ROOTS & BRANCHES

As I’ve worked through the just-completed series reminiscing about my genealogy curriculum, I’ve been waiting patiently to publish a few of my frequent correspondent Rick Bender’s newspaper finds.

Following up on last week’s “Roots & Branches” column that admitted I omitted newspapers from that curriculum seems like a good time to do that.

Bender has been sharing finds with me all summer, mostly as a result of reading my book The Family Tree Historical Newspapers Guide and deciding to subscribe to Newspapers.com.

He had felt bad that his great-great-grandfather Levi Bender had gotten just a line or two in the Lebanon Daily News, the newspaper he had previously researched for the time period.

But then he found the version from the Lebanon Courier and Semi-Weekly Report on Newspapers.com. In this account, he was called an “affectionate husband, kind father, courteous neighbor, respected citizen, and esteemed Christian” and said to be “one of the leading painters and paper-hangers in the community.” The obituary totaled 15 lines.

Along with these treasured additional details, Bender also wrote later in the summer that he’s unearthing evidence of how much suffering and tragedy there was by his family members in the late 1800s and early 1900s – and wondering how much to include in his family history.

My advice? Simply to understand that the privacy of these deceased people is no longer an issue but that good taste is eternal, and make sure that he lets the newspapers do the talking and that any analysis of what’s in them is based on sold assertions and not an emotional response.  Newspapers weren’t always “the funny papers,” for sure.

Bender also validated one of my mantras – “build biographies one sentence at a time through small newspaper mentions” – with one of his tentative finds.

He found it curious that a John Bender of Wells County, Indiana, had the same birthday, one year apart from his several-greats-uncle Johannes Bender in Lebanon County.

These Wells County Benders lived in Bluffton and in Rockcreek Township, roughly 25 or 30 miles from Fort Wayne, where Rick Bender’s grandfather’s uncle Reuben Bender (originally of Lebanon County) established his cigar business in the late 1870s.

In looking for connections, he found a Bluffton Banner newspaper item that says Mrs. Reuben Bender, of Fort Wayne, was visiting Mrs. J.B. Miller.

“So far, I find only one woman who could be Mrs. Reuben Bender of Fort Wayne in 1904 — Uncle Reuben’s widow, Rose,” Bender recounted. “Similarly, only one woman who could be Mrs. J.B. Miller in the Bluffton area in 1904 – John B. Miller’s wife, where John was the son of Susan (Bender) Miller, the daughter of the aforementioned John Bender of Wells County.

Adding weight to the tentative connection is that Uncle Reuben died the first week of September 1894. That visit was during the 10th anniversary of Reuben’s death.

“I find this all fascinating,” Bender wrote.