The Things You Find

One of the fun aspects about looking for historical records of my family is stumbling on random bits of history. After finding the mortuary records for several family members, I went looking for copies of their death notices in the newspaper archives.

Finding the birth, marriage, death notice section of the paper can sometimes be tricky when scanning the online images, so I'll often start at the first or second image and scroll through the pages to find what I'm looking for. In the process I've gotten a glimpse of various news stories, ads, and other items. Every so often I stumble on something fun or interesting -- a local crime, a scandalous divorce. In my recent perusings, I was scrolling through copies of the San Francisco Chronicle from 1905 and 1912. In the 1905 paper, I happened to stop on the sports page and notice the tiny box scores for the major leagues. In 1905, there was no Major League Baseball west of St. Louis, so most of the local sports coverage was college and minor league baseball. Still, I was curious how my now San Francisco Giants, then in New York, had done. I zoomed in on the tiny box score to see the Giants had beaten St. Louis 8-1. The only other bit included in the box score was the pitching battery. The winning pitcher in that game was legendary Giants Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson. I had to smile that of all the times I decided to stop and check the box scores I had stumbled on a game by one of the most prominent pitchers in baseball history.

The next interesting thing that I stumbled on was in 1912. Again I was just scrolling through the pages when a boldfaced "Titanic" caught my eye. I paused expecting to see some kind of outlandish advertisement. I was partly correct. It turns out I had stumbled on an ad for the never to happen return trip of the Titanic sailing out of New York. Having the perspective of 100 years of hindsight, I wondered what happened to the folks who had booked passage on that return trip. What were their thoughts on being on the other side of such a historic event.

There have been other things like this that I've stumbled upon perusing old newspapers and while right now my focus is on finding specific information, I do think I need to plan some time to go back and read some of those old papers in their entirety. The history lessons of my school years was so much remembering dates and places and names for exams that the day to day perspective of events got filtered out. Following my family tree through history is similar in some ways to reading a novel of historical fiction. It has presented history in a new light and made it all the more real than dry text books and lectures ever could.