Uncle Otto’s Final Mission
23 July 1945. That is the date my Uncle Otto Anthony Mittelstadt and his plane, a model F4U-4 Corsair only months old, disappeared off the coast of Okinawa just as WWII was coming to...
Author: David
Violent Football, Witchcraft, and the King James Bible: Another Gunter Connection Tale
European football can be (and has been) a brutal sport. So much so that during its formative years in England it was banned several times strictly because of the violence among players or among...
Distant cousin and scientist extraordinaire, Edmund Gunter
Distant cousin Edmund Gunter (b. 1581, Hertfordshire; d. 10 December 1626, London) has been a thorn in my side for some time now. While searching early newspapers and other publications for any information related...
Postcard Story: Sympathy in Polo, Illinois – 1916
Unlike the last postcard, the Easter greeting that didn’t excite me all that much, this card melted me. Such a sincere and compassionate outpouring of grief seems in stark contrast to modern day sugary...
Postcard Story: A Happy Easter
My criteria for purchasing old postcards could be described loosely as follows. They should picture an interesting place or location. They should be personalized, that is, they should have a message written on them...
Confederate Monuments Symbolize White Supremacy And Hate
Confederate symbols across the country have come under closer scrutiny in recent years. Indeed, they are the source of contention in many of the recent skirmishes mentioned in the news the last few years....
Early 20th Century Autocamping
The rise of the automobile in the very early part of the 20th century created a unique cultural movement that lasted for some 25 odd years. In 1910 there were approximately 460,000 automobiles in...
Postcard Story: In Which A Civil War Veteran Becomes A Citizen
My interest in this postcard was initially the painterly depiction of the Laguna Pueblo on the front. One of my great-uncles was the parish priest of the mission church there, 1930-1931, and on my...
How My Dad Missed Out On Meeting President Harry S. Truman
The deeper I dive into newspaper archives the more interesting are the stories I find. I go looking for stories explicitly related to family members and most of the time I end up finding...
1924 Road Tripping – Park III: The End Of The Road
This is the third and final letter from Miss Edith Bordner, from the end of her travels in Vancouver, British Columbia at the end of summer 1924. [Letter 1] [Letter 2] She mentioned in...
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