A Genealogist's work Is Never Done

 Above is a picture of my great great grandfather George Kuck. I had some free time and stumbled upon a folder on my computer containing scanned items given to me by a distant relative many decades ago. Our nearest common ancestor would be George's grandfather. Among the scans was a newspaper article detailing the drowning death of George's cousin Maximillian while ice skating above a river dam in town. Like all the articles given to me back then, it is undated and unsourced and so I was trying to tidy things up by finding the source of the article. 

I wasn't able to.

However in the process of doing that, I ran across some new-to-me newspaper articles about my great great grandfather George that I thought I would share.

George, like his father before him, was self employed man for much of his life, owning a variety of stores. At this particular point in his life, 1890's, he owned a leather shoe and boot store that was always advertising in the newspaper. What got me was that every advertisement was essentially what we now call "click bait", or contained some title, usually in large, bolt font that made you gravitate towards it. This one said "prove it" but another one that I saw was "massacre" and referred to what was being done to the prices. 

I had always assumed that George got his start from his father who was a respected leather harness dealer in a nearby town but this newspaper article made me doubt that. S. B. Cogswell happens to be George's father-in-law and Gus Michell was George's brother-in-law. 

Another thing about the article is it's mention of George retiring. The article was published in 1891 when he was only 21 years of age. I'm guessing it just meant he was leaving the business for other things and indeed he did hold a variety of other jobs and was quite successful, using his wealth to buy land and then leverage that land to buy even more. This all caught up to him during the Great Depression when he lost everything. By then, he was truly ready to retire but had to run a grocery store until a couple years before his death in 1943.

Here is one more article I found when George was still in his early 20's. It seems pretty far fetched that this method would work to make a hen want to lay eggs. 

Finding these articles makes me want to investigate him further. His wife Elizabeth, created a scrapbook that I have filled with newspaper articles and other things of the time detailing their lives so I have never really done much in the way of online research of George other than his marriage to Elizabeth two different times, a fact conveniently left out of the scrapbook. I also have his pocket watch, fine silver tea set and a few other items which gave me the feeling that I knew him better than I actually did. I guess all this is to say a genealogists work is never done.