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.

Salisbury, CT - The Early Years

We've just published Salisbury, Connecticut - The Early Years!

Every so often in this e-publishing business we get to actually publish something that has never been published before. Mostly we republish stuff that's old, generally pre-1923, thus avoiding copyright issues, but every so often we dig up something a whole lot newer -- and on rare occasions, even get to be the first publisher of something.

Back in the 1980s, after Judith Sherman (who has several roles in this story, including business partner in Between the Lakes Group and spouse, as well as author, as you will shortly see) found herself no longer working for the Wall Street powerhouse that had employed her before our daughter was born (new moms still don't get much respect on Wall Street, we're told, but it was even worse 30 years ago), she decided to get her MA in history -- a subject that had been a consuming interest of hers almost all her life -- at Hunter College, which both had a great history department on its own and could draw on the even stronger CUNY history department, which happened to be only a few blocks from our apartment in NYC.

Because we already had the house on the dirt road that gave its title to this blog, but only visited it on weekends, once she had completed her required courses and was undertaking original research, one of her research topics was, naturally, the history of Salisbury, Connecticut.

When this paper was subtitled “The Early Years” it indeed meant early. Most of the material is based on the 1719 – 1742 period – the period when Salisbury (which is located in the extreme northwest corner of Connecticut, in case you were wondering just where the dirt road is located) was first laid out and settled. In its 83 pages (yes, it's a serious paper, not a homework assignment), including extensive footnotes, the paper summarizes the township’s early history in a way that had not been done previously.

At the time this paper was written, colonial historiography fell into two broad classifications: first, there were the archivers, the people who collected colonial-era manuscripts, (occasionally) translated them into modern English, sequenced them, and published them in bound volumes for others to search for elusive ancestors but mainly to get dusty on research library shelves. The second category of colonial historians at that time painted in broad strokes. Very broad strokes, usually. They drew from limited documentary history, they extrapolated from more recent and more extensively documented eras, they were happy to include tradition and conjecture, and they theorized about what must have happened in very general terms.

Usually historians in the latter category had an axe to grind – most frequently an ancestor’s reputation to inflate, or an organizational viewpoint to protect and promote.

Around the time this paper was written, a third kind of colonial historian was beginning to emerge. Historians, largely graduate students like the author of this paper, and younger faculty in research universities, were just beginning to apply quantitative techniques to the colonial data available. Instead of writing from within the milieu that rewarded the second variety of colonial historian cited above with social approbation, the new historians tended to write about places where they did not live and where they had no ancestral backgrounds to color their historical interpretation.

It seems strange today to realize that thirty or so years ago colonial history tended to eschew quantitative measurements, and that arms-length critical analysis was the exception rather than the rule, but that was the state of the colonial history field even that recently.

The author’s background, prior to her graduate education in history, had been in analytical work on Wall Street. She had learned early on, in reading annual reports and 10-Ks of companies looking for investment opportunities (and red flags) and in identifying companies as merger and acquisition candidates, that puffery abounded in the text of annual reports, and that only by starting with the footnotes and the numbers themselves and analyzing them critically could rational business decisions be made. A statement like “Land speculation was rampant in early Salisbury” was the sort of generalization that sadly characterized the state of colonial history at the time this paper was written – and exactly the type of statement that Sherman had been trained to detect, question – and frequently demolish.

Along those lines, this paper presented the first not-entirely-laudatory view of a real sacred cow of Salisbury history, the first clergyman in town, the Rev. Jonathan Lee.

Anyway, after opening a long-hidden away box and finding this and another paper about the history of Salisbury, we decided that it was time for a first publication.