Carol Darrow
I’m writing this column on September 12. Yesterday almost everyone I spoke to mentioned where they were on September 11, 2001 and how they learned about the airplanes that hit the World Trade Center. Many of those people also remember exactly where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated.
Most of your ancestors relied on weekly newspapers and those weeklies relied on information relayed by telegraph. Most people knew how significant it was when Lincoln was elected president on November 6, 1860. Many southerners were convinced he was going to get rid of slavery leading South Carolina to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860. When Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, newspaper and telegraph offices posted the news on handbills nailed to their building. The Rocky Mountain News published the telegraphed news on April 19, 1865.
Momentous events such as the Chicago fire, the Galveston hurricane of 1900, the U.S. entrance into World War I and World War II, were events that impacted your ancestors in various ways. Did they have young men who went off to war? Did they suffer severe crop loss due to tornados or early snow? Did local manufacturing or grain elevators fail in your ancestor’s town? All of this news was published in local newspapers and many newspapers are available on digital services such as Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank. com as well as historical newspaper services in Colorado, New York, Iowa and many more. You can narrow the search by location and month and year – and search for key words such as Lincoln, 1865 or tornado, 1904 in Colorado as well as your ancestor’s name.
Subscriptions cost about $90 per year although there are shorter options. Collect your ancestor’s key locations and dates and work for a month on newspaper research. You are sure to learn what news was impacting your ancestors.