I checked to see which Indiana newspapers they have digitized and was pleasantly surprised to see The Indianapolis Star among them. In the past, I've nearly gotten seasick reading through microfilm reels, trying to find obituaries, only to discover that all I was going to find was a death notice from the funeral home in the classified ads. Sadly, no obituary exists with biographical information on Sidney DAVIE. I've had to rely on census records and city directories that don't always get the facts correct or consistent.
Since my research into my gg-grandfather Sidney DAVIE has been off-and-on successful, I searched for his name in Ancestry's Historical Newspapers. (No dizziness this time.) I couldn't believe what I found.......
 |
| The Indianapolis Star, September 30, 1915, page 20. |
The amazing thing about this story is that my grandmother told me a similar story, but her facts were a bit jumbled. She said that her grandfather had injured his arm in an elevator accident at the English Hotel in downtown Indianapolis. (I know that later in the 1920s, he was a custodian at the English Hotel.)
My grandmother was born in 1917, so she had to have heard about her grandfather's injury after the fact, as a young child, either from him directly, or by hearing her parents or other relatives mention it. It's understandable that what she told me, more that 80 years later, didn't entirely match the newspaper account. (Not that the newspaper gets everything correct...The spelling of his last name is wrong!)
The other weird coincidence about my find is that my grandmother was born two years to the day after this newspaper account or two years and one day after her grandfather's accident. If she were alive today, I think she'd get a kick out of the fact that this article was there for me to find.
