Using Newspapers Can Lead To Some Surprises/ They could lead to photos

Newspapers have proven to be my best resource the past month. A photo posted at FamilySearch for my great-uncle who was killed in WWII led me back to researching in newspapers. 

I've been searching for a photo of my great-uncle William Kappel for years. I was so happy to see his photo in the photo hints at Familysearch.org. The photo below obviously looks like it came from a newspaper. 

There was no source citation at FamilySearch. I did a little digging and found the same photo was attached to his Find A Grave page. There was only a link to a source for the photo at Find A Grave. The link took me to the  Field of Honor site for Margraten Netherlands American Cemetery. I had contributed to my great-uncle's page before. I was contacted by the cemetery for a photo of William. Unfortunately my family didn't have one. I'm very glad they found one. 

Thank goodness there was a source citation on William Kappel's page. I had not been to his page in quite a while and didn't know a photo was added. 

According to the citation the photo appeared in a newspaper called the Chicago South End Reporter, which was accessed through newspaperarchive.com. I tried to find that paper available online for free at Chronicling America and other not for profit sites, but I couldn't find it anywhere else. 

I then went to the paid subscription newspaperarchive.com site to find the photo. There was no date or page number in the citation so I searched on his name, William J Kappel, and filtered my search for just the newspaper in question. This didn't produce any links to the photo I was looking for. I thought maybe the name was just misspelled but even using variant spellings the correct entry never came up. 

What I finally decided to do was to search page by page through the Chicago Southend Reporter for the period just after his death. Doing this, bingo, he appeared on the front page of that paper a few weeks after his death. The photo was part of an obituary. 

I'm thrilled to finally have a photo of my war hero great-uncle William Kappel. The additional information about his work at Pullman and his wife and son are also nice to have. Most of my Chicago family members were employed by Pullman. 

The success I had with this newspaper research spurred me to do more. I noticed that another newspaper site, newspapers.com, had the Mattoon Journal Gazette available. My Mason/Owens ancestors lived in Mattoon from the mid 19th Century. 

I had used newspaperarchive.com before so I was familiar with the filters at that site. Generally their filters worked well for me in the past, but failed to bring up the correct article this time. I noticed that newspapers.com has fewer filters, which were harder to use I thought. Narrowing dates and finding specific newspapers was a little more difficult for me at newspapers.com. 

When searching for my Mason family in the Mattoon Journal Gazette I was able to get some hits just searching on the surname using the search feature. I was surprised at how few entries there were. Usually you find obituaries, and visiting reports when someone took a trip. I was just finding a few mentions regarding illnesses in the family. 

Learning from my previous experiences I decided to check the paper just after my great-great grandparents Peter Mason and Mary E. Owens-Mason died. I was able to find write ups about their deaths by using this strategy. 

I was thinking there had to be an easier way to find the family in the papers. I then decided to use quotation marks and search for each individual family member. That produced much better results. I think I've covered the Mattoon Journal Gazette pretty thoroughly now. 

I found several articles about the 1911 death of my great-great grandmother Mary E. Owens-Mason. Each mention included more names of people traveling to Mattoon to attend her funeral. Most of the Mason family, including Mary, relocated to Chicago around the turn of the 20th century. Mary died in Chicago in 1911 as detailed in the obituary below. 

There were a number of visiting notices in the paper for my Mason/Owens family. These notices were always very common. People love to see their names in the paper, which I'm sure increased subscriptions. I already knew Josie Durham was my great-grandmother Mary's sister. If I hadn't known, this could have turned out to be a key piece of information linking the two women. What is interesting is the address. I didn't have the name of the street where the family lived. Another newspaper notice gives the address of 4th street. It sounds like they lived on the corner of 4th street and Moultrie in Mattoon. 

I'm happy with where my research stands on the Mason/Masson family line, but would like more documentation for Mary Owens-Mason's family. I was so happy to see Mary's siblings listed as attending her funeral. This is further confirmation of her lineage. I will need to research some of the other names of people attending to find out if they are relatives? 

I found a few references to my great-grandfather Fred Mason. The first references refer to his battle with typhoid fever along with the rest of his family in 1885. 

 

Ada Mason was unlucky health wise because later she was also diagnosed with blood poisoning. 

Ada and her sister Ida were staunch Catholics according to the many articles I've found for them participating in church activities. Ada apparently was considering becoming a nun according to an article in the Mattoon Journal Gazette. Ada is often mentioned as a singer for Catholic masses and other entertainments. 

My great-grandfather Fred Mason wasn't that strictly religious apparently; he was arrested for theft in 1893. His son Claude followed in his footsteps which I will expand on in another blog post. 

I discovered something that surprised me. I didn't know my great-grandfather was married before he married my great-grandmother Helen Mullen. I am surprised it took me 20 years to find this out. I found a death notice for his first wife in the Mattoon Journal Gazette. Catherine or Kathleen Rafferty-Mason died on 22 October 1899. I was able to find a tree for this couple at Ancestry. 

This tree also listed two children born to this marriage. I had noticed these two children, named Vera and Claude, listed with their grandmother Mary on the 1900 and 1910 Census. In 1900 they were listed as her children, but in 1910 they were correctly identified as grandchildren. I had assumed they were illegitimate children of one of Mary's daughters. 

I was able to confirm Vera and Claude were the children of Fred Mason and his first wife using Catholic church records for the Springfield diocese in Illinois.

  

Claude's godparents were his aunt Ada and uncle Edward

The most important result of my search for confirmation of Fred's first marriage was discovering family photos attached to the tree of a descendant of Vera Mason, my grandmother's half sister. I had never seen a photo of my great-great grandparents Peter Mason and Mary E. Owens-Mason. That was a very exciting find! The photos also included some of their children which I had never seen before. Unfortunately I still don't have a photo of my great-grandfather Fred Mason. 

Using online newspapers requires some experimentation when it comes to the search features provided. Filters sometimes help narrow the search. Using quotation marks can help too. And sometimes you just have to search page by page. I don't assume anymore the search provided will pick up all references to a family. It is worth the time and effort because the information helps fill in the stories of our families.