Paths to the Present Understanding of the Past

How Harold B. Gill, Jr. pioneered computer-aided historical research

Recently, I was talking in my vlog here about the York County Project, the computer-aided statistical analysis of the records of York County, Virginia begun in the late 1970’s by Harold B. Gill, Jr., my late father. Among the items in a shoebox from which the following post also came a letter by his father to his mother from the time of her pregancy with him, there was also this letter from the District Court of York County authorizing him to access the “York Court’s loose papers” in the Virginia State Libary.

Edith M. Elliot, Clerk of the District Court of York County, VA’s authorization letter

This artifact marks the early stages of my father’s pioneering use of computers on historical research at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. While ARPANET was already connecting computers across the government and education space, it had yet to reach the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. In due time, however, my father would be making use of the assets that the Internet afforded him, including the newspapers being published running up to and after the American Revolution. At the age of 91, he was working on a book of tradesmen’s advertisements in Virginia newspapers of the 18th century, a work that the Harold B Gill Foundation, LLC is currently working to pull together, edit, annotate, and publish - although I believe that will require some years to bring to completion. Going to the Foundation’s link, you’ll see the cover photo shows the then-Director of Research at Colonial Williamsburg with Dad in a swamp, with “plat maps” rolled up, surveying 18th century property boundaries! Another photographs shows my father with drafting tools working on the plat maps by the natural light coming into his office in the Travis House at the corner of Francis and South Henry Streets in Williamsburg.

By the mid-1980s, my father’s study featured a first generation PC with two 5.25 inch floppy disc drives. It had no hard drive. One had to load the DOS disc, then remove it and put in the WordPerfect or DBase III+ or, later, dBase IV disc, and another disc on which to actually store the work-in-progress. Over the course of years, the computers were upgraded until the set up looked like this on April 11, 2024, four days after he passed away:

Harold B. Gill, Jr.’s study with an advertisement detailing the sale “Rope-Walk” land for a work-in-progress left unfinished at the time of his death on April 7, 2024

If you are thinking of supporting the work of the Harold B Gill Foundation by becoming a paid subscriber of “Harrowings” here, trust me when I say that I will be pouring most, if not all, of the rest of my days into “Harrowing” the thumb-drives, CD-ROMs, as well as hard-copy files and floppy discs and, when it can be located, the hard drive of the “all-in-one” that served as my father’s main computer at the end of his life.

Already, you can read the Journal of Nicholas Cresswell here with all of my father’s and George M. Curtis’s annotations - it was the last major book length work from my father’s hand and was glowingly reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

Other’s include these articles available online from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation website:

As always, please leave a comment if you are so inclined and do consider supporting the ongoing work. We have 10 paying subscribers at this time and are so grateful.

Finally, amplification of our signal over the noise of cyberspace is so helpful!