Friday, February 10, 2012

Charity in New York State in 1906

Most regular readers of this blog are aware that as a retirement business we at Between the Lakes Group have been engaged in finding and republishing history (mainly of the northeastern states of the US, but sometimes elsewhere as well) for over a decade now. When you're engaged in a pursuit, you find that a lot of what you think about is related to the pursuit at hand. Thus, it occurred to us that we would not be out of line if we occasionally commented on the process of selecting the things that we publish, and perhaps even about the process.

So, this post is the first of what will likely become a series on items we've just published. It could even be an easy way to stay on top of what we're working on.

We were fortunate a while ago to happen on an eBay listing for a three volume set that comprised this report about charity in New York State in 1906 (the title of which is actually "Annual Report of the State Board of Charities for the Year 1906"). It was certainly an unusual item; so much so that the seller actually contacted us after the auction to ask what would motivate someone to actually buy such a thing and pay the shipping for it.

When we told them that we felt that this would be a great primary source for those interested in local history and for those who might want to see for themselves just what life was actually like a hundred years ago if you happened to be among society’s unfortunates and lived in New York State. We allowed that given the political attention today’s “safety net” was getting, we thought that there might actually turn out to be quite a bit of interest in the information in these three volumes.

The question was how to make it available, of course. We’re a firm that publishes electronically, so reprinting those volumes was not an option. How to organize the material was, however. It occurred to us that possibly the eBay seller was flummoxed about who would want to buy something like this was that, in its three volume format, this is pretty close to impenetrable. For example, volume III (this material is from volume II) is almost entirely tables of statistics. You’ve got to be more than an ordinary policy wonk to find that worth a second look. Volume I – the “report” per se – is a real mixed bag, with much duplication of material on some of the state facilities discussed in this volume, yet also some that is not found here. Volume I also has a series of transcripts of discussions and papers appended dealing with specific issues that were of particular interest to the Commission at that time.

We decided, since we tend to organize our publications by county, that we would stick to that methodology here, providing a certain amount of information at a state-wide level, but certainly not all that the three volumes include. We recognized from the start that we would be overlooking material in volumes I and III that referenced facilities in the counties, but one must start somewhere.

Accordingly, our plan is to re-publish volume II in county by county segments, and to precede those publications with the summary of state facilities that begins the volume (that is this paper).

We hope that those interested in local history will find this series interesting, and we are confident that very few counties have these reports available to them anymore. Thus, we think that any county historian or local historian will find it of interest. We expect that people working on the genealogy of people who were involved in charitable administration in New York State in 1906 will find this of interest simply because it contains many names of persons in various administrative capacities. Further, although names of inmates of the facilities are not listed, we think that anyone who learns that a genealogical subject was at one time an inmate of a particular institution will want to find out a bit more about where the ancestor or other relative lived and what conditions were like there.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, with the level of political discourse about the “safety net” we now have, that we ought to have, and at some point in the past we actually had, we think that knowing what this portion of the safety net consisted of back in 1906 will be instructive, if not surprising, to most people.

As we like to think that everyone knows, but it also feels like we need to say, we are in the process of publishing more historical information about New York State (and other locales) from a variety of sources, all old, out of copyright, out of print, and much of it very scarce and difficult to locate. We invite you to examine both our material available for download (like this article) and our CD-ROMs – your purchases of which make it possible to continue to collect and republish this material for you.

A full catalog of our offerings can be found at our main website, http://www.betweenthelakes.com. We invite you to visit us there.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Praise for the government

I figure that with a title like that most readers will decide one of the following:
(1) that senility has finally kicked in bigtime
(2) that I'm being sarcastic
(3) that this is some kind of political polemic

Wrong. It's none of the above.

It's actually praise for the Connecticut Department of Revenue Services (and I can hear the response to THIS -- the author must be truly crazed) for something that they do well, better than the old way, and cheaper for the taxpayer, too.

That something is online filing of sales and use taxes, coupled with a direct debit to my business checking account for tax owed.

In way of background, my business, such as it is, Between the Lakes Group LLC, is a retirement business. It's never made much money, and it never will. However, if you happen to be interested in local history, genealogy, and Americana, principally as it relates to the Northeast, you really do need to have our site bookmarked. What we do is locate and republish materials in these closely related subject areas. The publication part is online (and on CD-ROM) so our "products" are considerably cheaper than you could ever find them in print -- if you ever could find them at all. Anyway, it's worth a look. The link will take you to our website, where you can peruse the catalog.

Okay, that's the end of the commercial message -- now back to the subject of the Connecticut DRS and why I'm praising them

I mentioned that this retirement business of mine, Between the Lakes Group, is a very small business. It's so small that several years ago, the DRS put us on annual filing of sales tax -- that was smart move #1.

Nonetheless, back then, filing had to be done on paper and mailed to Hartford. I foolishly neglected to send some returns return receipt requested -- and each time I omitted that step, the return seemed never to arrive in Hartford (which cost me a $50 penalty per instance -- more than the tax owed on at least one of those occasions -- remember, I said this is a SMALL business).

After it happened twice, I made a rule that all returns going to the DRS would go certified, return receipt. It was a pain, and it was kind of offensive that I had to pay several dollars just to pay a rather small tax, but at least it stopped the $50 penalties coming in.

Then, the DRS implemented online filing. As soon as I found out about it, I started using it. Each year they make small improvements that make the process easier. This year, with a more elaborate sales tax structure, I had not expected the process to go smoothly, but, having just filed my sales tax return, I am very happy to say that I was wrong. They did everything right, they made the process easy, they checked for calculation errors (actually, they did the calculations for me), and I saved the trip to the Post Office, the first class postage, and the certified return receipt fee, not to mention the anxiety that I always felt in the old days until the return receipt came back.

Thank you, Connecticut DRS. Your system works, and I appreciate it. Good job.