Down the Rabbit Hole

I love old newspapers. I love reading the digitized versions online. I love searching the newspaper websites for articles concerning my ancestors (or whatever I get obsessed with researching.) On Saturday, I started by looking for my grandfather, William H. Montgomery, in the Emporia, Kansas newspapers. Some years previously I had searched for everything I could find on his sister, Ann, and her career as a nurse. She spent many years as an army nurse and I ended up creating a timeline for her. I wanted to do the same for my grandfather. I spent some time finding news bits that mentioned Will Montgomery—many of which were items about the social doings of the younger set (parties and dances and “smokers.”) I had no idea he was so popular! When I realized I had spent two or three hours doing that I decided to quit and do something else. But later in the day, the call of Newspapers.com drew me back to the Emporia news.

After a while I did some searching on his mother’s name, and finally on the name of John Graham to see if the Grahams who were friends of his family that I had heard about from my mother, were the same as the people who had the Graham Book and Art Store he worked in for a time. The short answer is yes—though there were more than one John Graham and there was a bit of sorting necessary. The one I wanted was John D. Graham. After I had gone WAY down that rabbit hole and confirmed most of what I thought I remembered I had been told, I reluctantly decided to pack it in and come back to it another day.

There were dishes still to wash, there was laundry to put in the dryer. Outside our yard still needed more rescue work. AND I still had my Get Pushed challenge from Northy to do. She challenged me to use one or more of these Q words: quaint, quit, and quarrel. I tried to think of a way to make this picture quaint. If our printer were functioning properly, perhaps I could have put it in a suitably old-fashioned frame and in a “quaint” setting. Sigh...ah well! You are getting only QUIT – as in “Ye Gods, I need to quit doing this!”

[Mary Siegle]

@northy Here is one of the Q words -- Quit. And now it is almost midnight (typical of me) so, having done this I think I will quit and go to bed.

[JackieR]

Fab narrative and montage

[katy]

Fascinating story and a terrific photo to accompany it.

[Kathy]

It's fun to go down the rabbit hole. And all those chores and tasks that "need" to be done are always there when you're finished. Good response to the get pushed challenge