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People are strange.
Dec. 31st, 2022 06:32 pm Last night I realized 'oh wait the 1950 census is probably available in useful format on the genealogy websites I use, I should look at that for a bit..." and maybe unearthed a family scandal. (oh dear.)
The genealogy website was not especially useful in sorting it out, since the locality where things happened didn't have public records for that time period available yet. But then I realized... given the family in question (some of Hubby's relatives counted as Rich and at least small-scale Famous), there would probably be information I was interested in in the society pages of the local newspaper, which I did have access to online.
I started glancing through search results for the family name. Not directly related to the thing I was looking up, I was delighted to find a wedding picture of Hubby's grandmother right there in the paper, and a breathless story from a few days before about how the wedding had to be arranged in a hurry because they had to work around the groom's Navy service in the early days of World War II - this was the only date the Navy would approve for a furlough so it was a lucky thing that her sisters were being allowed home from their schools for the weekend but the Navy was still calling dibs on the prospective Best Man's services, hopefully something can be worked out!!! A few other stories seemed.... almost trivial; "X will not be home from school for Thanksgiving but plans to spend the Christmas holiday with her family." "X and Y are going to camp, where X will be an archery instructor and Y will be a camper for the first time."
(I did find the deets on the thing I was looking for, which... yeah, if I haven't heard the story by now I'm going to stick with what's in the public records, go 'oh dear' at what I read between the lines, and leave it alone. But also I think nobody counted on the sum total of human knowledge being available at a click of a button 75 years later.)
But then I started getting weirded out about ... the existence of the society pages to begin with. The idea that one of the newspapers of record of a vaguely major city had a whole page to fill with the doings of the local Rich and at least small-scale Famous? Like... is it news that X and Y are going to camp, where X will be an archery instructor? How were these stories reported - were they submitted by the Rich and Famous themselves? Was there someone who determined what local people were Newsworthy enough for it to be reported when they went on vacation and occaisonally called them up to find out what they were up to? Is this different from the celebrity tabloids of today - were local rich people objects of celebrity in the pre-television era?
I mean, I don't entirely get celebrity tabloids either. And I guess at least in the society pages of yesteryear, you at least mostly had to read between the lines to find the scandals.
The genealogy website was not especially useful in sorting it out, since the locality where things happened didn't have public records for that time period available yet. But then I realized... given the family in question (some of Hubby's relatives counted as Rich and at least small-scale Famous), there would probably be information I was interested in in the society pages of the local newspaper, which I did have access to online.
I started glancing through search results for the family name. Not directly related to the thing I was looking up, I was delighted to find a wedding picture of Hubby's grandmother right there in the paper, and a breathless story from a few days before about how the wedding had to be arranged in a hurry because they had to work around the groom's Navy service in the early days of World War II - this was the only date the Navy would approve for a furlough so it was a lucky thing that her sisters were being allowed home from their schools for the weekend but the Navy was still calling dibs on the prospective Best Man's services, hopefully something can be worked out!!! A few other stories seemed.... almost trivial; "X will not be home from school for Thanksgiving but plans to spend the Christmas holiday with her family." "X and Y are going to camp, where X will be an archery instructor and Y will be a camper for the first time."
(I did find the deets on the thing I was looking for, which... yeah, if I haven't heard the story by now I'm going to stick with what's in the public records, go 'oh dear' at what I read between the lines, and leave it alone. But also I think nobody counted on the sum total of human knowledge being available at a click of a button 75 years later.)
But then I started getting weirded out about ... the existence of the society pages to begin with. The idea that one of the newspapers of record of a vaguely major city had a whole page to fill with the doings of the local Rich and at least small-scale Famous? Like... is it news that X and Y are going to camp, where X will be an archery instructor? How were these stories reported - were they submitted by the Rich and Famous themselves? Was there someone who determined what local people were Newsworthy enough for it to be reported when they went on vacation and occaisonally called them up to find out what they were up to? Is this different from the celebrity tabloids of today - were local rich people objects of celebrity in the pre-television era?
I mean, I don't entirely get celebrity tabloids either. And I guess at least in the society pages of yesteryear, you at least mostly had to read between the lines to find the scandals.
