Ryan W. Owen, Writer and Photographer
My fingers first brushed across the small metallic oval a few weeks ago. It was right next to Officer Lee’s Lowell PD badge. This very different badge was light, too old to be plastic. I figured it was probably aluminum. As I slid out the drawer at the Lowell Historical Society’s archive, the flourescent […]
Read MoreAt the Lowell Historical Society, we sometimes get the question: “Hey, what’s the strangest thing you have in your collection?” That’s a tough question to answer. The Lowell Historical Society has been around for a long time. I’m reminded of this each time I visit our archive. Just this morning, I found a book, one […]
Read MoreIn those long ago days before cellphones, speed dialing, and stored numbers, folks like Tommy Tutone telephoned girls like ‘Jenny’ by actually dialing 867-5309. If he was a modern type, he may have even punched the number into the telephone’s touchtone keypad, an innovation that was several years old by the time the song was […]
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Most family historians have THAT box. The box always looks roughly the same. It’s the box that belonged to the toaster your mother had three toasters ago. Or, maybe it’s a shoebox for a pair of long-lost boat shoes from Thom McAn or a gift box from Anderson Little (remember them?). Maybe it’s a bag […]
Read MoreSo, say you’re writing a scene about Edwardian-era police officers in New England, or researching the life and times of a police officer ancestor. Or, perhaps you’re trying to get an idea of how people got into trouble with the law in the first years of the twentieth century. You’ll need to know why Edwardian-era […]
Read MoreDid you know that Jingle Bells was composed by James Lord Pierpoint in Medford, Massachusetts in 1850? It’s claimed that the town’s 19th century sleigh races inspired the song, and that it was originally written as a Thanksgiving, not Christmas song. Why “jingle bells”? Music historian James Fuld informs that the horse-drawn sleighs of the […]
Read MoreSo, say you’ve inherited a large stack of family photographs showing ancestors who are far up your family tree – such as great-grandparents, or their siblings, cousins, or close family friends. As you stare into the moment in time captured in that cabinet card or tin type photograph, do you ever wonder what their voices […]
Read MoreIt turns out that wild turkeys are incredibly difficult to move across long distances. In the days before refrigerated travel, a national roadway system, and even railroads, driving turkeys across long stretches of land was the province of men called turkey drovers. From 1790 to about 1830, turkey drovers walked turkeys to market, literally, at a […]
Read MoreDo you commute to work using public transportation? There’s a certain etiquette, a set of norms, that is easily observable when you are on the bus, the train, the subway, or even a plane. There’s a prevailing thought out there that civility is a “thing of the past”. But, was it? Did our ancestors live […]
Read MoreIf you were to walk . . . through Boston’s Scollay Square and down Tremont Street, into what those alive in 1895 called “the congested district”, you would feel the crush of people and electric car traffic on what, even then, was considered a narrow road. On this midsummer workday, as you walk southwest through the […]
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Forgotten New England 