“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“I see the name: Sarah Wellington. She was in a cobbler’s shop … It was 1748 in England. There were huge cowhides hanging up in the back room of the cobbler’s shop and dried cowhides hanging in another room. It was very cold in there, where the first cowhides were. It wasn’t ventilated, and there were no windows.

I paused again. Then I saw the whole thing very clearly, and I said, excited: “She died, at seventeen, there in the cobbler’s shop. She died from burns. The cobbler came out of the back room, and there she was, all in flames and screaming. He shoved her out into the street and rolled her over and over on the stones and in the dirt; but she died.

“She … she lived three doors down the street, in a dark front room. She had two brothers, one off someplace; he was a sailor. The other was younger. Sarah’s father did something for the cobbler, and, in return, he made shoes for the younger brother, and Sarah was in the shop to get them.”

“It was a craft,” I said. “Something Sarah’s father bartered for the shoes… something to do with fishing nets. The village was right by the sea. The cobbler’s shop was the only one around, though there were other villages. Sarah’s father made fishnets out of seaweed, dried seaweed. They wove it together like rope, then made the nets.

“There was a boy in the shop, too — not their son, an apprentice to the cobbler. He slept in the kitchen. His name was Albert Lang. He was eleven, I think. The cobbler and his wife had no children. She had trouble with her glasses … most people didn’t wear any. They were handmade; they had to grind the glass. They were like magnifying glasses, in a frame on her nose …

“The cobbler was comparatively well off, though not wealthy. He was fifty-three when he died. The boy, Albert, was too young to take over the shop, and for a couple of years the village had no cobbler, and the boy was a fisherman. Then another cobbler came and Albert helped out in the shop again … He finally married. His wife’s name was also Sarah. She was a cousin of Sarah Wellington’s. Most of the people in the village were related in one way or another; they had no other place to go.”

I laughed out loud, because I saw it so clearly. “I see houses and a couple of shops, then a narrow cobbled walk raised up high — it was a partly dirt road built up of rocks and stones that ran around an inlet from the sea. But it was never flooded; the road kept the village dry. There wasn’t any sandy beach, though.”

Then suddenly, I was back again, seeing the later time. “In London, I don’t know why, Albert’s wife liked to go to the bakery shops. They had fancier breads there than in the village. And Sarah … the first one … if she hadn’t burned to death, she would have died anyhow at seventeen, of tuberculosis. One lung was bad. It was a bad place to live. The village wasn’t sunny, and they kept the windows closed. There weren’t many windows anyway. The land was so rocky … and they would build a house on a slab of rock, and it was always damp. … Sarah’s dress was dirty. It was woolen, a brown natural color because it wasn’t dyed. It wouldn’t have burned so, but it had grease on it, and the grease caught the flames. …”