Welcome to the Blog of All Things Yesteryear

I have been doing my family genealogy for several years now.  With full credit to Newspapers.com as well as Ancestry.com, I have come to find out a lot about my own family.  As I looked through old newspaper articles I've come to understand that the newspaper of yesteryear was very different than the newspaper of today.  Of course, now with social media in play, information about people's lives is very much accessible if it is shared online.  The newspapers of yesteryear, say perhaps from the early 1900's and earlier, were utilized in a way that I had not realized until my genealogy searches began.

Of course the newspapers were meant to be a way for people to understand the comings and goings of people within their small town communities.  Newspapers had little tidbits about who was in town visiting a relative, or when someone returned from visiting someone out of town.  They even sometimes listed all of the people staying at the town's hotels and where they were from.  They also had articles of a political nature and talked a lot about local government activities, city councils, etc., which is the same as we find today. 

Newspapers had articles about legal cases and crimes, just as they do today.  Sometimes, however, the perspective of those articles were very different than those of today.  Today the newspapers report on such things as legal cases and occurrences with a certain air of objectivity, however the flavor of many articles from yesteryear seemed to have a more subjective quality to them.  Often, those articles had a very catchy title.  There was often much detail related to someone's actions.  In some of these cases, if I were the subject of some of these scandalous articles, I would have been mortified and would not know how to face the public again.

At this juncture I think I will proceed with posting and commenting on articles of a particular theme for each blog post.  It may evolve in a different way at some point, but that is my initial attempt in entertaining you, the reader, with the stories of yesteryear.  I do have to throw out a disclaimer that I do have an odd sense of humor sometimes, so what I may think is hilarious, you may simply think is tragic.  But be prepared for me to post some very odd stories nonetheless.  I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.