“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 713 (Saturday) – newspaper rabbit hole

Some of the byline archive.

It was another spent day in the house like a recluse, partly by accident. Someone in an ancestry group on Facebook posted that Newspapers-dot-com is having a free access weekend, which resulted in me tumbling down the newspaper lined rabbit hole. 

My Ancestry account has an add-on subscription to Newspapers-dot-com, but it isn’t the super-duper VIP all-access backstage pass and it doesn’t usually include all papers, particularly those I wrote work news releases and freelance articles for in Tennessee. Discovering there is temporary free access the papers I’m usually shut out of was all that was needed to blow up the day. i could finally get digital copies of the freelance articles for my writing samples file.

It started innocently with skimming stories and printing to PDFs to save them to the computer. There was great progress and satisfaction. Saving to the computer means if I need writing samples and/or discontinue the Ancestry account, I will still have the articles in my possession. Every time news articles were previously saved in Ancestry, they saved as the publication name and the date, with no easy way to tell what the story is about.

After an hour of file-saving labor, I checked one of the folders that stories were being saved to. There was a sinking feeling at the discovery the files default to “MS-DOS Application” files that can’t be opened on my computer.

There was some loud and colorful cussing. Then I took a deep breath and went back through all the articles to resave them as proper PDFs. The magic trick is using the “Save as PDF” command and not the “Print to PDF” command (which is the command used at work every day). There are several more clicks in this process, and it took about 1.5 hours to go back through the Newspaper site and “Save to PDF” all the files that had already been printed to PDF. 

Seafood supper.

The roll of progress continued until suddenly I realized it had been four solid hours of skimming and saving news articles and food was needed. A seafood delivery was arranged for supper. After I poured the supper wine, I couldn't remember if Winston had been fed or not. Some was put in his bowl in case I forgot, so he got (possibly) more food, meaning he either got half his usual food, or he got an extra 50% of his food. Then it was back into the trenches.

The biggest surprise of the project was actually reading a front-page story about my great-grandfather that appeared on the front page of Fitchburg Sentinel on July 22, 1943. It was titled, “Single Casualty During Blackout Here.” He was a watchman at a paper mill and fell during a blackout on his shift. The story noted he hit his skull but the next morning was in good condition with only scalp wounds.

When I quickly read the blackout story a year ago, I ignored the other stories on the page, and also assumed the blackout was a power failure like we have now. The first two pages of the paper are filled with stories about Sicilian Conquest, Allied Conquests, and a lengthy listing about local soldiers in the “Service Men’s News” column. Today, after reading the full article, I learned it was a citywide blackout as part of the war efforts, and was timed and monitored for compliance by civil defense and local police.

During the blackout, which lasted about 1.5 hours, civilians cleared the streets, traffic was stopped, and two separate flights of Army bombers flew in from the coast. The article noted that there were complaints about the length of the blackout, but “strict obedience to the rules was practiced.”

And now it’s back into the news archives, where I’ll probably spend all night reading old newspapers as I try to sort out the articles about my great-grandfather who has the same name as far too many other local men. Luckily, a lot of the new stories also provide the person’s address, which I have a list of from census records and city directories, because the name John Maki seems to be the Finnish equivalent of John Smith.