Pay Attention to Location

Don’t you just hate it when you put all kinds of energy into finding a person in one location only to find out that you were looking in the wrong place?

I took a break from my “TO DO” list and picked up an 1883 Knoxville, Tennessee newspaper; just wanted to relax. I didn’t expect to find anything dramatic but on page 2, column 6, a headline grabbed me;

“ANESTHETIC DEATH”

There were no pictures just words, lots of words.

Well, so much for relaxing. I got hooked as I read about Mrs. Samuel Scheibler and her trip to the dentist; an 1883 dentist. Needless to say I had to find a family tree for Mrs. Samuel Scheibler. I mean who wouldn’t want this item on their family tree?

I had her name, the date, and name of the newspaper; the item even gave her approximate age; so it was easy to just plug those facts into the Ancestry.com boxes. Right away I found a Samuel in city directories; lots of city directories but they were in Memphis, Tennessee not Knoxville.

I reread the item for more clues but still came up empty. So I went back to the fake tree that I had created; with the little information I had, and started fishing for hints. Again I got Memphis, Tennessee for hints on a Samuel Scheibler but nothing on a Mrs. Scheibler. I figured I would go ahead and do a screen print of the item even if it didn’t have a picture and even if the 1883 newspaper photocopy was a bit faded. So, I ”PrtScn” and copied and pasted and cut and more pasting and copying until I was cutting the last line of the write up.

Well, there at the end of this long write up in the ” The Sunday Chronicle of Knoxville, Tennessee” were these words “ …of a physician at hand. – Memphis Avalanche

The item in the Knoxville, Tennessee newspaper was a reprint of an item in another newspaper!

I had been looking in the wrong place!

What was even worse I had typed in Knoxville, Tennessee on all the boxes on my fake tree.

Ancestry.com had been trying to tell me that they lived in Memphis, but I was not paying attention.

I went back to the tree and changed Knoxville to Memphis and sure enough, up popped a hint for a family tree. I reviewed the tree and saw that indeed they had the Scheibler’s on it and the dates matched. I sent them my usual message and told them that on a fake tree they could find the screen print of a newspaper item.

From now on I will pay closer attention to the item and not assume that it comes from where the newspaper was published.

Oh, I guess you want to know what happened to Mrs. Samuel Scheibler.

Well, let me tell you. Like I was saying, she went to the dentist on the 18th of August of 1883 and …

What the heck you can read it in the newspaper.

Thank You.

To View the Original item,[the item is to the left of this link]
Select The Sunday Chronicle in box below: