My Favorite Media "Old Newspapers"

If I were to say where some of my most exciting discoveries have come from, I would have to say Old Newspapers.  

This last year, I made the discovery of the death of my Hero's great great grandmother that I had almost given up on.  A sweet lady had put her obit up on FindaGrave when she discovered there wasn't a memorial for her. She gave me the paper it was in, but there is only a transcription on Nebraska USGenWeb for the Columbia, Nebraska newspaper.  When searching to read the transcription, I found there was also a small obit for a child that the Heimbach family had lost when it was 18 months old. We would never have known this baby existed if it had not been for the small newspaper article.  

I also was trying to find what happened to my great great grandfather's first child. In an old newspaper article that told of him leaving Georgia, there was a mention of his wife dying and that he still had a new boy that he was very fond of.  

When he arrived in Texas, he met a lovely lady, and they were married. All the children I found on the censuses were her's.  I ask my dad about his great grandfather, and he said all he knew was that his great grandfather Gildon had lost his family when he crossed the Mississippi. His thought had been, that they had drowned or were killed.  It was a time when many were dying of Yellow Fever in Georgia, and this was apparently the cause of Frances Massey Gildon's death.  Other family members said the child was left with one of  Charles's sisters.  I could not find any evidence of this.  I turned to old newspapers again.  I found the article of Frances's death, but kept searching.  I found what I thought was another repeat of her death, but on closer study, found it was the son's death at 9 months of age. He was also named Francis and thus that was how I almost missed finding the truth.  

Another great great grandfather was said to have died in a gun fight. I searched books and gun fights to no avail.  Then, Wyoming opened up their old newspapers online in the Wyoming Newspaper Project. There I found in two different newspapers his obit and who handled his death. He died of pneumonia in his home. Nothing exciting there, except the evidence of truth. 

 These are wonderful finds, but I have also been able to trace the epidemics that took the lives of half of the Hero's great great grandparent's families in Chicago in the 1910s.  The Yellow Fever Epidemics of Georgia that had high reports of deaths in newspapers up as far as New York. The coverage of the fire in Savannah in 1820 that was documented all the way to Connecticut newspapers, and my ancestor's losses in the fire. I found and followed my mother's father's travels to and from the Philippines in the Philippines War. There was the discovered brother of one of the Hero's ancestors, who had died in the Mexican War, with not a clue as to who his parents were. Now I have a the day  that they both were the first volunteers in their town to step up to go fight in the Mexican War in blazing detail.

This is just a smidgen of the excitement of the browsing through old newspapers I have had the fun of doing. Chronicling America has a great sampling of old Newspapers. GenealogyBank.com has helped a lot. This is just two sites I have used. and I have also ordered old films, and gone to the libraries to search the films.  Ancestor Hunt offers information on many resources for old newspapers, and many State Archives have old newspapers online. I have only tried one in Great Britain, but I am sure there are serendipitous information to be had there too, just not quite over there yet.

Hope you have enjoyed this and if you haven't played a lot with old newspapers in your research, give it a try.

Spontaneous Research And the RV, Bring On The Serendipity

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[Man and I are still in East Tampa.  The weather in almost all of the US has been frightful and brutal and at the end of January and then February, there happened to be bad storms. We paid the rent to stay right where we are.  We hope to be rolling April 1st.]

I thought this month I would share with you what a wonderful thing spontaneity can be when you travel in a RV and research your family history.

I started research in 1991. It was about a year before I discovered a family book, “Lashbrooke, Lashbrooks, and Lashbrook (of the United States)”; compiled by Mary K. Gritt Lashbrook, (Utica, Kentucky: McDowell Publications, 1986).  In Mary’s book I found 12 pages at the end of the book.  Those 12 pages outlined the Lashbrook line of Man’s ancestors.  Mary could not connect those 12 pages of ancestors to her fine work.  However, instead of ignoring the line, she included it in her work as “unconnected”.  Bless Mary.

I spent the better part of the next years, lots of years, researching those 12 pages, chasing those Lashbrooks from Devon England to Seattle Washington with many locations in between.

I also chased the brides.  Sometimes successfully, others, well, not so.  One bride, Amanda Houghton (and any other spelling that you can dream up) married one Aaron D. Lashbrook.

I chased Aaron from England to Canada to New York State to Illinois and Wisconsin, through several western states, and finally into Oklahoma and Kansas. I "knew" from family tradition that he was buried at “Parker” cemetery near Arkansas City, Cowley County, Kansas.  I searched for that Parker cemetery.  I could not locate it.  I had a bag of tricks for locating cemeteries, but, somehow, Parker evaded me.

This was in the early days of the fine web site, Find A Grave.  I never found the Parker cemetery listed there, nor Aaron.  And, surely NOT Amanda.  It appears, by the way, that the Parker cemetery was added to Find A Grave around August of 2004, date based on addition of photos and a number of memorials.

It also happened to be a time when Kansas records were rather hard to gather from the internet.  Yes, young researchers, there WAS a time when it could be hard or next to impossible to surf in, grab our ancestor’s birth, death or marriage record and surf out, digital copies firmly saved to our computer hard drives.

And, there was the rub.  I had no death date for Amanda. I had no idea where she died or where, and surely had no idea of where she was buried.  Other researchers that I shared and collaborated with had no idea where or when she died either.  I could not rest till I found Amanda.  It became a mission to find out when and where Amanda died, and where she was buried.

Fast forward to the spring of 2004.  Man and I had spent time in Donna Texas for some of the winter months.  We were headed north, back to our SE Michigan home.  Our general route was north to Oklahoma City, then Kansas City, Missouri where I would do some research, on, of course, the Lashbrook clan.

As we drove north, at some point, I realized that Arkansas City Kansas was just not that far off our path.  Man and I discussed this situation, where I said something akin to, “OOO, I really need to go to Arkansas City”.  And, so, we located a campground and we stopped at Arkansas City.

What followed was what I called then, “a grand Lashbrook research trip”.  After setting up camp, we went back to the campground office where I asked the owner, who claimed to be a 6th generation local, “is there a Parker cemetery near here?”.  Before I could exhale he was on the phone, chatting with a local gal, giving me directions to THE Parker Cemetery.  He had this local gal meet me there, and less than 30 minutes later, I was looking at Amanda Lashbrook’s headstone:

The next three days were a whirlwind.  I visited several courthouses, cemeteries, libraries, archives.  I took at least 70 photos of headstones.  I extended my information on the descendants of Aaron and Amanda several generations.  I found marriages, divorces, obituaries, land records, stories, even some newspaper articles with photos.  I learned about the 1893 Land Rush and the local stories about hopeful future land owners camping out for up to one year before, waiting for the opportunity.

At a cemetery there we found the caretaker who took us into the Mausoleum where Aaron and Amanda’s son Charles Clinton Lashbrook and his bride Maud McLaury Lashbrook are interred.  Charles and Maud’s son Charles Arthur and Maud’s parents, C.B. and Virginia McLaury are also interred in the Mausoleum. This is the inside of that mausoleum, the Lashbrook clan are interred to the right of the lovely windows.

Serendipity, special people that helped us, and the spontaneous decision to make a bit of a detour resulted in a great research experience and gave me the information to build and add to one of the Lashbrook tree twigs.

If you believe in the magic of family research, you might feel that Amanda was ready to be found, wanted to be found, that she guided us to her final resting place.  Once we arrived in Arkansas City she was not going to wait any longer, 30 minutes, just 30 minutes.

Amanda was found.

Rest in Peace Amanda.


 

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