Newspaper.com

I recently started a subscription to this service in hopes of learning more about my mother's family. Sadly, we didn't get to know some of our aunts and uncles and their children as we were growing up. Oh, there was the annual trek from New Jersey to Ohio to visit the grandparents, but the older aunts and uncles had moved to other states long ago. I remember meeting uncle Dick once or was that just a picture on the wall of my grandmother's house. Uncle Jack had moved to San Antonio and remarried and not even my mother knew much about his life. So now I am curious about these people and what they were like and what kind of life they had.

So I started with uncle Dick, the oldest child. All my mother would say is that she was not close to him. He wasn't that much older, but for some reason they didn't have a close relationship.

I entered his name in the Newspaper website and I got some very interesting results. He and his wife Phyllis moved to Neosho, Missouri where they lived as early as 1957 and as late as 1963 before moving to St. Petersburg, Florida where they retired. In 1957 he won a fishing contest and he was president of the local United Fund. So he was a sportsman and a social volunteer. I also found out that he worked for Rocketdyne, the company that made the solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle.

So with just a few clicks I uncovered more about a man I never met. He is no longer just a mystery, but a man of some accomplishment.

But there is more to this story. His wife Phyllis was very involved in golfing and participated in local golf tournaments. They had a son Richard Jr. who lived in Illinois around the 1980's. His wife's name was Janice and according to her obituary they divorced. This information was found in an Allentown Pennsylvania newspaper.

All this and more from one casual inquiry. I think I will be spending many hours searching the newspapers for my relatives.