Tool:
Newspapers.com, which is also part of my Ancestry subscription, is proving a real joy in part because Huntington and the surrounding area were small enough that I can find reporting about pretty quotidian events.
The Story:
There isn’t much of a story this week, because I’m mostly building an idea of the day-to-day lives of the first and second generations by reading mentions from local newspapers. They are often about very small things. For instance, here is a brief piece about a B’nai B’rith meeting in which Lake Sr. was made Vice President:
This is from the Hinton Daily News, and I can’t for the life of me think of any reason they’d report on a meeting of Huntington’s B’nai B’rith, but they did.
There was also this wonderful paragraph from an article about local sporting events:
I love the sentence, “Lake Polan, Jr., mammoth lineman who tips the scales close to the 200 mark, has been moved up to a regular tackle post and will probably start the game here.” First, I just love encountering Uncle Lake in his youth. But also, I love the way this plays against stereotypes of Jews as unathletic, and particularly as unlikely to be high school football tackles.
I know this isn’t much, but I’m deep in the weeds working on the first three essays for the collection, and so haven’t done much serious research this week. I’m at the part of the project where I have enough to begin putting things on the page, which means some weeks there just isn’t much new to share with you, unless you want to hear about how much coffee it takes me to actually get through a thousand words or so. But I don’t imagine that you do.
What is your family research turning up, friends?
P.S. I just came back to add this delight! Hinton is a particularly small town, so much so that this visit from my mother and her mother made the paper: