, we had a collection of about 250 insects, arranged in orders in drawers. Unfortunately, none of the specimens had labels so many were tossed. Around 2011, we inherited hundreds of insects from Mike, a friend of the university that took care of the university and also a school teacher. These insects were also without any collection information and many were thrown out. Heart breaking but what is the value of a specimen without any data? 

In the meantime, we were collecting arthropods as part of study of grassland restoration (see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rec.12202), then as a study of the effects of grassland management on diversity in fifteen grasslands (accepted in Ecosphere). Those samples were sorted to order. Many were photographed and data were entered into Biota. I'm still trying to find the images - my worry is that the file was created by someone that graduated and no longer accessible. Lesson learned. 

More recently, I became interested in the effects of prescribed burning on pollinators and food webs more largely. In the last two years, I must have collected, I'm estimating, about 10,000 insects and we have sorted about 4200 insects so far. There are another 20,000 insects that are still in jars, envelopes, etc. so be sorted. Yep, I have quite the work load ahead of me. I'm sending many samples off to be analyzed for the food web study and we are focusing on omnivores - because their trophic position can tell us about the productivity of a site. 

I wanted to run some summary statistics to both create a benchmark for tracking progress of the collection and quality control. Simply by producing tables, I can catch spelling mistakes and other typos. 

We had 529 collection events entered. That's a pitfall, sweep, or pollinator pan. We do have a few collection entries that are single bird captures and a blood and feather sample is part of the collection. Moving forward, a collection involving birds will be all birds captured at a site during one effort (mist-netting/box check). We also have a few plants - this is different from the plants in the herbarium. These are samples to be isotoped for the food web study. Whole plants will go into the herbarium but tissue samples go into our collection. Not sure if this is best practice but this is where I'm at. 

Here's the summary of our collection 

Entries 

4241 entries

Megan O. entered 970 lines 

Tyler S. entered 948 lines

Cally E. entered 586 lines 

Becca K. entered 398 lines

There were about 10 other people that entered data - all less than 300 lines. 

I entered 238 lines - wow, I have a lot to do to catch up (consider it takes 5 - 10 minutes per insect to enter). 

Taxa

 - 23 unknown phyla (this is an error - unless I really can't identify something to phylum)

 - 2 annelids (worms)

 - 4125 arthropods (no surprise there)

 - 68 chordates (feather/blood, hair, scales)

 - 16 flowering plant samples (should be many many more)

 - 6 mollusks (all snails)

 - 1 fern (a bracken fern, a common field fern) 

 Of the arthropods 

    - 185 spiders

    - 88 collembola (springtails)

    - 14 millipedes (this number seems really low but it's odd how few go into pitfalls compared to how many you see in the forest)

    - 4 snails 

    - 3828 insects 

    - 3 Malacostraca (rolly-polly) 

Of the insects

    - 2 cockroaches (much much lower than expected)

    - 428 Coleoptera (beetles)

    - 1201 Diptera (flies)

    - 574 Hemiptera (true bugs)

    - 1239 Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants - most of these are ants and tiny wasps)

    - 88 Lepidoptera (most were hand captures but also include a number of micromoths that are a few mm) 

    - 17 Odonata (dragonflies - all are hand captures)

    - 138 Orthoptera (grasshoppers and crickets, mostly older samples from sweepnets) 

    -  50 mistakes (wrong orders listed with Insecta as the class, space added in front of the name or after)

    - identified to species 320 (not awesome) 

Moving forward

    - add many more species identities 

    - fix all the errors

    - send hundreds of samples off to be isotoped (~ 850 samples have isotope data) 

    - sort and enter thousands of insects! 

I do need a bunch of https://www.forestry-suppliers.com/p/53598/52861/cornell-university-insect-cabinet-drawer.  And time.. lots of time. 

Micromothone of the micromoths

 rove beetle