Why Would They Put That In The Newspaper?
Recently I was helping a friend with their family history research. We literally sat for hours scrolling through websites and running down rabbit holes of online searches. “Back in my day” (I find myself saying this a lot to my grandson lately) family history researching with a friend meant a meet up at the local library or possibly a day trip to Augusta to the State Archives. Those were always fun trips because you got to eat road trip food and pack lunches to sneak into the library.
I remember one such trip where the person I was traveling with was an experienced researcher at the State Archives. I was instructed beforehand that we would not be taking a break for lunch. The plan was to work straight through the whole day. So lunch on that day was a sleeve of saltine crackers I had hidden in my research bag. Where I would reach down and pull out one cracker to nibble on. Hopefully unnoticed by the library staff because food was not allowed in the State Library!
Now, in the twenty-first century, researching with a friend means that you sit on the couch, both of you with your own laptops open. You tag team as you scour the internet for information. There are no longer any set hours for researching. None of this only researching between nine to five. Instead I don’t think we even got started on researching until 7 o’clock in the evening. Long after midnight we were still at it. Somewhere in there I had gotten up and walked the few feet to the kitchen and grabbed us a snack or two of cheese sticks and maybe an apple. Although the internet has made access to all kinds of information much easier, in a way it has kind of taken the fun out of things I think. I could have used a really good road trip!
As the two of us sat there that night, running down dead ends and hitting a few brick walls, it became obvious that we were not going to find the information we were seeking on the internet. The truth is the internet doesn’t have ALL of the information. That’s a fact. What we were seeking probably exists somewhere in a dusty old book that hasn’t been digitized yet, or possibly in an old journal, a letter or a family Bible sitting in someone’s attic. The answer is out there, of that I’m certain, it just hasn’t made it’s way to the internet yet! Because of this, after a few hours our interest began to wane and while I sat with my head lolling backwards on the couch, my friend was doing one last check of Ancestry.com.
It was while looking over their own profile that my friend spotted an Explore tab on their profile. “Hey, what’s this?” came the question. I raised my head and tried to open my eyes, as sleep was so close, and if you know me, you know, midnight is a good six hours past my bed time! But open my eyes I did and I saw my friend click the Explore tab! Right before our eyes the screen filled with dozens of images. Most all of them were irrelevant, but somehow the internet Gods, or algorithms had paired my friend’s name with just about anything it thought might be remotely related to their name. Here it all was, just a click away! My friend scrolled down a bit, both of us laughing at the things the algorithms had chosen. But then my friend spotted something actually pertinent, it was a newspaper article from the home town they had grown up in. “Hey I was mentioned in the newspaper!”
I leaned over to get a closer look just as my friend clicked on the image and realized a subsciption to newspapers.com was need. We were in luck! I just so happened to have a subscription. So as I pulled up the website on my laptop and entered my login information, my friend continued to marvel over the fact that they were mentioned in a newspaper. Suddenly I heard. “Wait a minute, this is when I was two years old! Why would I have been in the newspaper when I was two years old?” Ooooo the mystery deepened!
Soon I found the newspaper article and we both stared at it on my laptop. “Well why in the world was that put in the newspaper?” my friend asked me after we had read the article. “That seems really strange.” I had to admit, they were not wrong. This was not the kind of thing you expect to find when you realize you were mentioned in an old newspaper.
Right there before us was the headline: “The following individuals were admitted and/or discharged from the local hospital this week.” This headline was followed by a paragraph of names of people who had all been admitted to the hospital. The second paragraph, the one containing my friend’s name, was a list of names of everyone that had been discharged. I asked my friend if they remembered any family stories of them being in the hospital when they were two years old, because clearly there was certainly no memory of their time in the hospital. Sadly no family story had been passed down either.
As a researcher and historian I have read enough old newspapers to know that a lot of things were considered news that we wouldn’t expect to see categorized as news today. Wedding and birth announcements of course, but also there were often mentions of social gatherings, even private ones! The entire guest list would be printed, often alongside what towns these guests had come from to attend the event, what food was served and even what some of the ladies wore who attended. It was always the ladies who’s clothing choices were mentioned, never the men. Just sayin.
There were columns devoted to who in town had relatives or friends visiting from out of town that week. I love it when I find these and it tells me not only where the guests had traveled from but what they did for an occupation in their life and why they were visiting the local person to begin with. These little tidbits are often just the thing you need to find that will make someone’s family history come to life rather then just be names and dates on a page.
Before HIPPA Laws, it was very common for newspapers to publish stories about someone being sick or injured, especially if it were sensational or scandalous. My all time favorite was an older gentleman who had fallen from a rafter while trying to dismantle a barn. The news article stated he had broken his arm but also “fractured his skull and has been senseless for four days, but is recovering.” It’s not every day that an 80+ year old man fractures his skull, is senseless for several days but manages to recover. This article was picked up and published across five different newspapers in Maine believe it or not. Sadly for the man, he did not recover and died from his injuries.
As my friend and I shut down our computers and prepared to call it a night, I pointed out that it really wasn’t that strange for the list of names to be printed in the newspaper. In our world today we are still publishing private, almost confidential information like that. Rather then it being broadcast by a newspaper, people today are doing it themselves via social media. Think about the things that happen in people’s lives that they so willingly put out there, sometimes for the public to see but if not public certainly for their couple hundred or so of “friends” to see. It’s totally plausible that someone today would bring their two year old child home from the hospital and happily announce on social media that they were home recovering. Or how many posts have you seen that state “Had a great time with friends last night!” tagging everyone that was with them, maybe even tagging the place they were at. This post will usually have several photos that shows what food was eaten, who was there and what everyone was wearing! All the details of a private social gathering, from attendees to food, put out there for a vast network of people to see.
Think about it. Not much has really changed!!