Monday, August 1, 2016

Chasing Vanishing Collections


With so many documents of interest to genealogists getting digitized and added to online collections, there has never been a better time to research one's family history.

That, in itself, can inspire a false sense of security: now that those aging documents are safely digitized and accessible on the web, they will always be there for us to access, right?

Not necessarily. Take the instance of the very news clipping I wanted to share on today's post. Since my decision to revisit my research on my father's side of the familya branch I hadn't worked on much in the past yearI had wanted to include some photos and news clippings of the family, starting with my own dad.

There is a reason for this. That photo you may have seen on Saturday's post, one shared with me by an older cousin, is a version of my dad I'd never seen. A much skinnier version. Definitely one with more hair than I'd ever seen. Since my dad was nearly fifty by the time I was born, he lived an entire lifetime before I ever came on the scene. He was, obviously, a very different person during those early years than the man I remember as my dad.

By the time I was able to flex my research muscles and try and discover exactly who this earlier version of my dad might have been, there were all sorts of online resources at my fingertips. I had the tools and I knew how to use them, so I came up with lots of great bits of personal history. Of course, it helped that the man was a professional musician in a city the size of New York during the heyday of the big band era.

Most of those research results I captured and stored on my old computeryou know, that wood burning computer I'm always sniveling about.

When it came to pulling those gems back out of their virtual storage vault to share with you, rather than booting up the old geezer, I decided the easier route might be to just go back and access them again on the online sites where I thought I had found them in the first place.

Wrong. Try as I might, I couldn't locate the specific newspaper item I wanted to find. I tried the two subscription services I use, plus two free resources on my go-to listthe New York Public Library's gateway to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the U.S. Library of Congress' Chronicling America site. The clipping I wanted to find seemed as good as gone.

Of course, you know the sorry excuse I have is that I never originally identified the news source from which I had first extracted the clipping. And it had been so long since I had accessed one other site that I had simply forgotten about its existence. (If you hadn't known about this newspaper archiving site with the improbable title, "Old Fulton New York Postcards," you might not have thought about using it, either.)

Thankfully, there it was, still in existence and still full of all the good stuff embedded in this crazy interfaceyou have to go view the site to see what I meanbut now also sporting the dignifying boast that it is now a resource link included in the NYPL's website.

The item I was seeking was part of a series of ads run in the Long Island Star Journal in the fall of 1942, promoting a dinner theater which featured variety shows on ice. What was surprising to me, at the time I found them, was that my fatherwhom I already knew was a musicianactually had his own band. His name was featured prominently in the ads, running during the months of October through December of that year, and into the new year of 1943.

However, despite that happy ending of relocating that source, it did remind me of the changing nature of online collectionsand even the possibility that one of those websites we so take for granted now may not always be in existence online at some future point. Some websites feature collections which may have a temporary contractual arrangement with the hosting sitea contract which can expire, or not enjoy the same generous terms as were included in previous versions. If your special snippet of micro-history was included in one of those scenarios, what would become of your access to that document then?



Above: Ad for the Ice Revue at The Boulevard in Elmhurst, Long Island, in the borough of Queens in New York City; from the Long Island Star-Journal on October 3, 1942; courtesy Old Fulton New York Postcards.

8 comments:

  1. Googling val mccann billboard brings up more.

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    1. Yes, Iggy, he certainly had his fair share of mentions on Billboard.

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  2. Having a lot of New Yorker genealogy, I love Fulton History website for newspapers. Thanks for the link to the Brooklyn papers!

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    1. Agreed, Magda--and the Fulton History site includes newspapers far beyond New York. I've even found Canadian newspapers on that site!

      I haven't had time to do so lately, but I suspect examining that New York Public Library portal may lead to many more links for genealogical resources than just those two newspapers I've already mentioned.

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  3. Thanks for the reminder to always take a screen shot or download content to save--and carefully note sources!

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    1. I think we all need to keep reminding each other of that, Marian. I encountered another example of that very predicament lately--back when I was researching the David Spragg story--in which I found another version of a newspaper story with an update attached at the end.

      Having found it late at night, I simply captured the URL, made a note of it, and shut down for the night. When I returned to that specific address the next day, it was an earlier version of the report that came up--no addendum with the valuable report of the burial with specific names listed. Try as I might, I couldn't round up that later edition with the version of the report I wanted. Frustrating as it was--I mean, I had the specific page address but it did me no good--it served as reminder to capture the actual image rather than just make a note of the location.

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  4. Wow he had his own orchestra! I am impressed! :)

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    Replies
    1. Yeah. So was I. I never knew that before...and he's my own father!

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