Historic Accounts: A Study of Store Ledgers from the Mid-19th Century is a new CD published by Vintage Volumes in Burke, VA. This CD is considerably different from the typical data CDs that have been appearing on the market lately. The biggest difference is that the CD doesn’t come with its own search engine—in order to use the data the purchaser must own at least Microsoft Access 97.
The CD contains three Access databases: VA Ledger contains the Adkisson store ledger from Halifax County, Virginia covering the time period January 1859 to November 1861; IN Ledger contains a ledger for a wholesale dry goods store in Independence, Indiana, for the period July 1851 to August 1854; and Census contains census data for a lot of the customers contained in the Adkisson ledger. Additionally, the CD is accompanied by a 127-page, spiral-bound manual that was painstakingly created.
Virginia Mescher, the transcriber of the data, has a passion for nineteenth-century life as represented by some of the books previously published by Vintage Volumes. She’s the author of Foods of the Mid-Nineteenth Century in the South, Laundry Methods and Equipment Used in the Nineteenth Century, and Price Comparisons, Price Increased, and Salaries of Jobs During the Civil War, among others. It was the last interest in prices that led her to these little-known ledgers. She also hails from Halifax County and knows many of the descendants of the customers from the Adkisson store, including the store owner’s descendants.
Owners of Access 97 or higher will have no trouble using this CD. Once you open Microsoft Access, you find the database you’re interested in on the CD and open it. You’ll get a warning that you can’t write to the database because it’s a read-only file. You are then presented with a standard Access “switchboard” providing you with options for viewing the data, including searches by name, item, date, and category, and viewing the total report (1,016 pages for the VA Ledger database). You can also open an “Orders Form” where you can view all of the orders for a particular person.
There are no bells and whistles with this data. The data was transcribed into a relational database set up, so that you can search for all items for one person, or you can look at a report of all people who bought shoes, for example. The author assumes that people using the CD have an understanding of the software required to use the databases, and therefore leave navigation within the database to the individual. For instance, many people will look for a Close button to close a screen. There are no such frills here—you’ll need to use the X in the upper right hand corner of the screen. I mention this because my experience with software and technical support has been that there are many people who don’t understand the inner workings of the software used to create a tool such as this, especially not to the extent that the creator understands the software. And, a user shouldn’t have to understand how the underlying program works. I don’t know the intentions of Vintage Volumes regarding marketing this product, but I believe they’ll find a great deal of resistance to a product that requires another (expensive) product in order to view the data. I found this in my initial release of Clooz, which also required Microsoft Access. I quickly had to release a product that worked on its own, and Vintage Volumes may discover that it also needs to release a product with a built-in search engine.
The manual that comes with the CD is quite extensive and impressive. Obviously a great deal of work went into its preparation. The price of the software, $49.50, might be worth the investment for the manual alone. Mescher goes into a great deal of explanation about using the two ledgers and the census database, but she also has a chapter on the background of the Adkisson ledger and Halifax County, and a chapter on interpreting the ledger descriptions. She also has a bibliography, a glossary, and seven appendices in the manual: Conversion to Modern Currency; Southern Inflation; Codes for Price Notations; Differences in Exchange Rate for Federal Money; Pay for Occupations; Abbreviations Used in the Adkisson Ledger; Adkisson Ledger Categories; and Indiana Ledger Categories.
This CD seems to be most useful for those with ancestors from Halifax County, VA, or Independence, IN, or for those interested in details of life in the nineteenth century. The author promises that more ledgers will be made available in the future to registered users for a nominal fee. To order the CD and manual, write to Vintage Volumes, P.O. Box 10311, Burke, VA 22009-0311; mmescher@erols.com; or phone 703-978-3925.
Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CGRS, CGL, is the managing editor of Genealogical Computing, editor of the Board for Certification of Genealogists’ newsletter OnBoard, the creator of Clooz—the electronic filing cabinet for genealogical records, co-creator of the new family health history program GeneWeaver, and a frequent contributor to Ancestry. She can be reached via e-mail at gceditor@ancestry.com.
GC Extra
