The Derbyshire County Council's Record Office has compiled a list of 19th-century inmates (pdf) and the crimes they committed.
The document features the records of all prisoners held at the County Gaol in Derby from 1800 to 1819.Other offenses included "Having a hare," "Taking swan's eggs," and "Pretending to have skill."
Reasons for imprisonment included "feloniously milking a cow", being an "incorrigible rogue", "vagabond", or "lewd woman" and suffering from "indolence". [Link]
Vic Fearn and Company have created some unusual coffins for their clientele, some of which may be seen on their oddly designed Crazy Coffins website.
The list includes kites, corkscrews, a ballet shoe, an electric guitar, a football boot, a sports bag and a replica of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.
Among the other designs waiting for their owner is a wooden egg, commissioned by a woman in Wales who wants to be buried upright in the foetal position. [Link]
A 128-year-old woman was buried Friday in El Salvador.
Cruz Hernandez, who national birth records show was born on May 3, 1878, in central El Salvador, passed away in her sleep on Thursday, neighbour and close family friend Margarita Ascencio said by telephone. Hernandez died without being recognized by the Guinness Book of Records.
"She had been poorly for a few days, and yesterday, after eating a tamale and drinking some milk, she went to sleep and never woke up," Ascencio said.
Many who knew her attributed her longevity to her favourite drink of a beer with two raw eggs in it. [Link]Her diet was strangely similar to that of this woman. I need to eat more eggs and drink more booze.
Florrie Baldwin is the oldest woman in Britain. According to her six-year-old great-great grandson Harry, "She really, really is 110. None of my friends have a grandma as old as mine."
Apart from the odd niggle she is still fit and healthy for her age and attributes her long life to eating an egg sandwich for breakfast and a cooked meal for dinner.
She said: "I always eat an egg sandwich in the morning and have at least one hot meal each day. I think I've had an egg sandwich almost every day since I was married at 23. I also do like a glass of sherry now and again."
If she had eaten a fried egg sandwich every day since she was 23, it would mean she had polished off 31,755 in her lifetime. [Link]
From the The Arizona Republican of June 7, 1906:
A singular birth certificate was submitted at a meeting of the school attendance committee at Norwich Union. A widow had been called upon to prove that her daughter had reached school exemption age. She produced an egg, beautifully colored in purple, yellow and cream, whereon, in almost copperplate characters, the name and date of nativity were picked out in white, together with the texts: "The Lord shall guide thee continually," and "Teach me to do Thy will." This novel certificate was the only record possessed by the mother, and, after being much admired by the committee, was accepted as evidence.That's nothing. The November 1997 issue of the Law Society Gazette tells of a will written on an egg.
[W]ills are supposed to be in writing, but this does not mean that they must be on paper – as Lord Merrivale P found out when he came to hear a case of Barnes, deceased, Hodson and Another v Barnes (136 LT 380). There he was, sitting in his court one day, when the widow of the deceased arrived with a will written on an egg resting in a box filled with cotton wool. After the case started, his Lordship pointed out that the egg was not witnessed. He was met with the response that the testator was a mariner at sea (in fact, he was a pilot on the Manchester ship canal). The evidence and the argument went on for two days and, eventually, His Lordship gave his verdict: he condemned the eggshell will. [Link (pdf)]
The Braddock District in Fairfax County, Virginia, traditionally dedicates its Winter Town Meeting to senior issues. This year, residents of a local senior center were asked to share stories of their pasts. Stories like that of Lola Petsche, who arrived from Cuba with her four-year-old daughter in 1949:
Upon her arrival, [...] she remembers seeing her host preparing eggs in a strange way, by boiling them and dyeing them bright colors. It was Easter, but Petsche had never seen anything like it.
"I said, 'I think I am going to like the United States, even though they eat weird things,'" said Petsche. [Link]
