Do not waste your time counting sheep; if you’re having trouble settling in for your long winter’s nap, you might find newspaper titles as sedating as Seconal: the “Gazette,” the “Times,” the “Examiner,” the “Post,” the “Tribune,” the “Sun,” the “Star,” the “Journal,” the “News”… and then the hyphenated titles, formed by newspaper mergers: “News-Tribune,” “News-Gazette,” “Journal-Star,” “Sun-Times,” “Star-Tribune,”and on and on.
A handful of interesting exceptions do, however, cross my desk. I’m often puzzled by the “Sun-Star” and “Star-Sun” unions. Is it an unholy marriage of night with day, or a Rosicrucian signal: sun is star; star is sun; sun marries self, a terrible autogamy and its dread progeny? Imagine waking every morning, or returning home every evening, to that Yeatsian horror: “[W]hat rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”(Oh, and, Merry Christmas, if you celebrate!) Continue reading “HPNL Hot Blast + Our Annual Gift Guide”→
Change of plans: no more rabbit holes. Geneaology!
Stephen Cornett Pribble’s Obituary
Genealogy is more than just names and dates, jobs and relationships. I started in the late 1990s researching my dad’s side of the family. I live in the area that my ancestors lived in back in the 1870s. There are a lot of us (Pribbles) in the Vermilion and Champaign County area. How did I find this out? Censuses, talking to older relatives (I interviewed my great-aunt, Anna Kathryn Pribble McNeese, 98 at the time), cemetery listings and walks, and joining the Illiana Genealogical and Historical Society. I used the society’s resources which, at the time, were reference books and microfilm. I looked on sites such as Ancestry.com, which were free back then, but there was a gap between my known Pribbles and the Pribbles listed on the site. Where did we fit in to the line that came over from England as an indentured servant?
Using HPNL’s libguide entitled Geneaology Resources, I found a number of aids useful in tracking down ancestors. Ancestry.com is still available, but you must pay to access the information there now, but Family Search is free.
Through the USGenWeb Project, I accessed the ILGenWeb site and from there, the Vermilion County genealogy website. From this site, deaths, marriages, military information, newspapers, and obituaries can be accessed. I’m just looking in Vermilion county for my folk, but the ILGenWeb has a site for each county in Illinois, and the USGenWeb Project for each state. I have used this site in the past to verify deaths and marriages.
Back on the Geneaology Resources libguide page, I selected “V” under the “Illinois” sidebar on the Genealogy Resources page, and am taken to the “Where to Start” page for searching information in Vermilion county. This led me to a number of books that may contain useful information. As for my Vermilion county cousins, I was able to read about them from an entry in History of Vermilion County… (Beckwith). Yohos can still be found in the area I went to school with Henthorns in Catlin, a nearby village to Westville, Georgetown and Sidell. It is a small world. One of my West Virginia (migrated in the 1870s, settling in Ridgefarm) cousins can be read about here. Frank’s brother was named Wilbur. Go figure. Kinfolk, but definitely independent lines from a common ancestor. Continue reading “Flesh Out your Genealogical Searches with Small Town Newspapers”→
