The Original Name of Harris Ranch

While checking-up on a detail of Amos Jean and Charlotte Harris, I discovered that Ancestry.com now included the World War II Draft Card collection. Luckily, Amos Jean Harris's card was available. The place of residence line of the draft card informs that Harris Ranch was named Deep Cup Ranch by the Harris family.

World War II Draft Card from Ancestry.com

Sneeky? or Am I Missing Something?

Observe the date on the following image for the Rancho San Emidio plat map:

Kern County Abstract Company. 1916. Abstract of Title to The Rancho San Emidio, Situated in the County of Kern, State of California. Made for The Kern County Land Company, a Corporation, Bakersfield, California. Same image in file at California State Archives.

January 1858 by Henry Hancock deputy Surveyor. Sound very plausible, and I took it for granted the date was correct. That is until I found Hancock's original survey notes. 

Notice that the survey was not even begun until September of 1858. Hancock received his instructions on the first of the month and then commenced survey on the 18th. Last time I checked January does not come after September. That is a nine month difference.

Publication Success

During the spring I organised a session at the annual conference of the Society of California Archaeology. After the conference, participants are asked to submit to the open access Articles of the SCA Proceedings. From the session of six participants Clare Bedford (with David Robinson, Fraser Sturt, and Julienne Bernard as co-authors) and myself submitted our articles. So it is official, I am a published archaeologist.

From Above

Our crew on Google Earth:


My team.

Randy's team.

The Sunkist Fruit Sticker

As far as artefacts go a fruit sticker, found on one of the sites from the 2014 field season, is probably the youngest I have ever looked up. They have been in use since the 1990s.

During my childhood my family liked to line up the sticker on the side of the refrigerator, creating a timeline of the different fruits we ate through a particular period. My mother would wipe the slate, so to speak, frequently, but we continued the practice well into the time we left home and returned for extra rations from the supermarket of mom.

I digress.

I learned quite a lot from this little sticker. Firstly, what those numbers under the barcode present, a livelong question only answered today because I finally took the time to find out. The numbers are product look-up codes and represent a standardized number for all fruits and vegetables. The number for a variant of a particular fruit is the same no matter the location, California or Georgia. The International Federation for Produce Standards has taken the codes even further, meaning a product code will be the same in the United States as it is in the United Kingdom.

The above sticker gives the product code number of 4383 which represents the Minneola variety of a tangelo. Minneola is on the sticker, as is USA, but I had first assumed that was its place of origin (it is from the USA). A tangelo is a 3 to 3.5 inch cross between a grapefruit and a tangerine. According to Sunkist they are in production from December to March. Our fieldwork commenced in April, which means the sticker is only a couple of months old.