Chronologies

Dated accounts of makers, workshops and brands, built from primary sources, with every line saying where it came from.

A chronology here is an account of one subject — a maker, a workshop, a brand — set out by date, with a source named on every line.

The sources are the subject’s own website where one survives, their own words in an interview or a letter, a newspaper, a patent, or the Internet Archive’s record of when a page existed. Where they disagree, the disagreement is recorded rather than settled: two dates from two documents are two facts about the documents, and choosing between them silently would claim a certainty nobody has.

Most of these subjects are living, or may be, and have not given permission for anything. A chronology is the museum’s own compilation of dates and sources, so it does not republish their work — but if one of these is you, the account is yours to correct, and the second column leads to the page that says exactly what the museum holds of your site and on what terms.

Several more are owed and not written. The ones with the deepest material are subjects with no website at all — Budrio, the town the instrument is named after; Sojiro, who changed what the ocarina was for; Gretsch and Waterbury, the industrial makers; Rudolph Teschner, the first American factory. Those will arrive here without a preserved site beside them.

If you can correct anything on these pages, or settle a date they leave open, please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com.