Saturday, March 28, 2015

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Newspaper Headline on Your Father's Birthday

It's Saturday Night, 
time for more Genealogy Fun!!


For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I challenge you to:


1)  What was your father's birth date?


2)  Find a newspaper from his hometown, or a nearby larger town or city, that was published on that date.  What was the major headline on page 1 of that issue of the newspaper?

3)  Share your headline with us in your own blog post, in a comment on this blog post, or in a Facebook or Google+ post.

NOTE:  For those who don't have access to digital newspapers behind a subscription wall, find FREE digital newspapers using Miriam Robbins' Online Historical Newspapers site - https://sites.google.com/site/onlinenewspapersite/.

Here's mine:

1)  My father's birth date was 15 October 1911, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

2)  I know that Ancestry.com has the Fitchburg Sentinel in their collection, so I'll look there for page 1 of the 16 October 1911 issue (there was no 15 October issue on a Sunday apparently):



The major headline is:  "Mackmen Win Second 3-1."  This refers to the 1911 World Series, where the Philadelphia Athletics beat the New York Giants 3-1 in the second game on a home run by Frank "Home Run" Baker.  

Ancestry.com didn't have the Boston Globe, so I found the Washington Post for 15 October 1911:



The largest headline on the first page of the 15 October 1911 Washington Post was:

"Giants Take First Game of the Series" with sub-heads of:

"Doubles by Myers and Devore and Collins' Error Brings Victory"

"Pitchers in Great Duel"

"Bender Allows Only Five Hits, One Less Than Mathewson, and Fans Eleven, but Luck Is Against the Indian"

The headline doesn't tell the score, but the article says it was 2-1 in favor of the New York Giants.  This game had the largest crowd to ever see a ballgame, with 38,281 spectators in New York.

Unfortunately, the FREE Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov) site doesn't have any Boston newspapers for that time period.  

I did find the New York Sun front page for 15 October 1911 and the major headline was:



"Giants Win First Game By 2-1"

Another headline on the page is "Rockefeller Not Very Ill."

I guess it's only fitting that my father loved to play, and coach, and watch, baseball...after all, he was born during the World Series.  Of course, this was before radio and television, and the only way people knew the outcomes, unless they attended the games, was in the newspapers the next day.

The URL for this post was:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/03/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-newspaper.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


2 comments:

Mel said...

I enjoyed this one. There were some interesting events that made headline news on the day my Dad was born. http://www.researchjournal.yourislandroutes.com/2015/03/sngf-headline-news-7-march-1927/

Lois Willis said...

I enjoyed this challenge as well. I found the events on my dad's birthday interesting.

My post can be found at
http://loiswillis.com/?p=3827