Old Newspaper Ads

On Being "From Around Here"

The most frequent thing I find, when I go looking for old family documents in public archives, are advertisements. Starting out, they are these for my great-grandfather’s services as an optician. And maybe also still a peddler, if we accept the dictionary definition of peddler: “a person who goes from place to place selling small items.” Eye glasses are small goods, after all.

Or this one, in the Big Sandy News-Recorder Fri, May 16, 1930:

I love the move from peddler to traveling optician, to someone who has operated from the same location for over 15 years. I love the deep grounding in my home place this establishes. (It’s an Appalachianism to say you aren’t “from around here” until you have a parent buried in a child born in the area, in which case we became “from around here” in Lake’s generation.)

In my first round of research, I skipped all the ads, put them aside as unimportant to the larger story, but now I see that they really are the larger story: they are the move from immigrant to community member to patriarch of a family* that still has close ties to, and many descendants in, Huntington.

What things were you initially tempted to ignore when you started writing your family stories, friends, and how have they proven more important than you expected?