I’ve read books or watched plenty of movies that involve time machines, yet always crave a new such adventure. The “Back to the Future” series with Michael J. Fox is perhaps my favorite. Following close behind is, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. This 1991 comedy helped send actor Keanu Reeves to stardom.
In 1895, H.G. Wells wrote the most famous time travel episode of all, “The Time Machine.” At only 133 pages long, it’s condensed and full of adventure, yet to fully comprehend things, a reader has to go slow.
Within my blog pieces and published newspaper articles, I mentioned several times, for almost 7 years now, that I’ve been using newspapers.com to travel back in history for research purposes. Lo and behold, in conjunction with this valuable asset, I have a time machine of my own and I’m sitting directly in front of it right now.
Called a computer, I no longer have to go to a library and search through microfiche cards or suffer eye strain watching flickering reels of fragile microfilm. For those folks having spent hours doing this without food or drink, they’ll know what I mean. Like many seniors, I’m slowly forgetting things from the past, yet old newspapers stop fading once they’re digitized.
Newspapers.com is a superb tool for writing articles about events from long ago, yet it’s also great for genealogical purposes. Having spent most of my life in Alaska, just recently, two Alaskan newspapers from that timeline were added to newspapers.com.
Already having access to archived papers from other places we lived, like Florida, California, Alabama, and Texas, I’m now able to reconnect with segments of my life from the forty-ninth state that were captured in print.
Traveling back to 1954, the year that I was born, a birth announcement from the “Pensacola News-Journal” in Pensacola Beach, Florida, was uncovered. From there, jump ahead 9 years to April 9, 1963, and my name is mentioned in the “Selma Times-Journal” as belonging to the recently started Cub Scout Pack 133 in Selma, Alabama.
April 9 is my birthday and I find it very interesting the article was published on that very Tuesday I was having cake and ice cream. Within that short composition, it’s mentioned that our group was going to the Cub and Boy Scout circus in Montgomery. I vaguely recall this, as only one month later, my family moved to Lubbock, Texas.
Very little is mentioned in Texas newspapers about me, other than belonging to the Boy Scouts there and winning an award and prize for reading the most books during the summer of 1964. My prize for this event was a non-fiction adventure manuscript called “Kon Tiki” by Thor Heyerdahl. Although the book is quite tattered after one of our dogs got hold of things, it now resides in a safe place.
Two Alaska newspapers, “The Anchorage Times” and “Anchorage Daily News” contain quite a bit of my history starting with high school graduation, wedding announcements, birth announcements of our children, their graduation and nuptial announcements, obituaries of family and friends, and a smorgasbord of “letters to the editor” written by me. Thankfully, a slew of speeding tickets during the earlier years were never published.
That’s not all of my Alaska history. In the classifieds sections, I came across an ad for a 1968 Dodge Charger that I purchased for $1200, including a 1968 Plymouth GTX for $600, and a 1971 Polaris TX795 Starfire snowmachine for $550. Entering our home phone numbers in a search for other such records, I was able to view items such as furniture that we sold through both newspapers. Old phonebooks provided me with the phone numbers.
During my research, I found archived articles on newspapers.com mentioning American Civil War veterans that were directly related to our family, including news regarding my long-departed great-grandparents, great-aunts, and great-uncles.
Specific events include a tragic fire in 1943 involving an uncle I never met, and horrible accidents that Mom and Dad were involved with. One of those was a car crash near Victorville, California, on July 9, 1957. On that day, my father was riding in a 1957 Corvette driven by a friend who swerved off a curve on Route 66 and flipped. Dad’s leg was severely damaged and he walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
I came across a bunch of wedding and birth announcements for family and friends. I’ve relived life through newspaper articles, regarding tornadoes, floods, and world atrocities such as the 1963 assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The cost for a subscription to newspapers.com is minimal, and best of all, it can be had for 6-month subscriptions. For writing purposes and for genealogical research, I couldn’t do without my time machine. Quite often, when bored, I fire things up and take a literary journey back to when life was simple.
Yes—living in the past can be a blast!
I like to write junk... 