No snow, old newspapers
Well, not here, anyway. Higher elevations got hit. The girls were disappointed because they had dreams of a snow day in October, but those of us who remember the October snow of ’86 (and yes, I take a long draw on my corncob pipe as I recount it) know how incredibly damaging snow is when the leaves are still on the trees. Why, this very house suffered serious damage when a branch crushed the back corner of the garage, and the previous owners did nothing about it. Five years later, I’m battling powder post beetles and carpenter ants because these bozos didn’t take the time to patch the roof correctly.
I’ve been totally immersed in family history lately. Something called the Northern New York Library Network has put together an amazing digitization project for several north country newspapers, most importantly (for me), the Adirondack Record and Elizabethtown Post. The newspapers are fully searchable and come down as PDFs (rather than some obscure proprietary viewer technology like Ancestry uses). As a result, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks poring over old papers looking for (and finding!) mentions of my grandfather and many other ancestors, filling in holes I barely knew existed, and revealing something of normalcy in a north country family life that we frankly weren’t sure existed. My father never spoke of his family or his life growing up — it was impossible to drag it out of him. How people were related to him was very vague. It was all very odd. On my mother’s side, we knew all our great great aunts and cousins and knew some family lines very well, but on my father’s side it’s been a jigsaw puzzle with about 80% of the pieces missing. So this has been amazing.
This was a time when the “society” columns of a newspaper reported on every little thing someone from a community had done. If they went 3 miles up the road to do some shopping, it was written up. If someone was over for Sunday dinner, it was written up. If someone was down with la grippe, it was written up. (Now I know that the same week my father was born, his family acquired a telephone.) When I was composing newspapers that still did this kind of reporting back in the early ’80s, I thought it was the most ridiculous, antiquated form of newspapering possible, and may well have prayed for its extinction. While I still barely see its value as contemporary news, it is an incredible resource for those of us studying family history, so it’s just possible I was wrong. These papers are also browseable, so even for those with no family connection, it’s enlightening to look back and read some of the dispatches, particularly from World War I. And the ads. The ads are amazing. Gotta get back to it….