Monday, January 25, 2010

Relatively Speaking, Have You Seen - - ??

Wild One email is, well, out of control, numbers too large to count, piled up as tall as a mountain, interesting, sad, happy, and sometimes a great lead to web sites packed with goodies.

So many times one of us happens across a web site and the emails start to fly, "Have you seen this site?"  "NO, send URL".  Sometimes these emails occur when a web site is updated, sometimes it is a web site someone else mentions, as in, "Have you ever heard of this site??"

Now, you know, we are all gonna go surfing over to have a lookie see ourselves.  Punch in our favorite surname in search boxes, let the fun begin!

Last week it was Karen who started the activity, something about old newspapers that someone mentioned to her. Nope, was not Ancestry, nor any of the other pay sites that have papers.  It was a free site.  I remembered The Chronicling of America project, Library of Congress.  Their home page is here.

I sent the link to Karen, yes, this was what she had heard about.  So, as is the norm, since I was there, I decided to spend some time snooping.  I started with the Adair County News, Adair, Kentucky and found an article I had been looking for.  Then, I skipped to Minnesota newspapers, and typed in, Lashbrook, but of course.  Nine hits.  Looked at all of them, but of course.   First six were interesting, but nothing I did not have, however, number seven was a fun hit!  It did not tell me anything startling or new.  The article talked about Man's great-grandfather, Wallace Lashbrook, who was for many years a traveling salesman.  Knew that.  Actually, have it documented pretty nicely in my data base.  So, why was this a fun hit??

First here is the paragraph that mentions Wallace, or W. H., as he is frequently found in records:


The fun part was the graphic at the very top of the article, I just love the drawing, don't you??


Source:  St. Paul Daily Globe. (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, May 26, 1888, Image 10, here is a direct link.  Whomever "Charlie" was, he must have run across a lot of commercial travelers, that is one long article, quite a few names.

Yes, being part of a genealogical support group, such as the Wild Ones can be a very good thing, besides friendship, you get great leads to genie-web sites!  And, by the way, revisits to web sites can be a VERY good thing too, you just might find something newly added or something that the indexers or the OCR did not pick up the first or second time around.

Now, excuse me while I go link this fun color/graphic to Wallace's multimedia event area on my data base.


Copyright 2010, CABS for Reflections From the Fence.

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3 comments:

Anne Percival Kruszka said...

Oh Yea!!!

Karen K said...

Another great post Carol! Nice job!

Linda Hughes Hiser said...

Thanks for this tip. I will have to go out and search for myself today.