Peter and All-
I am sending this attachment on a public post because apparently the one I
sent to Peter on his individual email didn't make it.
It is an instructive exercise that might be of interest to others on this
list as a line of research. I signed up for Newspapers.com through
Ancestry (I think it would be included in a full genealogical subscription
but I don't have time for getting back to another Hobby) for about $13 a
month. While the search engine IMHO is not ideal it does allow you to
search newspapers in a specific area and subject that can yield good results
for railroad research.
The routine I've been using is when I find an item (they are presented as
individual page pdf files) I email the link to that page to myself. Later,
I open up a Word document to contain the items and click on the link to open
the pdf page up. I then use a screen capture program to import the
newspaper name and date header (sometimes having to go to another page as
some papers only have the paper name on the front page) and page reference.
I then copy the article column heading and the relevant columns of article
text. The Word document is then given some descriptive name and filed in a
folder that (hopefully) will be a hint for latter retrieval and use.
It is amazing how much information the newspapers used to carry back in the
days when there actually was Journalism in "the media". Railroad news was
important and reporters generally got the facts from the source pretty
accurately, certainly more so than the people who claim to be journalists
today and write "the conductor steering the train....". The level of
writing was on a much higher plane with the expectation that even though
many people had little formal schooling past grade school people wanted to
understand everything that was going on in their world and "kept current
with the times" on a wide range of subjects presented in the daily
newspapers.
I have found articles on the introduction of new locomotives that get very
technical, description of new trains and schedules, and opening of new
lines, facilities and other plant. The financial pages carry a lot of
information about proposed mergers, changes in management and other things
of interest to the researcher. However, so far I have been disappointed in
the lack of coverage of in-city and suburban station openings, fires,
remodeling, and cessation of service for Aurora-Chicago stops. But I have
found some good stuff even so.
The carnage on the rails was horrific. Not a day went by that there wasn't
a train wreck and reports of people being killed by trains. Reading the
Chicago papers one can readily see why there was pressure for the railroads
coming into Chicago to elevate their tracks! Railroad workers were in a
dangerous profession and death and dismemberment was frequent.
While the item on Michael Gallagher does not go into great detail it is
interesting how widely the wire service version of the story was picked up
by papers in other states.
Charlie Vlk
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Michael Gallagher.docx
Description: MS-Word 2007 document
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