It’s Saturday so it’s time for a new Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver on Genea-Musings:

1) Have you found an unusual, chilling, amazing, or fascinating newspaper article about your ancestors? 

2)  If so, please share the article and what you learned about your ancestor(s) from the article.  Provide a source citation too!

My great grandfather, Charles Edwin Adams, died on 24 January 1922, quite suddenly in Calais, Washington, Maine.

His death notice (followed a couple of days later by a very flowery obituary) only touches on the unusual cause of Charles’s death.

In the family lore that came down to me, there was a strong warning to never trim one’s nose hairs! That always sounded a bit odd to me and my mother didn’t know the origin of this admonition.

However, my grandmother, Hazel (Coleman) Adams did know the backstory, which she shared with me when I asked.

Charles, or Charlie as he was called, decided about a day before his death to trim his nose hair. While doing so, he cut the skin around his nose and it quickly became infected.

A day later, he was dead.

What was the ‘blood poison’ that killed him? He died of a strep infection six years before the discovery of penicillin.

Charles had celebrated his 45th birthday just 13 days before he died.

These announcements were followed by a full obituary:

I inherited these articles from my grandfather’s cousin, Charles Chadwick, whose mother was Charles Adams’ younger sister. They were found among a stack of papers.

It is very likely that all were clipped from the Calais Advertiser newspaper. However, in spite of me continually begging the publisher to digitize this newspaper (I was told it was a project to be done on 2024), which began publishing in 1835, it has not happened so I can only assume their origins.

A source citation will have to wait!

Thank you, Randy and Lisa Gorrell, for another fun challenge.

The weekend has rolled around once more and Tucson is truly in the sog days of summer as it’s been well over 100 and the monsoon rains have eluded my neighborhood!

However, Marian B. Wood provided Randy Seaver with this week’s topic for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun on Genea-Musings:

1) Did extreme weather or a natural disaster ever affect you or your ancestor(s)? In what way(s)? How did you find this out?Describe one or more of the extreme weather experiences in your own life or in your ancestors lives.

I don’t know about any natural disasters that affected my ancestors’ lives, but with many living in northern New England and Canada plus quite a few mariners, I am sure that they were affected by extreme weather more than once in the shape of blizzards and hurricanes.

Personally, the only extreme weather that I remember was Hurricane Donna, which hit New Jersey on 12 September 1960. That was just six days into the new school year when I lived in Passaic, New Jersey.

Everyone was talking about how bad the hurricane would be, as it came up from the South. All the students walked home for lunch at my school and, although I remember being sent home with my classmates, I don’t remember if we were sent home early in the morning or just told school was cancelled for the afternoon session.

In any case, there was no school and I remember sitting on our front porch watching the rain come down. I remember thinking it wasn’t much of a storm compared to what the adults were all worried about and, as I looked up its history, my memory is correct. While Florida and North Carolina really got slammed, by the time Donna made it up to the middle Atlantic States, there wasn’t much punch left in it.

I’m pretty sure we were back at school the next morning!

Thanks to Marian and Randy for an interesting topic this week.

With the beginning of August and being at mid-summer, today’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge is very appropriate.

Lisa Gorrell suggested this excellent topic to Randy.

1) Did your family go on vacation? Describe one or more of your vacations with your birth family or with your spouse and children.

I was very lucky growing up because my grandparents had a camp on Little Sebago Lake in Maine where I spent a couple of weeks every summer from the time I was two until I was 16. My grandfather died in December of that year and my grandmother sold the cottage the following spring.

I’ve actually written about the wonderful times I spent on Little Sebago, including a post just last week.

As soon as I could walk, I was trained to pick blueberries. We took trips in the row boat and the motor boat. I learned how to water ski and to amuse myself in a cabin that had no potable water, the toilet was outside and the guest cabin where we slept had no heat, but provided lots of spooky noises at night.

I was also lucky enough to spend those weeks with my grandparents and my Aunt Barbara.

Those were the best vacations a kid could have had!