This weekend is a fun-filled weekend full of activities that make our suburb of Seattle feel like a small town: Derby Days. This yearly event includes a traveling carnival, a kids parade where every participant still gets $2 from the local bank, a grand parade which includes floats, bands, princesses, and pirates (hey, it’s Seattle!), lots of food, the longest running bike race in the Pacific Northwest, and wrapping up with fireworks at night. Whew!

So, it got me to wondering what it was like for my ancestors who lived in small towns in Kansas. Heart of the mid-west, surely there were similar celebrations. Well, sans pirates. So, I dug into NewspaperArchive.com and started looking at papers around July 4th (makes sense that would be a party, right?). Well, actually, I went into my online records to double-check some locations of ancestors, went over to Ancestry.com to double-check something else, ended up wondering why the heck I can’t find Hugh and Lucy McMullen in the 1870 census so I kept spreading that net farther out (aka: tweaking the search with using and not using a variety of information).

So, now that I’ve looked up at the clock and realized it’s 2:30am (yike!) and tomorrow will be a FULL, sun-filled day, what have I found?

  • Hugh & Lucy’s family in Kansas census records from 1875, 1885, 1895, 1905, 1915, 1925
  • John Gale & John Thornburgh’s families in 1870 Illinois census (I know, they’re not even in Kansas…)
  • That if you search on “locusts” or “grasshopper plague” in Kansas newspapers you get quite a few hits
  • Lucy’s obituary in the Hutchinson newspaper
  • Miscellaneous bits about folks visiting other folks

…and what I think is the coolest…

  • Marriage record for Hugh and Lucy from December 1869[1]. I already had the info it contained from other family history compilations, census info (estimate of year), and from Hugh’s pension papers, but it was still cool to see. Here is the image and extract (click to enlarge):

So, I didn’t find what I was looking for, but since it was a general interest objective, I’m not going to spend time fretting that I totally let myself go down some research roads I had no intention of venturing down tonight. However, being more disciplined in my research is something I do need to work on. On the plus side, this is the first time I tried to interpret some gnarly old handwriting and produce an extract and I have to say that I’m feeling pretty pleased about that.

What I didn’t find is an 1870 census record of Hugh and Lucy OR a recounting of a parade in the newspapers that I could compare with my upcoming festivities. Maybe they were too busy cleaning up from the locusts. But that’s a post for another day.

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[1] Ancestry.com. Missouri Marriage Records, 1805-2002 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2007. Original data: Missouri Marriage Records. Jefferson City, MO, USA: Missouri State Archives. Microfilm. [I know it’s not in proper format, but it’s 3:00am-ish now and better then nothing.]

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