Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Your Best Family History Discovery This Week

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

It's Saturday Night again -

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Our mission from Randy Seaver of Genea-musings, is to:

1)  What was your best family history or genealogy discovery (or discoveries) this past week (or month if you choose)?

2)  Post your responses on your own blog, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status post.  Be sure to comment and leave a link to your post on this post.

Here’s mine:

Well, the day is not over yet, and I have been spending time working on some genealogy. This week, I visited the FamilySearch Library in Oakland where I volunteer. Since there were no researchers needing help, I showed Jacqueline, who is just starting to volunteer there, the premium websites available on the FamilySearch library computers when opening the browser. I discovered that two newspaper websites were available for searching: Newspapers.com and NewspaperArchive.com. I was very happy to see that NewspaperArchive had returned. I had a nice list of items I wanted to get from that site.

These items were from Jeffersonville, Indiana newspapers National Democrat and Evening News. I quickly found the items I was looking for. Even though there were two newspapers in Jeffersonville, it seems the National Democrat printed exact copies of the articles that had appeared in the Evening News.  I should take a look to see if they were owned by the same person.

Two of the articles were about people who had died elsewhere but had previously lived in Jeffersonville. The articles about them had some different information than the obituaries in the cities where they died. These were more news items than obituaries.

There was one interesting article that had nothing to do with obituaries. It seems that a baby was left on the doorstep of Thomas and Mary Davey’s home in Jeffersonville. Although the article didn’t advance my knowledge of the family except to know that their daughter, Susan Wellman, who lived in Cincinnati, was there that day, it is a human-interest story. Both Thomas and Mary were too old to take care of a baby and the town official came to take the baby to be cared for.

“A Baby: Left at the Door of Mrs. Thomas Davy,” Jeffersonville Daily Evening News, 13 Dec 1883, p. 1, imaged, NewspaperArchive (https://www.newspaperarchive.com : viewed 19 Jan 2022).

    While Mr. Thomas Davy and family, were sitting quietly in their home on Wall, above Seventh street, they heard a baby crying. Presently one of them had occasion to go outside and found a tiny infant lying on the porch.
    The poor little mortal, abandoned by its raven mother, was only about twenty-four hours old, and was clad in nothing but a thin little slip. It is a boy baby. Mrs. Wellman, daughter of the venerable Mr. Davy, picked it up and took it into the house. Dr. Graham and Trustee E. V. Stealey were sent for, the one to render what medical aid might be needed and the other to take charge of the infant as the proper township officer. Mr. and Mrs. Davy are about seventy years old, and Mrs. Davy thinks she has no cause to be jealous of her husband.
    Quite a crowd collected to see the little stranger, and the young men were hugely interested in him. The infant was temporarily taken care of by Mrs. Wm Taylor jr until Trustee Stealey can find a suitable place for it. The little fellow is said to be a good-looking baby, with fair black eyes. Suspicion attaches to a certain young woman.

The other item I discovered was another Wollenweber had come to America from Kusel. My husband’s ancestor, Ludwig Wilhelm “Louis” Wollenweber’s older brother, Carl Wilhelm, had a son, Louis Carl Wollenweber, who came when he was a young man and settled in the Denver, Colorado area. I have no idea if the two men ever met in the U.S. So, I have a new line to follow.

So, I would say I had a good genealogy research week.

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