Genealogy Jottings

I have mentioned before that I have found a great deal of late 19^th century and early 20^th century family information in local newspapers.

I spent this week researching the life of one of my great-grandmother Anna Petronellia Sherman’s half-brothers. He can only be described as a black sheep. The newspaper repeatedly carried stories of his exploits including excessive drinking, wife-beating, womanizing, on-the-job injuries, and a divorce.

This man must have caused a lot of heartache to his family. I can only imagine the damage he inflicted on the lives of his four children. All this hard living finally caught up to him when he died in 1933 at the age of fifty-one.

Anna’s own father was said to have drunk to excess as well—a family trait? Anna herself did not imbibe as far as I know. In fact, she married young and left the state, never to return. Perhaps she had had enough.

I still have the remaining half-siblings to learn about, and I wonder if they all had trouble coping with life the way their father did. Most of them lived in the same small town, so I will be combing those newspapers again to learn more.