Flora Satt's 1950 master's thesis

In 1950, Flora Satt, a descendant of  Saul Baruch Milstein was attending Colorado University in Boulder, CO.  She was about 25 years old.  Her mother was Ethel Milstein.  Her grandfather was Menash Milstein.  And her gr grandfather was Saul Baruch Milstein.

We now know that Saul Baruch Milstein and his family did not arrive on their ship until December 1884, after the Colony had disbanded.   So while Flora is not a descendant,  she would have been closely related to numerous people who were at Cotopaxi, or descended from the Colonists.

Her research was excellent for 1950.  Her thesis is well documented.  It has been titled "unpublished thesis" - but that would only apply to then - things change.

Prior to her death in 2014, Flora gave permission to my brother, Nelson Moore, to publish her thesis.  She did not give that permission to anyone else.  You can read it in it's entirety with footnotes and bibliography here:

The Flora Satt Thesis on Cotopaxi

she titled the bibliography "critical bibliography" ,  I would interpret the word "critical" to mean "absolutely necessary".

Nelson's website link is cotopaxi-colorado.com.    He has had this current website up since 2001.  He had other websites before that.  His web pages clearly state that they are copyright protected.  That's the first clue that you do not have permission to copy anything from that page....but you can certainly link to that page.  Why does anyone do this?  To "protect" what is written.  To keep someone else from altering it, using it, making money from it.

Within the past year, a Saltiel living in London has created a new website.  The exact same title as Nelson's website minus the hyphen.  Of all the possible names to pick from, why did he pick that name?  Most likely for the same reason people tried to create an eBay.net website!  To get readers to go to their site, to capitalize on the work already done.

I do not go to that website for one reason only:

The author(s) of that website copied Flora Satt's thesis.  They then inserted their own comments about her writing.  And then they published it on that website.

HUGE Copyright violation!!!

It makes no sense that someone would create a new website so unquestionably identical to a website already existing, then take work from the existing website and publish it on their website.  Their intent was outright theft of website content.   They use the excuse that they cannot contact Satt's heirs for permission.  That's not how copyright law works.  If you don't have permission, you do not post.

Flora's thesis has been such a blessing to me.  I think of how much research she had to do at such a young age.  With no internet.  No email.  The newspapers had not been digitized, so she would have sat and gone through each newspaper page by page, column by column.  I often come across little checkmarks beside an article about Cotopaxi - I wonder if it was her mark.  I like to think it might have been.

She gave us oral stories, family histories and I could not have started my research without her footnotes and her critical bibliography.  For that I am ever grateful.  May her memory be a blessing to those of us who follow the Cotopaxi story.

***** c2016Cotopaxi-Colony.blogspot.com  All content is copyright protected and may not be copied, reproduced, reused or reposted in any manner without permission.