Although your ancestors did not post status updates on Facebook or tweet about their adventures on Twitter, snippets of their social lives may nonetheless have been preserved for posterity. I thought about this the other day as I was reading the local newspaper. You see, I live in Randolph, Vermont. Our local newspaper, the Randolph Herald, has retained the charm of a local small town newspaper. In the paper, there are sections that talk about the events and people that were the “talk of the town” in each of the several towns in our area. Events that happened are listed along with events that are coming up. Sometimes, notes about people visiting town or leaving town to visit other places are included. There are also sections of the paper detailing marriages, engagements, births, deaths, and birthdays. Our local paper reminded me that in the past, the local paper was a source of social media information.
Sure enough, when I looked around online at old local newspapers, I saw some of the same types of things that I see in the Herald as well as some others. It seems hard to believe in this day and age that there was a time when the comings and goings of many people were actually newsworthy events that were published in the local paper. In many newspapers, the society or personal columns, as these social media updates were called, were written by women. The content is both informative and entertaining. The degree of scandal that was permitted varied from newspaper to newspaper but in general smaller towns tended to stick to the basics of who went where and when, and other wholesome things while newspapers in bigger cities were not afraid to publish scandalous stories about celebrities and other public figures. Today, I spent quite a bit of time looking around at interesting bits of society news from different moments in time. It was rather addictive – after all, old gossip is ten times more interesting than current gossip.
Photo by cohdra on morguefile.com.