Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Newspaper Headlines on Your Birth Date

I love it when Saturday rolls around because it’s time for SNGF with Randy Seaver on Genea-Musings.

This week’s topic:

1)  What was your own birth date?

2)  Find a newspaper from your hometown, or a nearby larger town or city, that was published on that date.  What was the major headline on page 1 of that issue of the newspaper?

I don’t have a subscription to any newspaper sites and the only one that includes Passaic, New Jersey papers is newspapers.com. New Jersey is way behind the times in terms of digitizing newspapers – I couldn’t even find one from another town.

A general online search reveals very few additional details:

It wouldn’t have been headline news, but apparently football player Lynn Swann shares my day, month and year of birth.

President Truman was pleading for help to continue to bail out Europe, still suffering from the effects of World War II.

Pope Pius VI was head of the Catholic Church.

Queen Elizabeth II ascended the throne a month before I was born.

Cry by Johnnie Ray and the Four Lads hit #1 on Billboard on 8 March 1952.

This was tough without access to the Passaic Herald News and it seems that little happened nationally or internationally the day I was born. One of the websites covering “What happened on this day” even said “Well, this is embarrassing – we can’t find anything!”

3 thoughts on “Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Newspaper Headlines on Your Birth Date”

  1. Oh, Linda, that’s hilarious that the website couldn’t find any news. Good try even without the newspaper access.

  2. But there are New Jersey newspapers online! I have used them to research my father’s family, which has been in that state for generations. I highly recommend you visit the Wikipedia page for “List of Online Newspaper Archives” and check the list of New Jersey newspapers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newspaper_archives#New_Jersey. Also, the entire list of newspapers on the Fulton History site (fultonhistory.com) is included on the site, and two Passaic newspapers are on the list.

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