Tag: Blog

InShaw Blog Update- May 2026

There’s a Truxton Circle article I’m sitting on that I need to rewrite.

I’m also a church archivist for a church I don’t belong to. There’s some work that I’ve been putting off. I said I would get to it in Spring. Spring is over, and haven’t done anything. But I have done some preliminary oral history work. This is time consuming and has taken my attention away from this blog.

And I’m not particularly interested anymore in doing property histories. What makes me happy is researching people. The DC Recorder of Deeds is very helpful with looking up people, but I don’t want it to be my main thing. Since I need to clean up my census data, I’m going to see if I can mix blog writing with data clean up.

And there are personal things or life in general. I suspect getting older makes it harder to do as much as I used to. sigh.

Square 507_pt4

This is the last post for this square. I thought I had several posts for the even side of the 1700 block of 4th Street NW. I suspect some may be in the Moveable Type black hole of off-line posts. I won’t say they are missing. They are hibernating. I don’t have anything historical about the 400 blocks of Rhode Island or Florida Ave NW.

1700 block of 4th St NW. Taken Dec 14, 2005

I thought I had written about the homes on 4th St owned by Dr. Euphemia Lofton Haynes. But I can’t find those. So that’s another future post for another day.

I do have a untitled random post listing vacant houses on the block and neighboring block from 2003. And there’s an edgy post, regarding Cindy the Crackho. 4th St isn’t mentioned, but that was her general hangout block. She was very friendly.

I need to move on to other blocks. This is a good realization of the thin parts of my research, the parts I’ve ignored.

Slow/No Posts in March

February was very busy. I gave a presentation on Eloyce Gist to a pretty good crowd at the National Archives at College Park.

A lot of things personally have been piling up and unfortunately I missed a very important deadline with financial consequences. What’s done is done, but there are other things with other deadlines I need to take care of. So I will take a break from the blog this month.

In the meantime. Here’s a picture of some kittens on a patio.

Taken June 13, 2006

Blog Changes Coming for 2026

At some point between now and 1/1/2026 I will change the look of this website and Inshaw.com. This may mean it might go through a couple of looks before I settle on one. You’ve been warned.

I know I need to update Truxtoncircle.org, which is also in the Inshaw family of websites. Maybe 2027 for that.

On Comments

In order to prevent spam, which pops up in my notifications from time to time, I had closed comments after 365 days, or 1 year.

This made sense when I was writing on more topical topics. But now that I’ve shifted to writing about the history of the neighborhood, I see that I am missing the opportunity to connect with people. These can be people whose ancestors I write about or others who have an interest in the topic. For good or ill, because, yes, I do throw shade.

So I am extending the comment period to 2.5 years. If that goes well, I’ll expand to 10 years.

Notice about Flickr photos

So I’m thinking about retirement. From the thing that pays me, not this. However, the thing that pays me supports the work I do here. It pays for the web hosting, the domains, and a bunch of other stuff.

One of those is a Pro Flickr account, where I have a slew of photographs hosted on the site. I haven’t used Flickr that much to host new photos since 2022. And though $75 a year isn’t that much, I need to start making this hobby cheaper.

I have downloaded my photos, but I need to start deleting some of the photos from the site. I think the limit is 1,000 and I have somewhere above 3,000.

Starting now I will begin mass deleting photos.

Preparing for Washington DC History Conference- Black Homeowners of Truxton Circle

I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be presenting at the 2024 DC History Conference and I’ll be talking about the Black Homeowners of Truxton Circle.

So if you are available Saturday, April 6th at 10:15 at the Neighborhood History and Housing panel, come see me. Ask some questions.

You can register now for the April conference, and take a look at the program here.

So in order to get ready for the conference I’m going to slightly ignore the blog for a bit. Also I have some personal things I need to deal with. Even once the conference is done, there will still be some personal things that will need to be dealt with, maintained? So I’m thinking of a schedule of one researched post a week with a few Memory Lane posts. I’d like to get around to actually getting something published outside of the InShaw blog about Truxton Circle and that’s going to take some focus and time, in addition to some of those personal things I’ve been ignoring.

WSIC- Taking a break

Well, the newspaper search was very tedious and right now I am Washington Sanitary Improvement Companied out.

There is more to explore.

I was telling a friend who doesn’t live in the DC metro area about this project and about the WSIC. It started as an experiment in housing, mixing charity with capitalism. She asked if WSIC achieved their goals. Answering that question is something I’d like to take a stab at. Unfortunately, the answer would involve other areas of the city that I am less knowledgeable about.

So I’ll get back to it. If I don’t remind me would you?

I’m also going to slow down on posting on the blog. I want to garden, do stuff with the family, yadda, yadda. Blogging and researching are great when it is cold and horrid outside. I’ll probably ramp up when it is too hot and sticky and buggy to go outside.

New Year, New Job, New Goals 2022

Last year I moved out of Truxton Circle after selling my home of 19 years to the wilds of PG County. Despite that I am still the world’s expert on Truxton Circle History and it is not a skill I will be giving up anytime soon.

Speaking of skills, doing the Black Home Owners of Truxton Circle series, has helped me get a new job. Nineteen seems to be a magic number, as I worked in the same Bureau of Fight Club (they are funny and don’t want me to talk about them) department for 19 years. This weekly, sometimes daily, habit of hunting down people, possibly long dead, and writing up a quick biography has developed a skill of a quickie genealogist. It was a skill I could point to in my job interview, semi paraphrasing Liam Neeson in Taken:

I do have a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. If you are obviously still alive, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you. I will protect your privacy. But if I’m not sure, I will look for you, I will find you, and I make sure you are dead.

It’s easier to do the job if the persons in the document are dead.

However, the new work environment will be a bit more restrictive. I don’t know how much attention I can pay to this site. I do know that I will no longer have access to the primary records related to Shaw and Washington, DC history, as I did with the old job.

I hope that I can work on a few new projects. I have warned that I will look at Squares 552 and 615, the core Bates area of the TC, and because my past research has been used for historic preservation/landmark, I want present owners to make the changes they can now before any restrictions come. There is also a journal article I want to write, but I have to figure out what story the data I’ve cobbled together actually says.

I’m a little sad that my job move means I won’t be exploring the history of DC public housing. Once upon a time public housing didn’t suck, and wasn’t shorthand for crappy crime ridden living conditions. But now it is, what it is.

The new job does pay more…. so I could conceivably hire someone to do the leg work of scanning those records.