A Day in the Life is a great SNGF topic with Randy Seaver:

1)  What were the newspaper headlines the day one of your grandparents or great-grandparents were born?

2)  Use any newspaper provider (Chronicling America (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov) is FREE) to find the headlines.

3)  Tell us who your subject was, when and where they were born, and tell us three or four headlines on the front page of the newspaper for that date.

For this challenge, I chose my maternal grandfather, Vernon Tarbox Adams, who was born on 3 May 1899 in Calais, Maine. I used Chronicling America and found the Portland Daily Press, published on the day of Grandfather’s birth.

It is quite ironic, given that my grandfather was a regional manager for Western Union, that one of the headline stories was about a lawsuit being instituted against Western Union!

The print is tiny in this newspaper, but these were the top stories:

The lawsuit against the Western Union would allege that a delay in delivering a telegram caused the murder of Mamie Small by Bradford Knights.

Next, the final details in the treaty to end the Spanish-American War were still being debated.

Finally – and I love this story – the Jernegan process, which apparently “made” gold in a plant in Lubec, Maine was found to be a fake!

Randy, thank you for bringing us fun topics every week. 🙂