FishTales A Newsletter History of the Fish/Morse Families

November 1998 Issue # 16 Return to Contents

It has been a very busy year here and Fish Tales suffered because of it. This only the second issue in 1998 for what is supposed to be a quarterly publication. Mary Lou Smith told me so five years ago. She said that trying to publish quarterly was too ambitious. Well, apparently it's a goal, not a mandate.

Enclosed with this issue is an index covering all of the publications to date for those of you who have been saving your copies. We will use issue numbers from now on, rather than the volume and number designation. The latter method is a little pretentious, especially if there are different numbers of issues each year, which has been the case so far. Still, it is interesting to note that we have been able to get out sixteen issues over the past five years and the archival material is far from depleted.

With this installment we come to the chronological end of Arthur M. Morse's complete diaries. That is, we have taken his story from the diaries he wrote in 1892 through 1894. There is a partial diary for 1898 which will be useful. It does not mean that we have used all of the material in them. When he did write, he wrote a lot and we may revisit the diaries in the future. They are intriguing, because they were written with no apparent audience in mind. In fact, some of the entries seem to be inside jokes to himself. I find his letters more revealing, because he knew who his audience was.

This issue of Fish Tales does not introduce any new characters. Next time I plan to provide some new blood, or at least a short story to liven things.