The Year Was 1903

The year was 1903 and in Washington, D.C. a group of twenty-four charter members adopted a constitution to form the National Genealogical Society. Throughout its rich history, its membership has swelled to well into the thousands, with members around the world.

It was a year of innovations. The Wright brothers made history that year with their famous flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Henry Ford, along with eleven other industrialists formed the Ford Motor Company and production began on the Model A. As the business progressed, Ford’s assembly lines helped to make automobiles more affordable.

The Canadian and U.S. governments, with the aid of an international tribunal, settled a boundary dispute, which had been fueled with the discovery of gold in the Klondike region of the Yukon in 1896.

In Kansas, heavy rains in the last few weeks of May brought on historic flooding in the Missouri, Kansas, and lower Republican River Basins. In the aftermath, homes were washed away, along with many bridges, one of which held the water line that supplied Kansas City, Missouri with water. Details of the flood can be found online in a USGS document comparing it to the 1993 floods, and in an online article from the Kansas City Star. The Kansas City Public Library also has a collection of photographs from the disaster online.

The year ended with another Midwestern disaster, as the newly built Iroquois Theater in Chicago caught fire during a crowded holiday matinee. Although the fire was extinguished by the fire department within a half hour, the panic that ensued and the explosive flames and smoke fed by scenery and curtains killed over 600 of the 1,900 patrons in the theater.

The cinema was still in its infancy in 1903 and audiences found thrills in The Great Train Robbery when it was released that year. The literary world found another classic in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, which was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in June and July of 1903.

Unmarried Relatives; Please Don't Overlook Them

It's important to research every member in your ancestors' families. I cringe when I hear a family historian say that they didn't trace their great-grandmother's two sisters because neither of them married or probably had no children. They might be missing some of the greatest tidbits of their family history and even the old family Bible or scrapbook. I would guess that some of you readers are today's single sibling and are caring for the older generation or live in the old family home.

The Last Child at HomeUnmarried relatives may have been the last of the siblings to leave the family home or may have been the one to stay and take care of Mom after Dad passed away. Often, they continue to live in the house after Mom is gone. This might be the sibling who ended up with the family pictures, Dad's letters from the Spanish-American War, Mom's old address book, or that family Bible. Without such a connection to unmarried collateral relatives, I would never have seen the picture of my great-grandmother Betsy and the two sisters who also left Sweden and settled in the Midwest.

ObituariesOne set of my Irish great-great-grandparents were a bit tough to research. They lived in a relatively big city and had the common name of Cook. I had concentrated on their son, John, who was...

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Ethnic Newspapers

Those of us with non-English speaking immigrant ancestors are sometimes dismayed by the small amount of genealogical information found on them in local newspapers. One way to potentially overcome this problem is to utilize American newspapers in your ancestor's native language. Many large (and sometimes not so large) cities with substantial immigrant populations had newspapers printed in the immigrant's native language. Ignoring these papers could result in significant information being overlooked.

Why Use Them? It might have been that the only people who "cared" that your ancestor died, married, etc. were fellow natives of his or her home country. An ethnic newspaper may include more details about your ancestor than the local English-language paper.

When Antje Fecht died near Carthage, Illinois, in 1900, there was no obituary in the local weekly paper. Not even a one-line death notice. Her obituary in a German language newspaper was fairly detailed and included her date and place of birth, information on her immigration, and the Bible text from which the funeral sermon was given.

Louise Mortier's 1921 obituary in the Gazette van Moline (a Flemish language paper published in Moline, Illinois) provided her exact village of birth in Belgium, but did not mention her first name, only listing her as Mrs. August Mortier.

Why the extra details in an ethnic newspaper? Because the readers knew the area and usually shared a heritage, fellow Belgians reading the Gazette van Moline would want to know where in Belgium she was born. Readers of the English-language paper were not as familiar with the country and not as likely to care.

Learning About the PapersThere are many ways one can learn about...

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