When there are quite a few small, weekly newspapers within “shouting distance” of your ancestral family it can be difficult to search all of them for references to your ancestor. We tend to focus on the newspapers that are the nearest to where the ancestor lived and perhaps the nearest daily paper that may have contained a reference as well.
This clipping refers to a fire that destroyed my great-grandparents’ home a few miles from Basco, Hancock County, Illinois, in 1923. I have known about the fire since I was a small child. I’ve seen other newspaper references to it in weekly papers within ten or so miles of their home and references to it in the two nearest daily newspapers. But this reference in the Camp Point Journal, published in Camp Point, Illinois, approximately twenty-seven miles from their home contained details not in other references. I only stumbled upon it while searching the newspaper for something else. I did not think to extend my search that far.
I should have.
Sometimes the extra details are not significant and other times they are. But you can’t make that determination about significance if you don’t find the entry in the first place.
And, in reference to the title of this post, the piano probably needed a good tuning afterwards. The reality is that mattered little. The important thing is that my five-year-old grandfather and his parents escaped unharmed.
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