Can I exchange this certificate for gold?

“While cleaning out my mother’s house, I found a twenty-dollar bill that says “twenty dollars in gold coin payable to the bearer on demand.” It’s bigger than a regular twenty-dollar bill and it has George Washington on it. Can I really exchange it for gold?”

Our patron brought in a picture of their find and we were able to identify it as a 1922 series twenty-dollar gold certificate. The U.S. Department of the Treasury and Federal Reserve History websites answered our patron’s question. While it can be redeemed for a regular twenty-dollar bill through any financial institution, it can no longer be exchanged for gold. In fact, for thirty years it was illegal to have a gold certificate.

Gold certificates circulated until December 28, 1933, until the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 withdrew all gold certificates, gold coin, and gold bullion from circulation. President Roosevelt gave the order that all privately-owned gold certificated be turned over to the Treasurer of the United States by midnight on January 17, 1934. It was then illegal to hold them until the restrictions were removed in 1964.

However, there is good news! According to the thirty-fourth edition of the Standard Catalog of United States Paper Money, a 1922 series twenty-dollar gold certificate in fine condition can be worth about two hundred dollars.

Is there a way to find out what was happening on a certain day in history, particularly during World War II?

In January, we answered a patron’s question about how to find an obituary that was published years ago, and that information is available on our library blog and is useful in knowing where to look for old local newspapers.

To see what was going on in any given year, we have Timetables of History by Bernard Grun, Chronology of World History by H.E.L. Mellersh, and Chronicle of the World by Jerome Burne and Derrik Mercer. These books are set up like timelines, documenting the important events that happened every year.

History, HistoryNet (publisher of several magazines including Military History), and the New York Times all have a “This Day in History” feature on their websites. The New York Times even includes a picture of the front page of the paper from a particularly significant date.

For World War II-specific information, World War II Database and HistoryOfWar.org both have timelines of the war that go day-by-day. We also have VFW’s Pictorial History of the Second World War, which is a chronological collection of captioned photographs.

For further research, the Newton Falls Public Library has an extensive collection of World War II nonfiction, including The Second World War by Antony Beevor, Eyewitness to World War II by Neil Kagan and Stephen G. Hyslop, and The War: An Intimate History 1941-1945 by Geoffrey G. Ward and Ken Burns.

Is this a good time to transplant roses?

According to HeirloomRoses.com, KnockoutRoses.net, The American Horticulture Society Encyclopedia of Gardening, and Rayford Clayton Reddell’s The Rose Bible, the best time to transplant roses is during their dormant season, which generally lasts from late winter until early spring. It’s best to wait until the threat of frost has passed, so early spring, from March to April, tends to be a good bet (though this has been an unusual year for weather, with snow in late April). While roses can be transplanted once they’ve started to bloom and grow, it’s more difficult.

Our resources gave a few tips for successful transplantation. Prune back the rose before moving it. When digging up the rose to move it, dig deep enough to get as much of the root ball as possible. Plant it in a well-prepared bed where no roses have previously grown and make sure to water it well after planting and not to fertilize it until it’s established.

For more information, check out Designing with Roses by Tony Lord, Rose Basics by Amanda Beales, and 365 Days of Gardening by Christine Allison.

Why the donkey and the elephant?

The election season having sparked their curiosity, one of our patrons commented on our Facebook page to ask who chose the donkey and the elephant to represent Democrats and Republicans.

According to Smithsonian Magazine and ourwhitehouse.org, it was the famous nineteenth-century political cartoonist Thomas Nast who linked the donkey and elephant to the Democratic and Republican parties, though he was not the first person to use the symbols.

The donkey had been used in reference to Democrat Andrew Jackson during his 1828 campaign. While it was meant as a criticism, Jackson reclaimed it as his own symbol, drawing attention to the donkey’s positive qualities of steadfastness and determination.

The elephant may have been based on the phrase “seeing the elephant,” which soldiers used to refer to having experienced combat. It was first used in an Abraham Lincoln campaign newspaper in 1864, where it was depicted celebrating Union victories.

For more information, the biography Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons by Fiona Deans Halloran is available through CLEVNET. 

Do you have any information on wood gas?

Wood gas is an alternative fuel created by burning wood (or other biomass) in a machine called a gasifier. During World War II, wood-gas-powered generators and vehicles provided a way to get around the petroleum shortage. According to Richard Freudenberger’s article in Mother Earth News, there were over one million wood gas civilian vehicles in Asia and Europe by the end of the war.

One of our patrons was building their own gasifier and hoped to find some resources at the library. They checked out The Homeowner’s Energy Handbook by Paul Scheckel, which had a small section of information, but they were hoping for building plans. We looked in some of the other books about sustainable and off-the-grid living, including Chris Peterson’s Practical Projects for Self-Sufficiency, and we checked our collection of Foxfires and even some of our history books, but we couldn’t turn up anything.

We moved on to searching our online research databases. Typing “wood gas” into Academic Search Premier, one of the multidisciplinary databases available through CLEVNET, brought up a multitude of articles. Some were from scholarly journals, and one was “Wood Gas Wizard,” Freudenberger’s Mother Earth News article from April 2012. Freudenberger interviewed Wayne Keith, an Alabama farmer who was unwilling to pay more than $1.50 a gallon for gasoline. Keith started powering his vehicles with wood gas in 2004. His website, www.driveonwood.com, provides plans and other resources for others looking to do the same.

Why are my fish disappearing?

One of our patrons was concerned about their home aquarium. They had maintained it for many years, but their older fish were starting to die off. They had started to add new fish, but a few of those fish had disappeared. Was one of the older fish eating them? Was something wrong with the environment?

Assuming that the tank was tightly covered, the water was clean, pH balanced, free of harmful chemicals, and an appropriate temperature, and the fish were not being under- or over-fed, we checked Mary Bailey and Peter Burgess’s Tropical Fishlopaedia, Maddy and Mic Hargrove’s Freshwater Aquariums for Dummies, Dick Mills’s Aquarium Fish, Stuart Thraves’s Setting Up a Tropical Aquarium Week-by-Week, John Davies’s Complete Encyclopedia of the Freshwater Aquarium, and www.aquariumcarebasics.com for more information.

Our patron’s aquarium included a Buenos Aires tetra, a rainbow shark, and a rosy barb. They had been attempting to add an otocinclus catfish and a few varieties of platys and tetras.

According to Bailey and Burgess, an omnivorous fish who has never bothered its old tankmates may go after small new fish. If it came into the aquarium at the same time as the old fish, or if it was too small to eat them when they were added, the omnivore seems to recognize them as companions and not food. It’s used to food coming from above – which is also where new fish are introduced. Platys, tetras, and barbs are omnivores, and Thraves mentions that it’s common for larger fish to pick off neon tetras, so that could be a problem. While our patron’s fish are generally known to be peaceful, Buenos Aires tetras can get aggressive as they age, especially the larger ones. Rainbow sharks (which are not actual sharks but are closely related to barbs and danios) are also somewhat aggressive and territorial, especially toward their own kind. Only one should be kept in an aquarium and it should be given plenty of places to hide. (The Buenos Aires tetra and the rosy barb, on the other hand, are schooling fish and are happiest in groups of at least six.)

It’s also possible that the fish were simply unhealthy when our patron purchased them, or that they didn’t take well to the stress of transport, depending on how long they lasted. The otocinclus catfish in particular is known to be delicate and often has trouble acclimating to a new environment.

If our patron is still worried about their fish, Tropical Fishlopaedia and Freshwater Aquariums for Dummies both have information on troubleshooting aquarium problems.

What kind of nickname is Sagehen?

“In the book I’m reading, other characters call the main character the Sagehen. Why do you think they call her that?”

One of our patrons was enjoying The Last Midwife by Sandra Dallas, a work of historical fiction set in nineteenth-century Colorado. Gracy Brookens, the main character, is a midwife in a small mining town. Other characters sometimes refer to her as “the Sagehen.”

Our first guess was that it was akin to calling Gracy a mother hen or a mama bird in reference to her maternal nature. “Sagehen” is an informal word for the sage-grouse, a chicken-sized bird that calls the sagebrush of the American West its home. However, after doing more research, we found an interview with Sandra Dallas on the blog Let Them Read Books where she talks about what inspired her to write her novel. Her main inspiration was a poem called “In These Rude Airs” from Belle Turnbull’s book The Tenmile Range. Dallas met Turnbull in 1963 when the poet was an elderly lady living in a Colorado cabin, and remembers her as “a gentle creature” though her poetry had a hard edge to it. “In These Rude Airs” centers around another midwife called the Sagehen and Dallas created Gracy Brookens as a response, though she’s a much gentler character.

For curious readers, The Tenmile Range and The Last Midwife are both available for borrowing through CLEVNET.