Danbury Library Blog

October is National Archives Month and a time to recognize the help that we receive from archives and the people who staff them. Archives are crucial for historical research and especially for genealogy research. Danbury Library has a Local History Room which I invite you to visit. It is rich in archival materials which are concerned with Danbury history, Connecticut history and with genealogy research. Your intrepid correspondent will be giving a presentation at the Danbury Museum and Historical Society on Thursday, October 29, at 7 PM on Local Resources for family historians.

If you have not used the National Archives website, please take a look at it. It is likewise celebrating National Archives Month and is an indispensable resource for all manner of research but most especially for family history researchers.

Posted by John O'Donnell at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Danbury's One Book, One Community 2009 is coming to a close! We hope you were able to join us for one of the many great events we sponsored for this program. For the last week of events, we're going out with a bang. Tonight, Monday, October 26, we have a film screening of the film The Soloist, over at WestConn's Student Center Theatre at 7pm. Tomorrow, Tuesday, October 27, at 6:30pm, we have a program here at the library called "In Our Own Voice", a joint effort between the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and the Danbury Library. A unique public education program, developed by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, in which two speakers share compelling personal stories about living with mental illness and achieving recovery. Audience members are encouraged to offer feedback and ask questions; the more audience members become involved, the closer they come to understanding what it is like to live with a mental illness and grapple with recovery.

Finally, on Wednesday, October 28, the author of our celebrated book, Hurry Down Sunshine, Michael Greenberg, will be at WestConn's Ives Concert Hall for talk and Q&A session at 7:30pm.

Join us for many great evenings and events this week!

Posted by Merry at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Big Daddy of vampires is back! Using Bram Stoker's notes for his 1897 classic, Dracula; the great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker, Dacre Stoker, has teamed with Ian Holt to write the sequel, Dracula: The Un-Dead. Set twenty-five years after Dracula has been destroyed, the group responsible for the vampire's destruction is the target of a malevolent force. Another blood-curdling, page turner from the Stoker family.

Posted by Mary at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recently I caught a very interesting episode on the History Detectives which I watch on a regular basis. One of the reasons that the show is appealing to me is that the history detectives frequently use libraries and librarians in their investigations.

This particular investigation was of a farmhouse in East Haddam, CT. The current owner knew something of the prior history of the farmhouse and was wondering why it had changed hands so frequently around the turn of the 20th century. The names that were associated with the frequent turnovers were Eastern European or Russian. The investigator uncovered the fact that there was a program to aid Jewish immigrants to move from New York City into the New England countryside and become farmers. The mortgages for the East Haddam property came from the Baron de Hirsch Fund and the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society. Baron de Hirsch was a Jewish philanthropist who wanted to help Eastern European Jewish immigrants become established in their new home. In Connecticut "yankee farmers" were selling their farms and moving west or taking factory jobs in the cities. Individual Jewish farmers owned land throughout New England . But the greatest number was located in Connecticut. But the land had been used hard for over 200 years which helps to explain the rapid turnover . The Hirsch Fund and the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society tried to help the farmers by producing a newpaper in Yiddish called The Jewish Farmer which was the first Yiddish agricultural magazine in the world and produced in Connecticut.

Posted by John O'Donnell at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's still time to read a number of books before the movie (based on the book) is released in the next few months. The long running favorite The Lovely Bones about how a family of a young girl copes with her disappearance/death and how she copes with watching their suffering from heaven has a great cast including Susan Sarandon and Mark Wahlberg.

Cormac McCarthy's critically acclaimed The Road, scheduled for theater release in November, is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a father and son struggle for survival.

On a comic/ tragic note (tragic if you think about tax dollars spent) we have The Men Who Stare at Goats which investigates the U.S. military's exploration of the paranormal to use in the war on terror. That movie with George Clooney is scheduled for release in November.

Posted by Mary at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)