ROOTS & BRANCHES

I had never been to California for more than quick trips to conferences over the years.

So when the opportunity presented to spend some time there ahead of June’s international German conference in Sacramento, it was a no-brainer whirlwind that included San Francisco, Redwoods, Napa Valley and driving the Sonora Pass at almost 10,000 feet.

But the highlight turned out to be a “preserved in place” ghost town named Bodie close to the border with Nevada.

Bodie is east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Mono County. It became a boomtown in 1876 and into the 1880s as profitable gold mines attracted several thousand residents.

Then it slowly declined and was officially was established as Bodie State Historic Park in 1962 and receives about 200,000 visitors yearly.

One striking thing was how many of the buildings still had their original furniture; a lot of times, when people pulled out of a boomtown, they took only what they could easily pack along. There were kitchen tables, beds and sofas from a century ago still where they had last been used!

Boomtowns fascinate me from a genealogy standpoint because of the “snapshot” documentation available for many peoples’ lives may be missing or scanty, depending on how long an arc such a boomtown has.

I bought a book from the park’s bookstore by Michael H. Piatt titled Bodie: “The Mines Are Looking Well …” that is the seminal history of the town.

Piatt’s book is well done with a variety of sources, including interviews with some people who had been in Bodie since the early 1900s and witnessed much of its later history.

But a lot of the author’s sources were mined (please pardon the pun!) from the newspapers established in Bodie during its heyday, including ones with evocative names such as the Bodie Evening Miner and Gold Hill Daily News.

A few things are good takeaways from Bodie and Piatt’s book for those using newspapers in genealogy:

• The first is the ubiquity of newspapers in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Quite a few publications are mentioned—and just researching one or two will leave an incomplete picture.
• It’s obvious that a lot of newspaper accounts were based on the perennially optimistic information put out by the mining companies. New prosperity was always thought to be around the next corner! Boomtown newspapers did not have investigative reporters; take what you read with a grain of salt.
• Piatt also used business-oriented publications such as the Engineering and Mining Journal in getting more technical material. These types of publications can be helpful to understand the background history of ancestors’ occupations.

If only I had a boomtown ancestor to tie all this to! Unfortunately, mine were homebodies tied to Pennsylvania.