Moderately to very, but I live in the heartland of the area I study, which is not true for many of the people here. I can go for a walk in the grounds of Castletown House, and have a good look at the kitchen there while I get some coffee, wander over and poke around the grounds of Carton House, and look into the structure of the kitchens there, too, meander back by Maynooth Castle and poke around the chimneys and other remnants, and get home before lunch. In many ways, food history/cultural history/local history are all part of a continuum here.

Heh. I actually work as the curator/collections manager in the county historical association. While I applied for the position from outside the area and with very little interest in the local history (trying to get a job in a small museum in the boonies, where there's little qualified competition, is a good way to get started in the field, I think), I'm always interested in individuals and daily life: it didn't take very long for me to get emotionally invested in it. I'm really not into the industrial/environmental history, which there's quite a bit of, but the prominent citizens and their network of interconnected families, social organizations, businesses, and homes are so where I'm at.

I do have to admit to being more interested in the town where we're situated than the county as a whole, but that's more to do with the town being more immediate - I don't know the other towns as intimately, so I don't have a jumping-off point with names, buildings, terrain, and so on. One side of Main Street has been barely touched/greatly restored, so it's very very easy to "see" what was there once it was rebuilt after the 1870 fires (we had a big fire in 1870).

Not much. I live in a small town remote from and mostly too young for the history I'm otherwise interested in. The library has a nice local history room that's the closest I've ever been to a proper archive, but the only thing we've ever been on the radar for is a nasty school dispute circa 1980. (It turns out that when the school district tells you they don't have the money to keep the doors open, they mean it even if you don't believe them and have to either keep asking for the cash or close.) I guess the network news was even here for a day.

That and the guy who killed McKinley lived here from age zero to five; I'm typing this about two blocks away from a bar that relations of his used to own. Nothing much here about that, except the fact that he was once present, and McKinley is pretty far outside my wheelhouse.

Might be different if I lived in a former major slave state or somewhere with an otherwise big role in nineteenth century politics.

I reenact for Texas Revolutionary battles, mainly Gonzales and The Alamo, but I bring a different perspective as my focus is in the French military but sadly I'm very uninformed about the Texas Revolution.