Before FB there was "Local Items"
One of my favorite things to read in old newspapers is the “Local Items”. Over the years, the feature name changes from “Local Mentions” to other various titles. There is everything listed in this section of the newspaper. Who is sick, visits, vacations, fishing trips, new houses, who passed away, who got married, what various clubs in town were doing, and even when the Barracks were being painted in 1906.
The information in this section is not only fascinating, but it is valuable historic information of contagious diseases to community and social customs.
I have learned so much from the “Local Items” including Hugh “Chappie” Roberts(26) had the first “War Baby” (Gilbert Roberts-54) in Rock Springs and his wife, Susan Fay”Lempi” Jacobson(27) traveled with the new baby to meet Hugh while he was stationed in Washington at Camp Lewis before Hugh went overseas to France.
The following are some other fun finds
from the local newspapers before there was FB.
“Just after the end of World
War I, a bizarre disease known as the sleepy sickness, or lethargic
encephalitis, devastated millions of people across the world and left doctors
puzzled for decades afterward...
Some of the finest scientific minds of the past 100 years have tried to provide the answers to what exactly caused the horrifying disease, or how to treat it, but, to date, nothing has been definitively proven and the sleepy virus remains one of the biggest medical mysteries of history.”
Source:
(Blazeski, Goran, “The forgotten ‘sleepy sickness’ epidemic. . .” The
Vintage News, online at https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/02/03/sleepy-sickness/. accessed 3 June 2021.)
You may browse through and read newspapers from Wyoming, including Rock Springs and Kemmerer, through 1920 at the Wyoming Newspaper Project. The "search" on this site works well and I have been able to locate some fun finds for our family and for the communities where they resided.
Wyoming Newspaper Project at Wyoming Digital Newspaper Collection.
(updated the link, sorry it did not work when I first posted the article)
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