Although I often worry that someday Buller Time will run out of material to explore or stories to share, I am comforted by the fact that historical resources relevant to our family are becoming accessible more quickly than I am able to discover, digest, and share them. The real danger is not that we will run out of material but that we will not have time to explore all the information that is available to us today.
Tonight’s post offers a good example of the fascinating resources waiting to be discovered. I have been aware for some time of Newspapers.com, which is a resource of Ancestry.com, but until several weeks ago I had never paid the money or taken the time to explore it. Newspapers.com, according to its promotional materials, “is an online database of historical newspapers from around the world.… It’s the largest online newspaper archive, with over 300 million pages from more than 11,100 newspapers” (see here).
Obviously, not all of the 11,000+ newspapers will be of interest to us, but we will, I am happy to report, find intriguing pieces of our family history tucked away in one or another of the thirty-four York County papers (308,218 pages) and the twenty-six Hamilton County papers (114,358 pages) included in the archive. This will, of course, provide us with a great deal of material for the months and years to come.
We kick off this informal series of posts, titled “In the News,” with a taste of one kind of information that we will find in papers of the first half of the twentieth century. Although the York County papers of this time frame did report on national and international news, they also had a decidedly local focus. Thus these papers typically included brief reports of the activities of the people in various communities within the primary subscription area. So, for example, one finds reports from McCool Junction, Bradshaw, Benedict, Arborville, Henderson, and even Lushton.
One of York County’s leading newspapers during this time was The York Republican, which published from 1875 through 1955. For the purposes of this post, we turn our attention first to the 12 August 1943 issue (page 7). I have uploaded a scan of the full page here, but I include the section of greatest interest below: the report of the activities of people living in and around Lushton at that time.
In case you missed it, the third paragraph of the right-hand column reads:
Rev. and Mrs. Carter and Eugene and Mathilda, Esther, Darlene and Carl Buller left Sunday afternoon for Iowa to visit relatives. The Buller children will visit their uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Pete Buller.
A related report appears in the 19 August 1943 issue (The York Republican was a weekly newspaper):
Reverend Carter was pastor of the United Brethren church in Lushton, which is where Chris and Malinda and family worshiped at that time. The Carters were obviously trustworthy, since Grandpa and Grandma allowed them to take four of their children to another state for nearly two weeks. My best guess is that the travelers left on Sunday, 1 August 1943, and returned on Friday, 13 August. If we subtract one day for the drive there and one day for the return drive, this would mean a visit of eleven days, which fits well enough with the newspaper report of “about ten days.” Later in the 19 August issue we read that Lushton schools were to open “next Monday,” which was presumably 23 August.
Who could have imagined that we would know exactly what these four Buller kids were doing in August 1943? The newspaper reports are admittedly minor, but they do give us a small glimpse of life in the Chris Buller family in the early 1940s. There are many more glimpses to come, some of which are minor and mundane, but some of which are both significant and surprising.
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