I find one of the best things about the Internet is having full-text access to obscure books that have been digitized for no discernible reason except that the copyright has expired. Case in point for A History of the Town of Candia, Rockingham County, New Hampshire, From Its First Settlement to the Present Time, the present time being 1893.

A History of Candia was written by a gentleman named  J. Bailey Moore (no relation to the Moores I’ll be researching, as far as I know). His health was apparently failing when he took on the task of writing the town’s history–which indeed proved so arduous that he died before he could finish it: his preface to the book leaves off in the middle of a sentence. The publisher then informs the reader of the author’s death:

Can’t you just picture Mr. Moore slumped over dead at his desk, pen in hand, the literary version of dying in the traces?

I’ll share what my mother and I learned about Jonathan Brown and his seven sons from A History of Candia. Then, I think I ‘ll need to follow the trail of this intriguing tidbit left by Mr. Moore in his preface:

Who could resist a series of “spicy articles”? Not I!