Murder most foul...threats and insults!

~~~~~~~~~~

Matagorda Weekly Dispatch
June 29, 1844

The body of a Mr. Canfield, whose residence is about nine miles from Houston at Piney Point, was found in Buffalo Bayou a short distance below his dwelling on the 6th inst.² He had been shot in the face and neck with buck shot.

Beware of Imposters!! We the members of the Quarterly Meeting conference of the Methodist Episcopal church, Washington circuit expose to public journals that James Brown and W. W. Walingford are imposters. Brown, an Englishman, about 30, of light complexion and middle size stature, & is remarkably boisterous in reading hymns & preaching; -- Wallingford obtained a license to preach in Austin Co. last fall, since then his guilt has been exposed. He has several wives in the U.S. and deserves to be shunned --

Serious Gin Accident. Mr. John Hoffman, an old citizen of this county living near Berlin, a brother of Mr. R. Hoffman of this city, on Friday morning was fearfully cut and lacerated by his cotton gin.... Dr. E. R. Young, his family physician, amputated the hand about two inches above the wrist.

Did your ancestors also make it into print? Yes, indeed. Quite likely they did! In between being born, getting married, and dying, they did all sorts of interesting things, some of which, no doubt, were newsworthy. If you’d like to know more about the use of newspaper collections in your family research, check on the many sources available at Clayton Library and at the main repository of the Houston Public Library.

John Hersey once said, “Journalism allows its readers to witness history....” For this reason, newspapers are perhaps the best history that can be found. And, although considered by genealogists to be “secondary sources,” newspapers can be extremely valuable in providing family data not available from other sources. And the variety of information to be found in newspapers is impressive.

Newspaper obituary sections are always a great place to start. These will often contain such information as the deceased’s birth place and date, maiden and married names, names of spouses, children, brothers and sisters, and even, on occasion, immigration data. And of course, if the notice gives the name of the funeral home and the cemetery, you then have two additional sources to explore. It behooves the researcher to remember that these obituaries may carry various titles—Obituaries, Death Notices, Mortuary Notices, Funerals, etc.—and they may not always appear in the same section of the newspaper as they do today. Some early ones will even appear in the classified section. Also, don’t assume that the death notice will only appear in newspapers from the place where your ancestor was residing at the time of death. Death notices are very often found in the newspaper of an ancestor’s old hometown. Such accounts may bring to light additional family history that may be very valuable. Even today’s obituary of an aged person may lead you back to the early 1900s or even into the previous century.

Marriage announcements, especially those appearing in the hometown newspaper of the bride, may include extensive information on members of the wedding party and on wedding guests, many of whom may be relatives of the bride and groom. Such announcements may also mention places of residence, occupations, and other facts. And what a find if there is a photograph!

“Gossip” columns and local news sections contain all sorts of interesting and informative items. In such columns-especially in small-town papers-you may find items on who’s visiting who from where and what their family connections are. Out-of-town births, deaths, and marriages attended by local persons were often mentioned, as were school graduations, award announcements, club news, and illnesses. Also, don’t be surprised if your ancestor made the news because of something he did that was less than honorable or because of encounters with the law. Scandalous behavior was always newsworthy, especially if it involved criminal activities. In the South, Blacks associated with a crime or act of rebellion-especially if such acts involved runaway slaves-always made the news.

Public notices can also contain valuable genealogical information. Look for a wide variety of items, including business and trade announcements, tax lists, unclaimed mail, passenger and hotel lists, and-usually in the advertising sections-notices concerning missing heirs, settlements of accounts by estate administrators, and estate sales.

Special editions, such as one celebrating the 100th anniversary of the town or one published as a “Merchants Issue,” will often include biographical sketches of locally prominent families and individuals, oral history, and anecdotal information about earlier times.

Past and current newspapers often offer local “history” columns that can contain genealogical information. And the use of personal ads in the classified section may also bring forth others working on, or with a knowledge of, the families you are researching, including “lost” relatives.

Compilations of genealogy columns can also be very useful. One that comes to mind is Ken Thomas on Genealogy (975.8 T458 GA).³ Thomas’s columns offer advice, book reviews, and queries, in addition to news concerning libraries, society projects, etc.

It is always best to examine the actual newspaper or a microfilm copy, but published abstracts are the next best thing. These are frequently found in genealogical quarterlies but have also been published in book form. Examples include such works as Kevin Ladd’s Gone to Texas: Genealogical Abstracts from The Telegraph and Texas Register 1835-1841 (976.4252 L154 TX), Kathleen Koppel Glass’s Texas History Through the Eyes of The Galveston Daily News (976.41 39 G549 TX), and the Wood County Genealogical Society’s Genealogical Abstracts of Wood County, Texas, Newspapers Before 1920 (976.4223 G326 TX). Other examples of newspaper abstracts include Robert M. Tompkins’ Marriage and Death Notices from the Western Carolinian (975.6 T674 NC) and Robert Davis’s two volumes of The Georgia Black Book, More Morbid, Macabre, & Sometimes Disgusting Records of Genealogical Value (975.8 D263 GA).

Pauline Gandrud’s 245-volume Alabama Records series includes many newspaper abstracts. After Gandrud’s work was published, newspaper records were pulled from each of the volumes and published as Marriage, Death and Legal Notices From Early Alabama Newspapers, 1819-1893 (976.1 G196 AL). Other newspaper items, of course, must be culled from the various original volumes.

Selected items have often been transcribed and published from various religious papers. One such offering is Brent Holcolmb’s Marriage and Death Notices from the Southern Christian Advocate, 1837-1860 (975 H725 USA) and a similar volume, Marriages from the Southern Christian Advocate, 1867-1878 (same call number).⁴ If you have Irish ancestors, an excellent collection of newspaper extracts can be found in the five volumes (to date) of The Search for Missing Friends: Irish Immigrant Advertisements Placed in the Boston Pilot (974.4 S439 MA) being published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society. When completed, this set will contain all of the Irish immigrant advertisements that were placed in the Boston Pilot during the years 1831 to 1916. Often, these advertisements were placed by those back in the homeland in attempts to locate family members and friends in the U.S. Also, the Pilot contained ads placed by newly arrived immigrants who were looking for those who had come before, many of whom had immigrated far inland. This communications network for Irish immigrants was an important feature in the Pilot for nearly a century. For this reason, the Pilot was subscribed to by many ethnic Irish living well outside of the Boston area. What are your chances of finding a connection in the Boston Pilot? Very good! Here, for example, is a notice that appeared in the Pilot on 16 October 1841:

...JAMES KELLY, a native of Tipperary, by occupation an engineer. He worked at Taunton, Ms., about three years since, from whence he is supposed to have gone to the South, or Houston, (Texas,) where he is thought to have been employed as an Engineer of a steamboat. Any information respecting him will be most thankfully received by his brother, John Kelly, who resides in Fall River, Ms.

When dealing with newspaper abstract (or extracts), it is important to remember that the abstract collection may not include the specific item that you seek or that would enhance your family’s story. The compilers couldn’t include every item found in every paper, so compilations of abstracts are not complete; they contain only those items the compiler deemed important.

Many newspapers have been microfilmed, and there are even indexes available for some of these. For Tennessee research, see Tennessee Newspapers: A Cumulative List of Microfilmed Tennessee Newspapers in the Tennessee State Library (976.8 T297 TENN). For North Carolina, see Roger Jones’s compilation, North Carolina Newspapers on Microfilm: A Checklist of Early North Carolina Newspapers Available on Microfilm... (975.6 J78 NC) and Alan D. Watson’s compilation, An Index to North Carolina Newspapers, 1784-1789. For Illinois, see the Illinois State Library’s publication, Newspapers in the Illinois State Historical Library (977.3 N558 ILL). For Maryland, see Les White’s compilation, A Guide to the Microfilm Collection Newspapers at the Maryland State Archives (975.2 M393 MD). Those researching Virginia will find that Clayton has the Virginia Gazette on microfilm (6 rolls) together with the hardcopy, Virginia Gazette Index, 1736-1780 (975.5 C249 VA).

For Texas newspapers, an excellent source of information is Lone Stars and State Gazettes (976.4 S564 TX) by Marilyn McAdams Sibley. Sibley’s work discusses Texas newspapers before the Civil War and contains an appendix giving a very detailed checklist of the Texas newspapers from annexation to the Civil War. The work also provides information on where these newspaper collections are located. Did you know, for example, that the San Jacinto Museum of History has an excellent run of the (Anderson, Grimes County) Central Texian from 1855 to 1857?

Most of us in the Houston area are familiar with the no-longer-published Houston Post, but did you know it had a predecessor, the Houston Post-Dispatch? The Texas and Local History Department of the Houston Public Library, whose collection supplements that of the Clayton Library, has this and many other newspapers in its large collection, including some items that date from 1835. Even a few foreign-language papers can be found here, such as the Texas Anzier, a German language paper of 1892-1893. If you do visit the Texas and Local History Department, be sure to inquire about their newspaper scrapbook collection and the newspaper card index. This latter item contains over 3,000 personal names selected from local newspapers published from the late 1830s up into the 1850s.

A major collection of newspapers has been assembled by the University of Texas Archives. If you plan to visit this collection, first examine Chester V. Kielman’s 1967 compilation, The University of Texas Archives, A Guide to the Historical Manuscripts Collection in the University of Texas (976.4 K47 TX). This will help focus your research. For example, Kielman mentions, at item 754, a typed list of foreign newspapers, listed alphabetically by country, city, and newspaper title. Item 1911 directs the reader to a newspaper scrapbook collection organized by subjects that include Agriculture, Alabama, Baptists, Confederacy, Indian Captives, Oklahoma, Presbyterians, Texas Counties (Anderson, Aransas, Coryell, Zapata, and others), and Texas Pioneers, to name but a few.

A number of states have ongoing newspaper projects that try to identify, locate, and preserve—through microfilming—the newspapers circulated or published within their respective states. Such a project for Texas is being conducted by the American History Center at the University of Texas. Virginia has a project managed by the State Library of Virginia.

Check university and historical society libraries and archives to see what can be found in their newspaper collections, and especially check those in the state of your interest. For example, the Filson Club in Louisville, Kentucky has over 300 pre-Civil War Kentucky newspaper titles in its holdings, and the Kentucky Historical Society has a large collection of newspapers for the years 1830-1890.

If you can’t visit the library that has the collection you want to access, call and inquire about the possibility of an inter-library loan. If the material is available for loan, you can make arrangements, through the inter-library loan department of your local library, to access the material.

Current newspapers may be of help in several ways, and most are being microfilmed today and are easily accessible. While Clayton does not have current newspapers, our Houston Public Library system does. Check with the main library, and check your local libraries and university libraries. Many current-day newspapers, the York Times and the Houston Chronicle, for example, have annual indexes, and these make it easy to look up a name or a subject. Such indexes are in most major public and university libraries.

For researchers with Internet access, there are several good Web sites you can visit to view current newspapers online. Examples:

Business and International Education—Online Newspapers
http://www.coba.wright.edu/bie/paper.htm

Newspapers Online!
http://www.newspapers.com/

E&P MediaINFO Links (online media directory)
http://cpudirect.elpress.com/emedia/

Before closing, I would like to recommend to the reader a few other, more general, references that are of interest to those doing newspaper research. Not all of these are available at Clayton.

• Brigham, Clarence Saunders. History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820, 2 vols. 1974. Wooster, Mass: American Antiquarian Society, c1947. (Central Library, SR 071 B)
• Gregory, Winifred, ed. American Newspapers 1821-1936: A Union List of Files Available in the United States and Canada. New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1937.
• Library of Congress. Newspapers in Microform, United States 1948-1972. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1973. Supplement, 1976. (011.35 N558 USA)
• ——. A Check List of American Eighteenth Century Newspapers in the Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1936.
• Milner, Anita Cheek. Newspaper Indexes: A Location and Subject Guide for Researchers. 3 vols. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1977-. (016.071 M659 USA)
• Parch, Grace D., ed. Directory of Newspaper Libraries in the U.S. and Canada. New York: Project of the Newspaper Division, Special Libraries Association, 1976.
• Szucs, Loretto Dennis. “Newspapers,” chapter 12 in The Source, A Guidebook of American Genealogy, edited by Arlene Eakle and Johni Cerny. Salt Lake City, Utah: Ancestry Publishing Company, c1984. (929.1072 S724 USA)

1. Trevia Wooster Beverly, a charter member of CLF and a professional genealogist, publishes the Texas quarterly, The Tejas Gazette, and teaches genealogy classes. Her great-grandfather, Q. A. Wooster, was a traveling correspondent for the Monona County (Iowa) Democrat, when a trip to the “sunny south” determined his settling in Harris County in 1892.
2. Although rarely seen today, the terms “inst” or “instant”—used especially in 19th century writing—refer to the current month. In this case, the “6th inst.” means June 6th. The terms “ult” or “ultimo” were used to refer to the previous month.
3. Except as otherwise stated, those publications whose call numbers are listed in this article can be found at the Clayton Library.
4. The Southern Christian Advocate, a Methodist newspaper, occasionally contained notices concerning the “unchurched” or persons of other denominations. The Lutheran clergy apparently also used this newspaper, since the Lutheran Observer, published in Baltimore, was the closest publication of that denomination until 1861.