Back when this blog was still relatively new, I wrote about researching my friends' family tree and the comical things we found in the newspapers of yesteryear. I'm still trying to wrap up that particular research project, and recently I discovered that I'd left a gap in the work. I never got around to visiting a cemetery to photograph the grave of Jess and Andrea's great-uncle John. So earlier today I picked up Andrea and we headed over to headstone-hunt in the searing August humidity.
I don't quite know how it happened to come up, but as we were traversing the cemetery (quite on the small side compared to some we've explored together), I happened to mention that there was a time when I got locked in a graveyard. Somehow it became determined that this should form the subject of today's blog post, so here you are.
It was several years ago; I know this because my husband and I weren't married yet, and we celebrated our tenth anniversary back in March. Not long after his grandmother passed away, we decided to do some research into his family tree. This was how I first became acquainted with looking things up at the historical society and using the microfilm reader at the library, skills that still serve me well today.
Our researches took us into a portion of the nearby city of Allentown, in a section that was relatively unfamiliar to me. We parked our car near the gates, noting as we entered that they were a good eight or nine feet tall. The cemetery in question is fairly old, and also very large, with much of it being out of the line of sight of the gate. This is relevant.
I'm rather fond of tombstone art, as macabre as I know that sounds. There are some really extraordinary pieces of it around here. This particular cemetery had an entire family whose headstones appeared to have been carved out of logs; the stonework on the bark was particularly impressive. Another local cemetery has one that is positively huge, and resembles a set of stairs on each side; on one side are all the family members' names and data written in English, and on the other side is the same information written in French (the patriarch having been a French immigrant). So as creepy as cemeteries can genuinely be, I sort of enjoy exploring them.
The sun was sinking low and we hadn't found our quarry, so reluctantly we headed for the gate. The eight-foot-tall gate. The eight-foot-tall gate that had, in the time we were out of sight of the area surrounding it, been closed and chained and padlocked. Night was falling and we were locked in a cemetery.
I might like them, but I don't like them that much.
This being twelve-odd years ago, neither of us owned a cell phone. Calling for help (beyond the prospect of screaming at the top of my lungs, which was my reserve plan if the sun went all the way down) was not an option. Neither was climbing the gate, nor the stone wall that surrounded the cemetery. Oh, and for bonus creep points, there were a bunch of crows sitting in the branches of a tree inside the grounds, watching us with unsettling interest.
I'm happy to report that we did not spend the night there. We walked along the perimeter and, as luck would have it, the cemetery has a second, somewhat hidden gate; the big one through which we had entered was for driving into the grounds, while the second one is adjacent to a sidewalk and is only wide enough to admit one walking person at a time. And this gate wasn't locked. We made good our escape, much to what I suspect was the disappointment of the crows.
It took us a little while to find our car, though, so they didn't give up right away.
Join me Mondays and Thursdays to laugh, to think, and to maybe change the world a little bit.
Showing posts with label genealogy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genealogy. Show all posts
Monday, August 1, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Dutchification
Today I received a notification via Twitter - specifically, the Twitter feed of the local newspaper - that a library in the area will be offering lessons in Pennsylvania Dutch. This amuses me.
The Pennsylvania Dutch, the people, are a specific group of Germans. To be considered Pennsylvania Dutch, your German ancestors must have settled in Pennsylvania in the year 1800 or earlier. (My family has been in this county since before the Revolutionary War. Haven't left yet.) Germans who settled after 1800 are regarded as Pennsylvania German. That's not the official distinction, but it's close.
We have a lot of things about us that are, for lack of a better way to phrase it, a little odd. We have hex signs - round pieces of art hung on the local barns. The symbols on the signs used to have significance regarding driving off bad fortune or evil spirits; nowadays, they're really there more for the simple Dutchy reason of "just for nice." We have some peculiar foods, like ring bologna and potato candy. No, really, potato candy. My grandfather used to make it. It sounds bizarre; it tastes delicious, but it's so rich that I could never stand to have more than a piece or two in an entire year.
The language, however, is a bit harder to clarify.
To speak Pennsylvania Dutch is to speak a localized dialect of German. My grandfather-in-law spoke it; the last Christmas he was with us, we were sitting at Christmas dinner and he said something I couldn't understand. My mother-in-law objected: "Daddy, you know I don't understand Pennsylvania Dutch!" I'll never forget the mischievous little grin he got on his face, like a little kid - whatever he'd said, he'd said it because none of us could understand it!
However, and I do wonder if this will be included in the lessons being offered at the library, it's very common to hear locals speaking what we call "Dutchified English." That's an incredibly fun thing to hear, especially when you're in the presence of people who don't know what it is - if you understand it, it's great fun to act surprised when others don't. In truth, until I went away to college and met people who hadn't been hearing these peculiar phrases all their lives, I had no idea they were anything particularly out of the ordinary.
In the words of Sherlock Holmes, "Only the Germans are so discourteous to their verbs." When our German ancestors learned English, they didn't rearrange the order of the words in their sentences. This results in some interesting sentences, like "Throw me down the stairs my pants." We also have expressions like "The coffee's all," which my college roommate considered a particular headscratcher; it means, simply, that there's no more coffee. In a similar vein, there's "You want to come with?" which, if you think about it too hard, admittedly makes no sense at all - and yet it makes perfect sense (to us) in context. Sometimes the language is a bit of a hodgepodge of English and German, too, which is the only conceivable explanation for telling anyone to "Outen the lights."
And then there's "say." I'm not sure exactly why, but that's a very Dutchy thing to do. Tacking "say" onto the end of a declarative sentence turns it into a question, inviting the other person in the conversation to share their opinion on the subject. "It's a nice day out, say?" "That pizza was great, say?" This one is best used sparingly, lest you sound like you're nuts.
But I think this entry's all. It's run on too long, say? Time for me to put in the cat's dish some food and outen the lights before I go to bed.
The Pennsylvania Dutch, the people, are a specific group of Germans. To be considered Pennsylvania Dutch, your German ancestors must have settled in Pennsylvania in the year 1800 or earlier. (My family has been in this county since before the Revolutionary War. Haven't left yet.) Germans who settled after 1800 are regarded as Pennsylvania German. That's not the official distinction, but it's close.
We have a lot of things about us that are, for lack of a better way to phrase it, a little odd. We have hex signs - round pieces of art hung on the local barns. The symbols on the signs used to have significance regarding driving off bad fortune or evil spirits; nowadays, they're really there more for the simple Dutchy reason of "just for nice." We have some peculiar foods, like ring bologna and potato candy. No, really, potato candy. My grandfather used to make it. It sounds bizarre; it tastes delicious, but it's so rich that I could never stand to have more than a piece or two in an entire year.
The language, however, is a bit harder to clarify.
To speak Pennsylvania Dutch is to speak a localized dialect of German. My grandfather-in-law spoke it; the last Christmas he was with us, we were sitting at Christmas dinner and he said something I couldn't understand. My mother-in-law objected: "Daddy, you know I don't understand Pennsylvania Dutch!" I'll never forget the mischievous little grin he got on his face, like a little kid - whatever he'd said, he'd said it because none of us could understand it!
However, and I do wonder if this will be included in the lessons being offered at the library, it's very common to hear locals speaking what we call "Dutchified English." That's an incredibly fun thing to hear, especially when you're in the presence of people who don't know what it is - if you understand it, it's great fun to act surprised when others don't. In truth, until I went away to college and met people who hadn't been hearing these peculiar phrases all their lives, I had no idea they were anything particularly out of the ordinary.
In the words of Sherlock Holmes, "Only the Germans are so discourteous to their verbs." When our German ancestors learned English, they didn't rearrange the order of the words in their sentences. This results in some interesting sentences, like "Throw me down the stairs my pants." We also have expressions like "The coffee's all," which my college roommate considered a particular headscratcher; it means, simply, that there's no more coffee. In a similar vein, there's "You want to come with?" which, if you think about it too hard, admittedly makes no sense at all - and yet it makes perfect sense (to us) in context. Sometimes the language is a bit of a hodgepodge of English and German, too, which is the only conceivable explanation for telling anyone to "Outen the lights."
And then there's "say." I'm not sure exactly why, but that's a very Dutchy thing to do. Tacking "say" onto the end of a declarative sentence turns it into a question, inviting the other person in the conversation to share their opinion on the subject. "It's a nice day out, say?" "That pizza was great, say?" This one is best used sparingly, lest you sound like you're nuts.
But I think this entry's all. It's run on too long, say? Time for me to put in the cat's dish some food and outen the lights before I go to bed.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Furniture in the Family
I awoke this morning to discover that today's installment of Catena Comics, a webcomic by my pals Tracy and DeBray Bailey, included a shout-out to this blog in the news blurb under the comic. I'm guessing that's where a few of you came from, if the sudden jump in stats is any indicator, so welcome. :)
I promised to tell the story I am about to share, but it hasn't been easy to prepare it. I've spent the last two hours doing something which qualifies as highly peculiar, even for me. I've been researching, photo-searching, and ultimately watching a few episodes of a 1970s television show called Welcome Back, Kotter. You might be wondering why I'm interested in a show that premiered on television a full year before I premiered in existence. Truth is, I'm not particularly interested in the show, but it was something that had to be endured in order to find what I needed.
Gabe Kaplan as Gabe Kotter; Marcia Strassman as Julie Kotter; no copyright infringement intended, etc.
Surprisingly, there are no decent screenshots that I could find which feature the Kotters' dining room table. The only one I found had the table covered with a green cloth while Mr. Kotter and his oddly-nicknamed students played poker. So I had to watch the show in order to take my own screenshot. But there it is -- the table.
Now, to explain the significance, I have to talk about someone very important to me, preferably without getting too emotional. My mother's father -- we called him Pop-Pop -- told me about this maybe a year or so before he passed away in 2006. He and I were very close; I mentioned him previously in this blog, when I recounted the saga of being forgotten by my high school football team at an away game. As stated there, he was a bus driver for our school district, but he only took that job after he had to retire from the true love of his life, which was woodworking.
Edmund Kratzer Custom Cabinets operated for 22 years out of a converted two-room schoolhouse. On a whim, I did a quick web search to see if anything came up for the name, and was amused to discover the existence of Kratzer Furniture, an Amish furniture maker. No relation, to my knowledge. We are, however, direct descendants of Johannes Kratzer, who gave money and a chunk of the family farm to construct a schoolhouse; the original building is gone but Kratzer Elementary occupies the land today. (I throw all this in not because it's relevant to what I'm getting at, merely in case anyone reading this recognizes the name.)
My grandfather was a master craftsman. I'm sitting in my own living room at the moment, and I'm surrounded by no less than three pieces of furniture made by his hand -- the coffee table, a trunk, and the credenza that houses my television. Up in the guest room is the desk he made me when I was twelve years old. He preferred butcher block cabinetry, although he could work with many different styles. Growing up, my sisters and I were amused by the family photo albums that contained not pictures of relatives, but snapshots of the different furniture pieces he constructed. It's just a little surreal to open an album adorned with the words "My Family Photos" and see pages and pages of tables, cabinets, and wardrobes. It wasn't merely a local business, although his workshop in the old schoolhouse was the only location (that is, it wasn't a chain). He told me once that he fulfilled orders from about 42 of the 50 United States, and one or two foreign countries.
By now you've probably figured out where this is headed. I wanted to find a picture of the Kotters' dining room table because I'm related to it. Pop said he didn't know, when he received the order, what the table would be used for; he found that out after he shipped the table to California. You'll notice, in that picture, that the tabletop is very definitively the butcher block style. The instant I saw it I knew he had been telling me the truth. I didn't really doubt it, because my grandfather never lied to me (unless you consider him pretending to be Santa Claus to be a lie), but I know his style and that was proof enough for me.
This wasn't his only famous order, although it may have been the one that was seen by the most people. I wish I could verify with him which morning talk show it was for which he made the table; I thought it was Good Morning America but it doesn't look quite right. Whichever one it was, the host of the show liked it so much he commissioned an identical table for his house. And then there was the matter of the ten tables ordered by someone in Studio City, California.
The order came in and he didn't think too much about it. Someone in Studio City wanted ten tables, he would make ten tables. He received the order and payment, both from someone named Marion Morrison. The name didn't mean anything to him, but my mother (who was a teenager at the time) came home and saw the order sheet stuck to his filing cabinet with a magnet, and shrieked. Pop couldn't understand what she was so excited about, so she had to explain to him that Marion Morrison was a very famous actor. He just used a different name when he filmed his movies.
You might have heard of him. He was known as John Wayne.
Pop laughed when he told me this story, saying how much he wished he could have kept the check. With John Wayne's real name as the signature, it's almost impossible to say how much that piece of paper would be worth now. But he needed the money, so to the bank it went.
The cabinet shop closed when I was fifteen years old, because Pop's health wasn't so good. That's an understatement, really; he had to have a quintuple bypass. But I remember how it looked, and I remember how it smelled, and I like to think that Pop is still making tables where he is now.
Yeah, I know that some people reading this are going to shake their heads and say that either my grandfather was full of it or I am now. I don't have any trouble believing his story, but I can see where someone else might. All I can say is that to the best of my knowledge, everything I've just related here is true. I can't prove it, so don't ask me to try. Some things are better taken on faith anyway.
I promised to tell the story I am about to share, but it hasn't been easy to prepare it. I've spent the last two hours doing something which qualifies as highly peculiar, even for me. I've been researching, photo-searching, and ultimately watching a few episodes of a 1970s television show called Welcome Back, Kotter. You might be wondering why I'm interested in a show that premiered on television a full year before I premiered in existence. Truth is, I'm not particularly interested in the show, but it was something that had to be endured in order to find what I needed.
Gabe Kaplan as Gabe Kotter; Marcia Strassman as Julie Kotter; no copyright infringement intended, etc.
Surprisingly, there are no decent screenshots that I could find which feature the Kotters' dining room table. The only one I found had the table covered with a green cloth while Mr. Kotter and his oddly-nicknamed students played poker. So I had to watch the show in order to take my own screenshot. But there it is -- the table.
Now, to explain the significance, I have to talk about someone very important to me, preferably without getting too emotional. My mother's father -- we called him Pop-Pop -- told me about this maybe a year or so before he passed away in 2006. He and I were very close; I mentioned him previously in this blog, when I recounted the saga of being forgotten by my high school football team at an away game. As stated there, he was a bus driver for our school district, but he only took that job after he had to retire from the true love of his life, which was woodworking.
Edmund Kratzer Custom Cabinets operated for 22 years out of a converted two-room schoolhouse. On a whim, I did a quick web search to see if anything came up for the name, and was amused to discover the existence of Kratzer Furniture, an Amish furniture maker. No relation, to my knowledge. We are, however, direct descendants of Johannes Kratzer, who gave money and a chunk of the family farm to construct a schoolhouse; the original building is gone but Kratzer Elementary occupies the land today. (I throw all this in not because it's relevant to what I'm getting at, merely in case anyone reading this recognizes the name.)
My grandfather was a master craftsman. I'm sitting in my own living room at the moment, and I'm surrounded by no less than three pieces of furniture made by his hand -- the coffee table, a trunk, and the credenza that houses my television. Up in the guest room is the desk he made me when I was twelve years old. He preferred butcher block cabinetry, although he could work with many different styles. Growing up, my sisters and I were amused by the family photo albums that contained not pictures of relatives, but snapshots of the different furniture pieces he constructed. It's just a little surreal to open an album adorned with the words "My Family Photos" and see pages and pages of tables, cabinets, and wardrobes. It wasn't merely a local business, although his workshop in the old schoolhouse was the only location (that is, it wasn't a chain). He told me once that he fulfilled orders from about 42 of the 50 United States, and one or two foreign countries.
By now you've probably figured out where this is headed. I wanted to find a picture of the Kotters' dining room table because I'm related to it. Pop said he didn't know, when he received the order, what the table would be used for; he found that out after he shipped the table to California. You'll notice, in that picture, that the tabletop is very definitively the butcher block style. The instant I saw it I knew he had been telling me the truth. I didn't really doubt it, because my grandfather never lied to me (unless you consider him pretending to be Santa Claus to be a lie), but I know his style and that was proof enough for me.
This wasn't his only famous order, although it may have been the one that was seen by the most people. I wish I could verify with him which morning talk show it was for which he made the table; I thought it was Good Morning America but it doesn't look quite right. Whichever one it was, the host of the show liked it so much he commissioned an identical table for his house. And then there was the matter of the ten tables ordered by someone in Studio City, California.
The order came in and he didn't think too much about it. Someone in Studio City wanted ten tables, he would make ten tables. He received the order and payment, both from someone named Marion Morrison. The name didn't mean anything to him, but my mother (who was a teenager at the time) came home and saw the order sheet stuck to his filing cabinet with a magnet, and shrieked. Pop couldn't understand what she was so excited about, so she had to explain to him that Marion Morrison was a very famous actor. He just used a different name when he filmed his movies.
You might have heard of him. He was known as John Wayne.
Pop laughed when he told me this story, saying how much he wished he could have kept the check. With John Wayne's real name as the signature, it's almost impossible to say how much that piece of paper would be worth now. But he needed the money, so to the bank it went.
The cabinet shop closed when I was fifteen years old, because Pop's health wasn't so good. That's an understatement, really; he had to have a quintuple bypass. But I remember how it looked, and I remember how it smelled, and I like to think that Pop is still making tables where he is now.
Yeah, I know that some people reading this are going to shake their heads and say that either my grandfather was full of it or I am now. I don't have any trouble believing his story, but I can see where someone else might. All I can say is that to the best of my knowledge, everything I've just related here is true. I can't prove it, so don't ask me to try. Some things are better taken on faith anyway.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Chat About Whose Friends, Exactly?
I'm a big fan of genealogical research. I'm not sure why. I think it's because I like the idea of digging up names and dates and information so that people don't get forgotten. I used to help my grandmother work on her gigantic mixed-up family tree, and then later I put the same skills to use in trying to untangle the branches on my husband's.
At present I'm nearing completion of a family tree for my two friends, Jessica and Andrea. Jess and Andi are sisters, and have the distinction of being (apart from my husband) the two closest friends I have with whom I can converse independently of a modem. Most of my friends live inside of a Toshiba laptop, but I see these two in the so-called real world at least once a week. As we sat in the local Wendy's one afternoon, I was telling them about the work my mother and I had done on a family tree for my godmother, and they started talking about how they would love to know more about their own family history. From there it was a pretty simple transition to my taking on the project, and that leads us to today's blog entry.
Most of the research was doable via the magic of the internet, but to get more complete stories, I needed to access people's obituaries. Fortunately, since my friends' family has been in our area for the last few hundred years, almost everything is in the local paper's archives, so it's just been a matter of multiple visits to the library.
If you've never had occasion to use the microfiche reader in your own library, you might find the contraption somewhat daunting. It looks like a television and an old-fashioned movie projector had a few too many drinks one night and this was the result. It serves the purpose right enough, but it takes a little while to get used to it. Old newspapers are scanned onto reels of film that get threaded onto the feeder, and the pages of the paper are displayed on the screen for you to read.
Sometimes, for reasons I've never understood, the papers are displayed in negative format -- white printing on black. This is especially jarring when you're looking at photographs; a smiling child becomes some kind of demonic black-toothed spawn.
Andrea sometimes comes with me when I'm on an obituary hunt, which is good, because she's got an eye for catching them. The more recent issues -- from about the 1960s onward -- are less confusing, but when searching older newspapers for the obituaries, it's like a text version of "Where's Waldo?" Sometimes I feel like the newspapers of bygone years were arranged by someone wearing a blindfold. There's no cohesiveness to the layout at all, and there seem to be more advertisements than anything.
The headlines are hysterical sometimes too. Older editions of our local paper were all written in column format, and some columns had larger headlines than others. The result is odd things jumping off the page, such as one issue with the dueling headlines "DEDICATED TO CHRIST" and "THE HAND OF DEATH."
Far and away our favorite thing, however, is the "Chat About Your Friends" column. I'm not sure when this started or when it stopped, but it existed for a good forty or fifty years in our local paper. "Chat About Your Friends" was filled with peculiar minutiae of the daily lives of residents of the paper's home city. For example:
~ Misses Minnie and Pearl Grayson of Tilghman Street recently took a day trip to the city of Lancaster to visit their aunt.
~ George "Bodkin" Jones, the postmaster, is ill in bed with a terrible cold.
~ The Masters family of rural area 1 is planning to travel to California to spend the Christmas holidays with relatives.
~ Little Billy Simpson, age 9, is recovering nicely from his recent injury. He cut his hand while chopping wood.
~ Sarah Smith, who resides near the fairgrounds, received a package from Chicago by post on Tuesday afternoon.
Andrea and I are fascinated by this column. The best way I can describe is that it's like a giant list of Facebook status updates, except that the updates were written by someone who's just observing the status. We tried to imagine what such a column would look like today.
~ The Rogers family visited their son at the state penitentiary on Sunday afternoon.
~ Jenny Thompson feels that the world is vastly unfair. She has written six poems about it.
~ Rick Holmes and Jeremy Jackson are now friends, despite having never actually met in their lives.
~ Laura Klotz was dogsitting for her parents this past Saturday.
In other words, Facebook status updates are boring enough to read on Facebook. At least when you're reading your Facebook, you know the people on your friends list (presumably) and have at least a small interest in what they're doing at a given moment. Imagine the local newspaper treating Facebook updates like actual news, and publishing them daily for everyone to read. How did this constitute legitimate reporting? Did someone actually get paid to spy on the neighbors and regurgitate their findings in the paper?
It's social networking without the actual networking. I'm not sure it even qualifies as social.
Arguably the funniest thing about "Chat About Your Friends," however, is its location in the paper. It invariably is found on the same page with the obituaries, which makes the whole thing come across almost like "Here's what your living neighbors are doing...and here are the ones who aren't doing anything anymore." It manages to straddle the fine line between humorous and creepy.
Upping the weirdness factor, obituaries in the old newspapers weren't always very well organized. I don't just mean the fact that they were sometimes scattered in between ads for shirtwaists and tapeworms, although trust me when I say that's weird enough on its own. No, I'm actually referring to the fact that they were sometimes printed in two separate columns. It's somewhat understandable, since I imagine that back in the days before laser printers and stuff the space in a newspaper was at a premium. You reached the end of the column, your piece wasn't finished, so you moved up to the top of another column. Makes sense.
Except that now, remember that the obituaries ran side by side with "Chat About Your Friends." They sometimes ran into each other.
"Mr. Ogden Thompson of St. John's Court was struck by a vehicle on Thursday evening as he crossed Franklin Street. He is expected to be survived by his wife Kitty and their three children Arthur, Sam, and Mabel, all at home. Mrs. Thompson is expecting a large crowd of guests for a picnic this weekend and hopes for favorable weather. Mr. Thompson will be propped up in a comfortable chair for the duration of the festivities."
Sometimes they bled into those ads, too.
"Calling hours will be Saturday morning at the home of the deceased's son-in-law, Mr. Jacob Hess, followed by interment in the West End Cemetery. Anyone wishing to make a contribution to the deceased's family in his memory is encouraged to try Johnson's Malt Beer, available only from Schantz's Select Emporium. It'll put a spring in your step and a smile on your face."
And if you go back far enough, they weren't even on their own page -- they were just scattered around the entire newspaper, interspersed with the actual news. Most of them were on the same page with "Chat About Your Friends," but others were treated like filler if the front page was in need of copy. That's how that "HAND OF DEATH" headline came about, in fact; they took five obituaries and turned them into an article, leading in with the explanation that the hand of death had fallen on several well-known persons of the area. The rest of the obituaries were relegated to the same page with "Chat About Your Friends," since they were evidently not important enough.
Although, to be fair, a large percentage of what was printed on the front page seemed like filler. I don't think we had any actual news in this region until around 1950. There's no other way to explain some of the stuff I've found. The hunt for a farmer's runaway pig was treated like the 1890's version of O. J. Simpson's flight down a California highway.
I had to give up for the day when the obituary for Mrs. Violet Trout appeared alongside the results of a fishing competition.
"Mrs. Trout was a well-respected member of our community. She taught at the sixth-grade level in our local school for a number of years prior to her marriage, and has served in the Ladies' Auxiliary of the Flagsdale Fire Company. The fish weighed 9 lbs., 12 oz., and was judged to be the finest trout specimen caught in the history of the contest. Graveside services will be held at 10 o'clock, followed by a celebratory fish dinner in the winner's honor."
At present I'm nearing completion of a family tree for my two friends, Jessica and Andrea. Jess and Andi are sisters, and have the distinction of being (apart from my husband) the two closest friends I have with whom I can converse independently of a modem. Most of my friends live inside of a Toshiba laptop, but I see these two in the so-called real world at least once a week. As we sat in the local Wendy's one afternoon, I was telling them about the work my mother and I had done on a family tree for my godmother, and they started talking about how they would love to know more about their own family history. From there it was a pretty simple transition to my taking on the project, and that leads us to today's blog entry.
Most of the research was doable via the magic of the internet, but to get more complete stories, I needed to access people's obituaries. Fortunately, since my friends' family has been in our area for the last few hundred years, almost everything is in the local paper's archives, so it's just been a matter of multiple visits to the library.
If you've never had occasion to use the microfiche reader in your own library, you might find the contraption somewhat daunting. It looks like a television and an old-fashioned movie projector had a few too many drinks one night and this was the result. It serves the purpose right enough, but it takes a little while to get used to it. Old newspapers are scanned onto reels of film that get threaded onto the feeder, and the pages of the paper are displayed on the screen for you to read.
Sometimes, for reasons I've never understood, the papers are displayed in negative format -- white printing on black. This is especially jarring when you're looking at photographs; a smiling child becomes some kind of demonic black-toothed spawn.
Andrea sometimes comes with me when I'm on an obituary hunt, which is good, because she's got an eye for catching them. The more recent issues -- from about the 1960s onward -- are less confusing, but when searching older newspapers for the obituaries, it's like a text version of "Where's Waldo?" Sometimes I feel like the newspapers of bygone years were arranged by someone wearing a blindfold. There's no cohesiveness to the layout at all, and there seem to be more advertisements than anything.
The headlines are hysterical sometimes too. Older editions of our local paper were all written in column format, and some columns had larger headlines than others. The result is odd things jumping off the page, such as one issue with the dueling headlines "DEDICATED TO CHRIST" and "THE HAND OF DEATH."
Far and away our favorite thing, however, is the "Chat About Your Friends" column. I'm not sure when this started or when it stopped, but it existed for a good forty or fifty years in our local paper. "Chat About Your Friends" was filled with peculiar minutiae of the daily lives of residents of the paper's home city. For example:
~ Misses Minnie and Pearl Grayson of Tilghman Street recently took a day trip to the city of Lancaster to visit their aunt.
~ George "Bodkin" Jones, the postmaster, is ill in bed with a terrible cold.
~ The Masters family of rural area 1 is planning to travel to California to spend the Christmas holidays with relatives.
~ Little Billy Simpson, age 9, is recovering nicely from his recent injury. He cut his hand while chopping wood.
~ Sarah Smith, who resides near the fairgrounds, received a package from Chicago by post on Tuesday afternoon.
Andrea and I are fascinated by this column. The best way I can describe is that it's like a giant list of Facebook status updates, except that the updates were written by someone who's just observing the status. We tried to imagine what such a column would look like today.
~ The Rogers family visited their son at the state penitentiary on Sunday afternoon.
~ Jenny Thompson feels that the world is vastly unfair. She has written six poems about it.
~ Rick Holmes and Jeremy Jackson are now friends, despite having never actually met in their lives.
~ Laura Klotz was dogsitting for her parents this past Saturday.
In other words, Facebook status updates are boring enough to read on Facebook. At least when you're reading your Facebook, you know the people on your friends list (presumably) and have at least a small interest in what they're doing at a given moment. Imagine the local newspaper treating Facebook updates like actual news, and publishing them daily for everyone to read. How did this constitute legitimate reporting? Did someone actually get paid to spy on the neighbors and regurgitate their findings in the paper?
It's social networking without the actual networking. I'm not sure it even qualifies as social.
Arguably the funniest thing about "Chat About Your Friends," however, is its location in the paper. It invariably is found on the same page with the obituaries, which makes the whole thing come across almost like "Here's what your living neighbors are doing...and here are the ones who aren't doing anything anymore." It manages to straddle the fine line between humorous and creepy.
Upping the weirdness factor, obituaries in the old newspapers weren't always very well organized. I don't just mean the fact that they were sometimes scattered in between ads for shirtwaists and tapeworms, although trust me when I say that's weird enough on its own. No, I'm actually referring to the fact that they were sometimes printed in two separate columns. It's somewhat understandable, since I imagine that back in the days before laser printers and stuff the space in a newspaper was at a premium. You reached the end of the column, your piece wasn't finished, so you moved up to the top of another column. Makes sense.
Except that now, remember that the obituaries ran side by side with "Chat About Your Friends." They sometimes ran into each other.
"Mr. Ogden Thompson of St. John's Court was struck by a vehicle on Thursday evening as he crossed Franklin Street. He is expected to be survived by his wife Kitty and their three children Arthur, Sam, and Mabel, all at home. Mrs. Thompson is expecting a large crowd of guests for a picnic this weekend and hopes for favorable weather. Mr. Thompson will be propped up in a comfortable chair for the duration of the festivities."
Sometimes they bled into those ads, too.
"Calling hours will be Saturday morning at the home of the deceased's son-in-law, Mr. Jacob Hess, followed by interment in the West End Cemetery. Anyone wishing to make a contribution to the deceased's family in his memory is encouraged to try Johnson's Malt Beer, available only from Schantz's Select Emporium. It'll put a spring in your step and a smile on your face."
And if you go back far enough, they weren't even on their own page -- they were just scattered around the entire newspaper, interspersed with the actual news. Most of them were on the same page with "Chat About Your Friends," but others were treated like filler if the front page was in need of copy. That's how that "HAND OF DEATH" headline came about, in fact; they took five obituaries and turned them into an article, leading in with the explanation that the hand of death had fallen on several well-known persons of the area. The rest of the obituaries were relegated to the same page with "Chat About Your Friends," since they were evidently not important enough.
Although, to be fair, a large percentage of what was printed on the front page seemed like filler. I don't think we had any actual news in this region until around 1950. There's no other way to explain some of the stuff I've found. The hunt for a farmer's runaway pig was treated like the 1890's version of O. J. Simpson's flight down a California highway.
I had to give up for the day when the obituary for Mrs. Violet Trout appeared alongside the results of a fishing competition.
"Mrs. Trout was a well-respected member of our community. She taught at the sixth-grade level in our local school for a number of years prior to her marriage, and has served in the Ladies' Auxiliary of the Flagsdale Fire Company. The fish weighed 9 lbs., 12 oz., and was judged to be the finest trout specimen caught in the history of the contest. Graveside services will be held at 10 o'clock, followed by a celebratory fish dinner in the winner's honor."
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