| | So get this -
I got a letter from my grandmother the other day. She was going through some old letters and papers from my Grandfather, who passed away in July. She had told me earlier that he had lived in Ticonderoga for a while; he had a donut shop here in the '40s. Which is just cool on its own. Really, who doesn't like donuts? Anyway, she found his address...400 Lake George Avenue. My address is 178 Lake George Avenue. I mapquested it, and according to that, the two are actually in the same building. It has to be, because it's the last building on the street. There are lots of apartments and such, so the numbers are weird. I started looking into it all a bit more, and I found this archive of newspapers online going back to 1852. I know that he was here until 1949. Sadly I couldn't find his name anywhere. But I found the address and a few ads for a donut shop. No one can remember the name of the shop, but there was one at the same address! The name of the people running it in the articles has been Steen, starting in 1950. So I'm thinking they took over when my grandfather left. It was called 'The Donut Shop' by the way. Is that so hard to remember? The best I can figure, the shop was downstairs and he lived above it. Now there's a laundrymat there, which is very convenient for me. I found an article that said there was a fire, at the Steen's residence (400 Lake George Ave), in 1950. After reading that I wondered if that building was torn down and something else rebuilt, but built into the brick of this building it says 1908, so it has to be the same. Now I'm trying to find out as much as I possibly can about it all, and it has completely taken over my life for 2 days. I don't understand at all how something like this could even happen. I really wish I could talk with my grandfather about it...
On a more philosophical note - at one point I realized I was looking at newspapers, some from 150 years ago, on the internet. It almost felt wrong, somehow. Irreverent. Like these were artifacts that were too valuable to be out there in cyberspace. They should be more difficult to find, so when you do find them, you realize what you're looking at...the lives of other people, the things that were important enough for them to write down. Their births and deaths, community events, stories and pictures. I think there's a reason we bury time capsules. If you left them out in the open for everyone to see, part of their magic would be gone. The intrigue is found partly in the search, having to go back one generation at a time, talking with people who remember, putting pieces together that hadn't been assembled in years. When that is eliminated it's like you've jumped too quickly into the past, skipping too much, and it becomes difficult to find any context for the information you find. Moving from the 3 digit telephone numbers of the '40s to roadrunner sort of had that effect. There's a historical society here that has these actual newspapers, and a lot of other things. I think I'll be making my way there next weekend to pay my respects, so to speak.
Conversely, it was totally awesome to be able to find all of this information so quickly. I guess it's hard to get out of the 21st century American mindset.
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| | Posted 9/3/2006 12:15 AM - 39 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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