I was delighted when I discovered my father’s birth. Yeah, obviously I wasn’t there. But it was a high point of my book research.
Here’s how it happened.
Digging deeply into Dad’s war service, I began to be curious too about his upbringing. I only knew the basics. I decided to try bringing his early history into the book as a way of showing who he was when he went into the Army. His parents homesteaded in North Dakota and he grew up in the era of the radio, and the Dust Bowl.
The Seattle Public Library has a genealogy desk on level 9 where librarians will boot up a computer terminal for you and guide your ancestry research through an extensive database collection and archived historical records. Alongside the computers are microfilm readers and, I learned, the library would order publications from other libraries through Interlibrary Loan for a nominal fee. The discovery of the Epping Bulletin, published from 1906 to 1912 in the village nearest our farm, was a revelation. I ordered the last three years of the weekly on microfilm through the North Dakota Historical Society. When the librarian called and told me it had arrived, I blocked off an afternoon to begin my review.
Microfilm is old tech. Publications were photographed and shrunk down onto film, and you attach that film reel onto an enlarger to view. As the film spools across, you can read each page’s image on the screen. On the library’s system, I could save a digital image of anything on the film.
Operating the device made me feel like a historian, or a behind-the-scenes researcher for the PBS show Finding Your Roots (recommended!). I grew to enjoy the slow clicking that built to a whiny whir as I sped the film from one reel to the other and gave out a clunk and a jerk when I’d stop to get my bearings.
Newspapers in those days were the main connection to the world. Radio was just being imagined by inventors like Tesla, Hertz and Marconi. So the Bulletin’s narrow, gray columns of type, broken up occasionally by a drawing, photo or advertisement, were portals to everything beyond the farm and town.
It was fascinating to glimpsing life so different from my own, but I gravitated especially toward a column called “Local Mention,” which noted the activities of the populace. Squinting into the dim viewer at the muddy type, I felt like a miner able to focus his headlamp only on a bit of a jagged vein emerging from a cave wall. But as I spun the dial to speed through the pages and stop at the column week after week, my hammer occasionally struck gold.
“Anders Persson and Mikkel Thornes of Tunbridge were in town on business today” read a line from November 1909. It was the first noted appearance of my grandfather in the area, visiting from his home, which was then a town in the middle of the state.
One year later, December 1910, he evidently had become a local going the other direction (and his name had been Americanized): “Michael Thornes is at Rugby on a deal for draft horses to be used for farm purposes next year.” He was about to begin farming his claim.
I scanned for our name, stopping at every capital T. After about a half-hour of work, my eyes would burn and I’d turn off the machine and stand to stretch. Whenever I found a rare mention (or an amusing news item, some of which I will share in a future edition of this column), I’d click save and store a PDF image of the page to my removable storage device.
I had started in 1909, but I really should have gone straight to 1912. I put that year’s reel into the reader and began to whir across the pages. Week after week of January, February, March, nothing notable. But crashing to a stop on the edition of April 4, I started down the column. One person traveled here, another person visited there. A wrestling match and a social dance were coming to town, and the minister “preached a splendid sermon to a large congregation in the school house” last Sunday. And then…
“Mr. and Mrs. Mikkel Thornes are rejoicing at the arrival of an infant son at their house on Saturday.”
By home birth, in their two-room homesteading cabin on a hill four miles north of Epping, on an early spring day that indeed turned out to be the date on the birth certificate, March 30, 1912, my father, to be named Erick Gabriel Thorness, “arrived.” And my grandparents Mikkel and Ragnhild rejoiced.
Seeing it again returns the tingling skin to the back of my neck. I sat for a long moment, alone at the row of computers and microfilm machines under the flat library fluorescence. I zoomed in and clicked save. I named the file Dads_Birth_Notice_4-4-12.
After carving this precious item out of the cave of history, I found myself commemorating the date. It was something I never before had thought to do. This March 30 will be the 111th anniversary of Dad’s birth.
I kept whirring and scrolling, seeking another vein. Two weeks later the paper devoted nearly an entire page to one article, which was topped by this banner headline: “Story of Titanic Disaster as Told by a Survivor.” The oceanliner had succumbed to an iceberg on Sunday, April 14, slipping beneath the waves as the band played “Nearer My God To Thee.” But it didn’t hit me nearly as hard as the news that had happened on that Saturday fifteen days earlier.
Links:
Seattle Public Library genealogy services: https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/learning/genealogy
North Dakota newspapers on microfilm: https://statemuseum.nd.gov/database/newspapers/index.php
Finding Your Roots: https://www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots/
The history of microfilm (it can last 500 years!): https://bmiimaging.com/blog/microfilm/history-of-microfilm/
That's pretty cool, Bill! Can you email me some pics of Epping if you have time? I like the pic of downtown Epping and the message to keep off the grass. 🤣