“To Appreciate Santa Barbara County of the 1920s – Explore the Public Domain”

“There’s a foretelling in the everyday objects History has left behind. Many are preserved online.

Historical transparency lives in the public domain.”

Cathy Berry is a writer who has always carried a torch for Southern California, its variety and history, and especially the many characters so at home there. A lifelong resident of Santa Barbara County, Cathy’s imagination was fired from an early age by the stories told by family, friends, and often, strangers just met. Over a lifetime, like a whirlwind picking up speed and bits of lives along with it, each new revelation inspired and spurred her forward to the next.

As an inveterate researcher, one who is very focused on a specific decade in a specific location, Cathy takes a fresh look at history through items found in everyday life in Santa Barbara County, California, in the 1920s.

Historical connections reveal themselves in hindsight, from a distance, in looking back. I better understand connections with the larger world. Sometimes, I discover hidden worlds.

Vast historical resources and records are available to anyone who has an internet connection and an interest in the past.

The Debut Novel

Reckoned by the Light of Stars

Reckoned by the Light of Stars is a historical story set in Santa Barbara County in the early years of the 1920s. Then, as now, escalating financial disparity plagued much of the nation and the world; environmental damage depleted resources; drug abuse and alcoholism ravaged; traditions were trashed; sex enjoyed a licentious revolution.

Reckoned by the Light of Stars is Cathy Berry’s debut novel. Her love of Santa Barbara County and its people inspired the story.

On learning more about the extraordinary true history of the area, readers are introduced to the multi-cultural communities of families who fished and farmed, built homes, highways, railroads, faced racism, lack of opportunity, and yet, despite natural and societal constraints, their spirits were and are luminous. They glow even now, in the modern day, through their stories, their artifacts—talisman—and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who live here still.

This website is a repository that includes historical information, links to online resources, news about her novel, Reckoned by the Light of Stars, and original photographs. Cathy continues to uncover the past and is working on the second novel in the series.

Resources

Freely available online historical resources and artifacts, such as newspaper articles, photos, cookbooks, trade journals and other items culled from daily life, mostly focused on the 1920s. Some of these are transcendent and beautiful, humorous, instructive, revealing. Others are vitriolic, violent, devastating.

By entering that not-so-long-ago time, one can find a dazzling, complex humanity reflective of the current day.

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Blog Info

In 2008, Cathy began taking photographs and created her blog, Cartas…Letters from Home. She wrote posts that mostly focused on Santa Barbara County, past and present. Eventually, passions converged and Cathy began writing a historical mystery set in Santa Barbara County, California.

Today, Cathy Berry Author includes a new blog that highlights historical information available in the public domain. The posts feature a bit of historical information from the 1920s, photos — and always — links to the freely-available online source material.

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Contact Cathy

Visit the Contact page with your comments or questions.

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“Through reading and writing I travel widely.”

The people whose stories I cherish most have helped me find a place within, where even darkness will be transformed into a tool so fine, so rare, able to hone with such exquisite precision, that I am transformed into an altogether new creation.”

Cathy Berry