Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Date Your Grandfather Was Born

It's Saturday Night,

time for more Genealogy Fun!!

For this week's mission from Randy Seaver, is to answer the question:

1)  What day of the week was your Grandfather born (either one)? Tell us how you found out.

2) What has happened in recorded history on your Grandfather's birth date (day and month)? Tell us how you found out, and list five events.

3)  What famous people have been born on your Grandfather's birth date?  Tell us how you found out, and list five of them.

4)  Put your responses in your own blog post, in a comment on this blog post, or in a status or comment on Facebook.

We did a similar exercise on 11 Oct 2014 and I covered my maternal grandfather. This time I will use my paternal grandfather, William Cyril Hork, who was born 10 July 1899 in Hamilton, Ravalli County, Montana.[1]

1) July 10th was a Monday. I found out the day of the week by typing in “1899 Calendar” into Google and many images of calendars come up. I use this trick all of the time to figure out the date when an obituary only states “Tuesday.”

2) I tried to find an issue of his hometown paper for the day of his birth on Newspapers.com, but the Ravalli Republic was only issued once a week and the next issue was Friday, 14 July 1899. In that issue on the front page was an article about the Fourth at Santiago and Theodore Roosevelt was mentioned.

On page 3 of the issue, a notice that a nice daughter was born to Mr. and Mrs. J.A. Hork. Somehow my grandfather was mistaken as a girl?

The Helena Independent was published daily. Headlines included:

• “Campaigning in Mud and Water” about the Thirteenth infantry in the Philippines.
• “Six of One Family Are Killed By a Train” about the family of William Reinhard of Columbus, Ohio. They were out for a ride in their surrey when the Big Four train hit them at the crossing.
• “Thousands Hungry” about suffering from the Brazos floods in Texas.
• “Want the Country” about the British who invaded the Boer Republic.

Checking websites that feature events in different years, I did not find anything on onthisday.com or Wikipedia for 10 July 1899.  However when ignoring the year, several interesting events happened on July 10, according to onthisday.com for July 10:

• In 1778, Louis XVI of France declared war on the Kingdom of Great Britain, which helped aid in the American Revolution.
• In 1940, the Battle of Britain began
• In  1991, Boris Yeltsin was sworn in as the first elected President of the Russian Federation

 3) Famous people born on July 10 were (also found on onthisday.com):

• John Calvin, 1509
• Camille Pissarro, 1830
• James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1834
• Adolphus Busch, 1839
• Nikola Tesla, 1856
• Arthur Ashe, 1943
• In 1899, John Gilbert, who was an American actor, screenwriter and director; and Heiri Suter, a Swiss cyclist.

[1] State of Montana, Birth Certificate, William Cyril Hork, No. 1266, birth 1899, filed 1941.

Copyright © 2019 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.