My mother found this amazing website that has digitized a number of newspapers from the Dutchess County area of New York. The papers go back to at least the early 1800s and since that is where much of my family lived (and where my parents and grandparents were born), this turned out to be a gold mine of information to help with our family tree research.
The site is called Old Fulton New York Post Cards and the man who runs it doesn’t get enough credit. I’m sure I owe him a bundle for all the help those articles have provided.
I’ve found many names I might not have otherwise found so easily but the real value is in how some of these stories can give you a real peek into the emotional life of an ancestor.
My great-great-grandmother was quite a woman and I so very much wish I’d had a chance to know her. She was born in 1865 and passed away in 1959 – just 8 years before I was born.
Census information tells me she had 10 births but only 4 living children – three sons and then, finally, a daughter.
Her youngest son was my great-grandfather who passed away at the age of 31 leaving behind 7 young boys. (I can’t even imagine what his wife must have felt when she lost her husband and had all of those small mouths to feed all by herself!)
But it was a simple notice I found in one of the newspapers that really let me know just how much my great-great-grandmother must have missed her son. The notice above is one of several versions she put in the newspaper every year, year after year, for years on end.
Her daughter also passed away at a young age but I’ve found no memorial notice for her – only this one that showed up every year for George. His passing was tragic for a number of reasons I won’t go into now and he died in an accident that most likely could have been prevented but he’d had some struggles before that, too – all of which I think were the result of his time fighting during WWI.
When George’s oldest son, George Jr., was killed in an accident on a naval ship at the age of 18, I could feel my great-great-grandmother’s heart break when I noticed she had added him to her next memorial. How it did not devastate her entirely to live through these two events (not to mention the young death of her only daughter) is a testament to her strength. She had to have been a very loving, very caring, and very strong woman.
Without access to these newspapers I would only know my great-great-grandmother as a name and a set of dates. There would be very little of her soul that I could understand – little about her life that I could do more than guess at by seeing how events unfolded for her. But now, I feel that writing about her does something similar to what she did when she published her annual notices – it lets me recognize that her having existed means something to me and that I miss her even though I never had a chance to know her.