In the last week or so, I have managed to reconfigure this blog and either recreate and/or redesign pages from the original site. Those can be found in the drop down menu above. I've moved some things around, broken up some of the sections of pages into separate pages, and I'm still chasing down each and every link to make sure they work. There are several, so I might have missed a few, but I'll find them!
If you do see broken links or images replaced by "Image Hosted By Tripod" placeholders, please feel free to let me know. There is, in the column to the right, a way to contact the Parlor via email.
There is a lot to update, and I've also been doing some redesigns of the graphics from my original site. Some of them look a bit different as I've made use of some fun image editing sites. Many images have an edge fade to blend better with the black background. I've also put frames on portraits, added graphics to better describe things, and (my favorite) have even been able to animate an image of one of the witches!
There are more images to animate, which I'm just thrilled about!
So far, I am concentrating on the pages from the original site, but I do have more ideas for more pages (Michael Curry, I'm gonna need one of those notebooks for this restoration project). Here is a teaser I've been brainstorming for a while. The houses surrounding the Brevard-Rice House.
People have observed that there are other houses in the Garden District that resemble the Brevard-Rice house in basic ways. This, of course, includes the Soria-Creel house, which was used as a filming location for the exterior of the Mayfair house in the new series. Some are more ornate than the Brevard-Rice house and some are not. But what a fascinating glimpse into this particular building style this will be, don't you think?
The timing is excellent, because I am now about to begin working on the pages from the original site that focus on the Mayfair house (the Brevard-Rice house). They are the last set of original pages left to work on. Everything else has been moved and redone here.
Just for funsies, I found another thing to do with some of the images of the Brevard-Rice house taken in the 1930's and 1960's. You'll see them as I finish each page. You'll see less and less the Oops alert, which has an animated image of the front door of the Brevard-Rice house made to look as if no one's home and a sign to never mind the dog, beware of Lasher--with a cat sleeping in front of it!
The other sign you see is taken from the cover of a book I read that is set in Rhode Island, and will be included on the Suggested Reading page.
Speaking of Rhode Island...
I have added some new pages as I went along, and one of them addresses the connection between the Brevard-Rice house and my family tree. This was something I was completely unaware of until the last five years or so. It is...what is the expression for this kind of story...a real doozy. I didn't even know I had any relatives in Louisiana, so I would never have thought to look there. Until I stumbled on a great uncle who changed one letter in his surname.
This has something of a connection to what turned out to be a ton of ancestors in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The last one includes yet another ancestor, a great uncle (among others) who was hanged as a witch in the Salem Witch Trials. I have been studying my family history for over 30 years, and in recent years, thanks to digitized records, genetic genealogy and sites like Ancestry.com, I've managed to learn more.
This, of course, means I hope to recreate the Mayfair Family Tree page with easier graphics and accuracy. I made those at a time when I had to draw out the trees myself with photo editing software.
There is a lot to do, but I thought an update on the changes around here would help explain what must seem like chaos at the moment. Please keep checking back for more!
~ The Parlor