Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- An Unusual Newspaper Article About Your Ancestors

  Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1) Have you found an unusual, chilling, amazing, or fascinating newspaper article about your ancestors? 

2)  If so, please share the article and what you learned about your ancestor(s) from the article.  Provide a source citation too!

2)  Share your information about your newspaper article in your own blog post, writing a comment on this blog post, or put it in a Substack post, Facebook Note, or some other social media system.  Please leave a comment on this post so others can find it.

Thank you to Lisa S. Gorrell for this SNGF idea.

Here's mine:

Early in my research (in about 1990?), I went to the San Diego Public Library to see if there was newspaper articles about my Carringer families in the San Diego newspapers.  Fortunately, there was an index on microfiche for the San Diego Union newspaper from 1868 to about 1980.  Here is one of the articles that I found unusual, fascinating and amazing.

One of the articles I found was this one (image captured in recent years on GenealogyBank):

The transcription of the article is:

"Carringer Gardens, Model of Beauty,

Have Also Wealth of Entertainment

By Ada Perry

"Mr. and Mrs. Lyle L. Carringer, 2130 Fern st., are never bored with their garden.  They have four fish pools in it filled with finny pets that are always on the move.  Sometimes they move out on the grass but the Carringers chalk this up to playfulness and continue to enjoy the aquatic aspects of their home.

"The Carringer place is distinctly in the livable small garden or outdoor living room class.  The pools are strategically located to invite folks outdoors for pleasure and relaxation.  One pool, the smallest, is placed near the rear door of the house as a starting point.  From there to a sunny larger pool planted to lilies and overhung with shrubs is a natural step.

"Other parts of the garden planted to flowers, cacti and succulents and several fruit trees are easily accessible from the second pool and then the Carringers and their friends naturally gravitate to a lath house furnished with chairs and tables.

"There are sources of amusement in the lath house.  The remaining pools are located there.  One is a rill in the heart of a pretty rockery and the other a shadowy oval presided over by a rice plant with curving stalks topped with laves like giant hands.  Directly above the pool a tree fern rests apparently on the water.  The invisible stand which holds it up represents some clever household ingenuity.  It was formerly a piano stool.

"A grill is built at the end of the lath house on a rock structure.  The grill space can be filled with a decorative potted plant when not in use although the Carringers have found it a consistent entertainer.

"Next to the grill in a glass house annex is a surprise feature.  On shelves are aquariums filled with tropical fish, paradise, moons, guppies, and other fancy swimmers weaving about in grassy water jungles; blinking, gobbling and raising families in the most distracting style.  The glass house is heated for them and each aquarium has individual radiators and thermometers for perfect comfort.

"Tropical aquariums are often kept indoors but the Carringers have theirs handy to the pools where fish life from goldfish to guppies can be observed.  Certain of the tropicals are moved to the goldfish pools at favorable times for variety."

The source citation is:

"Carringer Gardens, Model of Beauty, Have Also Wealth of Entertainment," San Diego [Calif.] Union newspaper, Sunday, 24 March 1935, page 18, columns 5-6, Lyle L. Carringer garden article;   GenealogyBank, Newspaper Archives   (https://www.genealogybank.com : accessed 3 January 2022).

Lyle L. Carringer (1891-1976) and Emily Kemp (Auble) Carringer (1899-1977) are my maternal grandparents.  They built the house at 2130 Fern Street in San Diego in 1920, and resided there for about 30 years.  My mother grew up in that house and garden.  Lyle loved to build things and was very creative.  Emily was a horticultural expert and loved the gardens.  My guess is that building and maintaining the gardens, the pools, the lath house and the glass house were evening and weekend projects for the whole family.  I have very distant memories of playing in the lath house and glass house and recall the goldfish pools as a young boy.  After 1946, my family lived in the building on the south side of the gardens.  They sold the Fern Street house in 1950 and the new owner built a fence to wall off his property from two little boys.  

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