Details Of My Search For Knowledge

 

I thought I would do a post detailing a bit about the search for news articles, using my great grandfather Lee Roy as an example. Although he lived across the border and I have found some articles for him in newspapers there, his wife, my great grandmother Dorothy, lived on the Iowa side of the border in the region where until a month ago, no historic newspapers were online in searchable format. Knowing that they probably spent a lot of time in her neck of the woods, I did a search for his name in the new online site for the local historic newspaper. It returned 224 articles for the name Roy Luther alone! He also went by Lee Roy, L.R. Luther, R. Luther, etc., all of which return even more results to sort through!

The newspaper site returns each result in the format above. Essentially, the program that reads the newsprint and transcribes it into searchable text, reads from left to right across two columns at a time, one line at a time. Why it does this I do not know but it makes the transcribed paragraph sometimes hard to decipher. The mention of the birthday in DeWitt by the Goodwin's was in the adjacent column from the one regarding my great grandfather in which that line said in it's entirety, "the Roy Luther home." The article itself was just a mention of two couples visiting my great grandfather on that particular day and of no particular interest to me.

However, after reviewing a number of these, you become adept at interpreting the lines and knowing which article is worthy of investigation and which aren't. I'm sure I miss some good articles and I know I read more than a few articles that I have no interest in, but I do find some gems that help me flesh out the life of my great grandfather. 

I try to find mentions of weddings, births and deaths and record those all in my research notes along with a few other news articles which intrigue me a bit. For example, on 28 Feb 1918 the local newspaper said, "Roy Luther and family are quarantined at Oliver Odell's in Memphis for small pox." Oliver was the father of Lee Roy's first wife Iva who would divorce Lee Roy the following year in Fort Collins, Colorado on the grounds of cruelty. After the trial she attempted suicide, survived and then died a tragic death after all, all of which I blogged about before.

Other articles let me know that he burned coal for heat:

1 Jan 1929 - Lem Jarvis and Roy Luther were in Stiles, Friday enroute to the Lunsford mine for coal, but learned there was no coal out before arriving at the mine, so returned without coal.

When he got his first radio:

19 Dec 1929 - Roy Luther purchased a new radio of George Gordy. The radio arrived Friday and was installed at once. Roy will now receive news day or night

That he liked to fish or perhaps just get away from his growing family:

19 Apr 1930 - Roy Luther motored Friday to White river in Missouri for a few days fishing. The largest fish will probably get away.

That he sometimes did catch a lot of fish:

13 Jun 1933 - Messrs Forrest Cruikshank and Roy Luther went fishing one day last week on the Chariton river and succeeded in landing about 25 pounds of fish.

I even learned that he wasn't always a farmer when I found an obituary for him that mentioned:

11 Jul 1972 - Most of his life was spent farming in Scotland County until 1951 when he purchased and for the next ten years ran a dry cleaning establishment in Denver, Colo., after which he retired to ... Iowa.

All in all, when I finished for now, I have ten pages of research notes detailing his life and movements which gives me a fairly good sense of the man who was my great grandfather who died a year before my birth. It certainly isn't as much knowledge as I have of other great grandparents of mine who lived until I was in my mid teens, but it certainly is better than just knowing a name and a face.