Obituaries, Clippings, Snippets, and Broken Wireless Modems . . . .

Research was stalled for about a week due to a failed wireless modem. Back up and running strongly today.

This week I bring more discoveries from a different newspaper site. This one is free and comes to you from the Library of Congress (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov). Much like Newspapers.com, this database doesn't contain every edition of every newspaper, but serves as another great research tool to supplement all the others. As with previous research, my best hits came from searching for those ancestors living in Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska in the 1910s and 1920s. Colorado newspapers are, again, underrepresented, but I did discover this site (http://www.coloradohisstoricnewspapers. org) and it produced a few articles on my great grandfather, Harry A. Snow.  Be advised, this site does not work well with Mozilla Firefox. I used an old version of Explorer to get my results. Here is one example from the September 9, 1921 edition of the Littleton Independent.

Typical genealogy data such as birth dates, the census, and headstone photographs are nice, but they don't deliver the sort of information included in this article. Before this discovery, I'd been told that Harry owned a stable, a bowling alley, and dance hall in Boulder County, Colorado. This clipping adds a little more flavor to what I know about the man. Here's a few more examples.

This one comes from the Abts family, ancestors from my maternal line who lived in Nebraska. This snippet came from the January 23, 1916 edition of the Omaha Sunday Bee. A good wedding story that adds detail to the framework of birth, census, and death dates.

The third clipping concerns Robert McKittrick, one of my great grandfathers on my paternal side. It deals with an application to transfer guardianship of Robert, from Parlee McKittrick to Joe N. Ferguson. This article appeared in the April 12, 1918 edition of The Evening Times-Republican in Marshalltown, Iowa. Robert fell from a train and apparently became physically and mentally incapacitated.

Interesting that Parlee, Robert's mother, did not transfer guardianship to Robert's wife, Mamie. Gender roles being what they were in the early 20th century, perhaps it was expected for a male (in this case a male in-law) to assume guardianship as opposed to any female. I can only speculate.

From here, I'll supplement my tree on Ancestry.com with information teased from these articles. There are plenty of names and dates that will make nice additions, and might even help another with their own research. Sharing and collaborating . . . . .