Did the Newspaper get it Wrong?

While returning to his home in Centerville, Kans., after visiting relatives in this city, John Blain was struck by a locomotive. He received injuries which resulted in his death. Mr. Blain spent the last few weeks the guest of his sister, Mrs. G. W. McFeeters of South Dodge avenue, and left the latter part of last week for his home.

That was, in part, how the newspaper reported the tragedy that befell John Blain in 1908. "This city" referred to Wichita, Kansas, home of the McFeeters family, where The Wichita Beacon carried the report on Tuesday, June 23 of that year.

But was that the way it all really happened? If you have been following A Family Tapestry for any amount of time, you already know my unceasing doubt of journalism's reporting prowess. More than harboring an unforgiving stance on errors in print, though, I find that the discovery of one error in a report causes me to doubt the veracity of the rest of the article.

I'll show you what I mean. See that reference to John Blain's sister, Mrs. G. W. McFeeters? As I muddled through the genealogical process to determine just who this man was whose photo I had discovered in a local antique store, I set up a family tree to assist me in this pursuit.

One thing I learned in the process of building that tree was that while John Blain had many sisters, none of them had married anyone with the surname McFeeters. It turned out, however, that his wife had a sister who did.

John Blain had married Harriet Isabel Beeman, that nearly thirty year old woman with whom he tied the knot in the neighboring state of Missouri in the fall of 1897. While Harriet may have reported that she was living in Missouri at the time, she was part of a large family whose residence had ranged, over the years, from Indiana to Nebraska before their arrival in the Show-Me state. Even after that point, Harriet's parents, Green Yarnel and Martha Johnson Beeman, appeared in records in Wichita, Kansas, before her father's passing in 1902.

Harriet's next-oldest sister, Sarah Ellen Beeman, who like Harriet was born in Nebraska, eventually also settled down in Kansas. She was the one who married George W. McFeeters on October 20, 1885. (Interestingly, though both reported they were residents of Kansas, they traveled to Vernon County, Missouri, for their wedding, as Sarah's sister Harriet did for her own marriage over ten years later, making me wonder whether Vernon County served as a sort of "Gretna Green" city for the region, though I've found no mention of such a custom for the area.)

It was this Sarah Ellen and George McFeeters who were the ones John Blain had been visiting in Wichita, before returning home to Centerville by way of Paola, Kansas, on the day in which he was struck by the Missouri Pacific locomotive. While it may be a small detail for a reporter to confuse a sister for a sister-in-law, just that one mistake makes me wonder how many other details in the article might also have been inaccurate. When time comes to review the version reported in the court proceedings regarding the suit brought by John's widow, the different account rendered there only augments my doubts.