The One I Thought I Knew Best

 

Victor Stephen Kuck

In my quest to write research notes on my ancestors, I started writing them on the one great grandfather whom I got to meet in person and have 12 years of memories with, Victor Kuck. I thought I knew everything I could know about the man because I often talked to my grandparents about him and even his wife, my great grandmother, for many years after Victor's death. I assume that I also talked to him but I have no memories of those conversations, only one sided ones I had with him after a stroke left him uncommunicative. I also have my great great grandmother's memory album full of newspaper clippings on those around her including dozens of them about her son Victor. 

After compiling all the information from various typical genealogy records like census, birth, marriage, death and military records, I am of the habit to do one more search for newspaper articles on the person at hand, in case I might turn up something interesting or unknown. Also, all the news clippings in my great great grandmother's memory book were without sources or dates and I was hoping to find the sources and dates for them so I could place them chronologically in my research notes. So I typed his name into the two main sites I use for this and didn't come up with anything new. Both of those sites however, only have a few articles from a larger town where he lived later in life and don't have newspapers from the town where he grew up, married and raised two kids. 

In the last half dozen years, things have been moving at a very fast pace as hundreds of small towns are now having their old newspapers digitized and put online (often for free) for all to freely search through. The sites they use can decipher the newsprint and automatically transcribe them so they can easily be searched much like how one uses Google Search these days. I type in a phrase/name and it will spit out a list of results of newspaper pages where that phrase/name occurs. When I click on the link, an image of the newspaper page will pop up and the phrase/name will be highlighted so I can easily find it without having to read through an entire page of newsprint. Then with provided tools, I can digitally "clip" out the newspaper article and save it to my computer hard drive. 

Since it has been more than a half dozen years since my last search, I "googled" the phrase "Rockford Iowa digitized newspaper" and was elated to see that Rockford had joined the list of towns with their newspaper now digitized. I entered my great grandfather's name and was rewarded with hundreds of articles mentioning his name.

HUNDREDS!

I searched for newspapers from the town his wife, my great grandmother came from and it too had been digitized. Searching his name resulted in 78 more articles! For the next three days, I spent late hours in the evening or early morning reading all those articles and clipping many of them for my hard drive. The bulk of them are trivial announcements of him visiting or being visited by others but I still ended up with over 100 clipped articles and probably a couple dozen or more are of things I had no idea occurred or are extremely interesting in nature. Some answer questions that I never asked but am delighted to know the answer.

Right now I am still digesting all these articles and I'm fairly certain I might start a new series of posts eventually when I finish up with the Laura Jane Harvey Murder series. It will be a way to memorialize this information so it can be printed out later and I think, might be interesting to read, especially his World War I experiences.