One Hundred Years Ago

 

Much as some people might celebrate a friend's birthday—say, their fortieth, or some other mere decade's amount of life—by buying a reprint of the front page of that exact day's newspaper, I thought I'd do the same today for my mother. Today would have been her birthday, one hundred years ago, and I was curious to see what the world might have held for her family that day.

Since my mother was born in a tiny farm town called Oelwein, Iowa, I couldn't pull up any copies of the local paper from archival collections. Perhaps there wasn't any local newspaper. After all, at the time, Oelwein boasted not quite eight thousand residents, although ever since the arrival of the railroads there at the turn of the century, it had seen a growth spurt. To read the news of the day, I had to rely on the publication at Cedar Rapids, an hour's commute to the south.

There, The Evening Gazette focused mainly on leftover news from a recuperating Europe after the Great War had subsided. Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, inaugurated that day as President of the German Republic, made three separate appearances on the Gazette's front page, as did French General Charles Mangin, who died that very day. Lawsuits and murder trials rounded out the day's news, as well as an announcement of big plans to bring a replica of Cheyenne, Wyoming's Frontier Days to town. To round out the day's news, an ominous mention of a bank failure in nearby Mason City, juxtaposed with reports of the state's banking situation being "in fine condition," pointed to history yet to be made.

My grandparents' brief stay in Oelwein—a railroad center grown out of a corn field bought from the town's namesake farmer—was an odd juxtaposition of my grandfather's current employment and my grandmother's oddly out-of-place roots as a southern lady whose impetuous marriage to a tall, dark, and handsome eligible bachelor brought her where she never expected to be. The stories of those farm-based days when my mother was born I know well. After all, it was my mother who passed on the family stories from her own relatives; why not share stories of her own parents' lives? But the stories providing the context of her young life and what blend of news mixed to create her own social environment I hadn't before explored.

Sometimes, in addition to gaining the right details about birth dates and places and the names to which they belong, it is helpful to spend a moment surrounded in the news of the day. To see what has yet to come down the road for an ancestor—those newsworthy items which to us are "old news"—can open up new vistas to us and help gain an appreciation for what shaped those family members from past eras.

Above: Headlines from the front page of the May 12, 1925, Cedar Rapids newspaper, The Evening Gazette; image courtesy of newspapers.com.