A New Year Filled With New (Old) Things

Note: We have gone on a small mini vacation and depending on my level of relaxation and access to my iPad (my girls like to use it for their entertainment), your comments my be slow appearing as too my comments to them.

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A week before Christmas, I finally found the time to check something off my list, a rather lengthy list at that. I drove 20 miles south to a county historical library that I had last stopped at maybe a half dozen years before when I found myself there with a couple hours to kill. During that time killing, I discovered they had shelves of obituaries clipped from the local newspaper, like maybe 60 linear feet of shelving full, all neatly stored in plastic sleeves organized in 3 ring binders and helpfully indexed, as long as you knew the year of death. At the time, I didn't know the years of my ancestors death, comprising an entire huge branch of my family tree, and so wishfully told myself that I should compile a list and come back someday. That day, took six years to arrive.

I made a list of 15 ancestors and their dates of death and walked in right as they opened for their only walk-in time per week on Thursday afternoon. Since the library was now on a different floor of the old school building it lives in since my last visit, the caretaker showed me around and I got started. In a matter of 30 or so minutes, I had found obituaries for all but four of the people on my list. Two of the deaths occur in years before the binders were started, one died only a couple years ago and so hasn't been included yet and the fourth fell in a mysterious gap year where there was no binder. Since they were all glued to photo stock paper and inserted into plastic sleaves, I was left with the choice of taking a picture of them with my phone or trying to figure out the ancient copier/scanner in the corner. I chose the former route. I then spent the rest of the next hour and twenty minutes chatting with the care taker and learning about other resources available in the library.

Over the next few days, I was able to upload those photos from my phone and onto my computer where I could neaten up the photos, attach them to the correct people on my online family tree and also transcribe their contents for my research notes. It was a fascinating process that leads me with lots of future clues to research again someday in the future. One particular person, my 2nd great grandmother, led such a colorful life, I might someday even try to do a series of posts on her. Unfortunately, media of the day didn't give women a lot of column space in their newspapers so to have so much on one of my great great grandmother is quite a find.

This county where I found this library and found physical copies of newspaper articles versus looking up digitized copies online, is one of the dark spots in my family history research. The sole newspaper hasn't been digitized yet, or so I thought. The caretaker, in our conversations post research, showed me a computer where they do have the sole local newspaper digitized and searchable in one year increments. It isn't available online because at the time, they thought they would get people to come in their library and use it if they could only access it there. She admitted that hasn't played out the way they had hoped. Also, because of their sole access being a computer, the digitized images have to be broken up in discreet chunks which means one must know at least the year to search for to have a chance of finding anything. This doesn't lend itself to finding random articles you never knew existed that often contain the most fascinating stories. 

Perhaps in the future, I can stop down there again and do some more searching on their computer, sorting through single years at a time with keyword searches and maybe turn up something new. Ideally, it would be nice if they could allow somebody to put the entire works online and to allow global searches of the entire history of the newspaper with a single keyword search... like nearly every other newspaper is doing these days.