Last Spring I reached out to the Marion (Indiana) Public Library about some research I was doing about two young siblings, Leah and Dale, who passed away tragically in separate incidences. I was trying to untangle the threads of oral history from fact and thought there might be a newspaper article or two about the incidences. The wonderful Research Librarian who assisted me was able to provide one short article that answered one question and begged me to ask a hundred more.
During our exchanges she also mentioned that many of their archives were in the hands of Newspapers.com being digitized and that I should check back in a few months to see if they could locate what I couldn’t find online.
So, I filed away the future research task in my mind’s never-ending To-Do list and time marched on.
Flash Forward to this month and, as I was deepening my research on another sibling in the same family group, I popped on to Newspapers.com, put in my simple search, and was greeted by dozens of articles and snippets and even a rather clear photo of my ancestor!
A true wealth of information!
As well as a solid reminder that information is being archived and digitized and added to platforms all the time.
So, I circled back to my original questions about Leah and Dale in the hopes of solving my mystery. While I did find one additional short piece written about little Leah’s death that shared a slightly different telling of the incident, there is still no trace of Dale.
Once I’m finished with my current research project, energized by my recent finds, I’ll circle back on all my ancestors in the area to see what new information had been added to various sources over the past several months.
The work is truly, happily, never done.
Onward,
Melis