Wow, who would have thought? In surfing around the web and on various genealogy sites, I stumbled across the fact that there are lots of old issues of the St. Charles daily newspaper at the site Find My Past. That is the website where all the old parish registers are, for the Chapman-Allen-Thompson lines, and, of course, the UK census records. I thought most of their records were UK records, and even though their site says they have world-wide records, I figured they would only have a few non-UK records.

So I’m finding lots of newspaper articles about Bruns, Ferber, and Washburn so far. There are articles on Dorothea Bruns and George Ferber eloping (so they said!), a mad dog, a dog that saved a family from a house fire, an arrest for home brewing beer during Prohibition, car crashes, county elections, and beauty queens! I love reading these old articles; many times they are really funny, albeit unintentionally.

But it is nice to have something to put in the database besides just names and dates. These articles will put real “life” into the family story. At least, in the St. Charles lines! I wish other newspapers would get online, especially ones where lots of family members resided for years and years (like Joliet, that would be a good one).

The only bad part is that these newspapers are so old, the quality is not great, and unfortunately the scans are quite small. To actually read the articles, I usually have to take my glasses off and squint at the screen. Some words are so bad that I can only figure out what they are based on the context of the sentence. So I’m taking the time to transcribe the articles as I go, since trying to decipher them takes awhile. Better to have one person do it once, rather than everyone having to do it also.

So that’s why the Bruns-Ferber history is taking so long, but it will be pretty cool when it’s done 🙂