Saturday, January 14, 2012

Finley, He Just Fell Over Dead

These ancestry entries are just something extra right now. I'll be back to posting my about other things soon.
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As I said in my last post, I was set to cancel my free 14-day free trial of Ancestry dot com.  I couldn't do it. I am so hooked on it. I suppose it is just like the people playing that silly-looking farm game on Facebook that, thankfully, I never tried or those people that play for hours on end those X-box games.I love research.


Finley is the brother of my great grandfather. I couldn't find anything much but a listing in the census when he was younger. But then I found a clue. When Finley's father died only 5 of the 7 offspring were still alive to attend the funeral. The obituary listed the 5 still alive that attended. That gave me at least a smaller window of years to  search for Finley as he was not listed as one that was still alive. By his birth date he had to have been under 30 years old when he died. I narrowed the newspaper search and then started scanning just the front-page headlines of the archived online newspapers. I figured if he died under 30 years old it would have been front page news in that little town. And there is was! Yeah!  A 1902 headline that read,
"A Sudden Summons"
"Finley McCuaig Drops Dead at the
Home of His Parents in Greenbush
Monday Night."

"A Sudden Summons and His Untimely 
Death a Shock to His Folks 
and Many Friends."

The detail they go into in these old newspapers! The family gave a minute-by-minute report of his last minutes. The whole town probably wanted to hear all the details. The article goes on to tell of his trip out west where he contracted typhoid  and recovered earlier and how his travel mates had died of typhoid. It was just packed with info. Finley was no longer just a name without any info with it on my family tree. Here is the article. I know this doesn't interest most people. But for people doing ancestry this may be the tidbit they are looking for.

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