The new edition of Bond Hill: Origin and Transformation… contains a few new findings. Robert Wimberg corrected an error of mine, where I had confused the Old Mens and Womens Home (aka the Old Folks Home) with the Altenheim (aka the German Old Mens Home). I really appreciate it when readers take the time to critique this work and help reconstruct this history with me. Dr. Kinji Tanaka of the Lafcadio Hearn Society brought to my attention some new archival material he uncovered from the Iowa State University archives where the papers of Hearn biographer, Dorothea McClelland are kept. I learned that Watkin emigrated to America in 1848 (not 1845 as suggested in a letter from Watkin’s niece). This would have put Watkin in London at the same time as Henry L. Fry, Watkin’s father-in-law. (I hypothesize that they may have met each other in radical circles in England, before Watkin married Fry’s daughter, Laura Ann, in Cincinnati in 1853.) I also learned the name of the Scottish printer who helped bring Hearn into Watkin’s print shop and bookstore in 1869: J.M. McDermott. These and other updates are included in the latest edition (no. 10. I update the edition number whenever I’ve done a printing and made a change, even if I’ve only printed one or two copies.)

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“A few updates…” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.