This post will deal with the future, the present and the past. In that order.
If you are someone down the road of time from me, a relative or someone who is researching the families I write about, hello! One big reason I blog is to add my small contribution to genealogy, or family history as I prefer to call it. I hope you find some useful information here. The thought that a descendant may be reading is surreal right now as Izzie is 15 and Alex is 10, but if you are one, and wonder why you can’t find so much in the old social media platforms that people of my time use, the answer is simple: I’m not a fan. I used to post a lot of updates, then I got over it. Fake news, trolls, the wastelands of the comments section everywhere, Flat-Earthers and other science-denying types, people posting pictures of their meals, cat memes. Actually, I am OK with the latter. I hope by the time you read this, most of those problems have been resolved, but the kitties are still around.
So, if you are looking for me: besides this little corner, I have an even smaller soapbox on Twitter, that old platform that the rocket guy bought in 2022. I use that mostly as a news aggregator. Speaking of him, when did electric cars finally become affordable? Are those batteries still catching fire? Moving on, here are two little pieces of advice: First, in online interactions, never say anything that you would not say to someone face-to-face. Be kind and polite, always. Second, check your sources. I don’t know what the consequences will be of my contemporaries’ lack of critical thinking skills and basic source vetting, but I want to apologize to you for whatever messes we got the world into because of the spread of fake news and wack job theories. Those two issues are why I am (almost) off of social media.
Now that we talked present and future, let’s go to the past. My favorite way to research the social media of way back when is accessing the Brazilian National Library online. They have a great collection of digitized periodicals and, lucky for us, our ancestors were keen on writing to their local newspapers, which I hope still exist when you are reading this. I have a few examples of how their writing helps me flesh out our family history and go beyond the classic BMD of genealogy (birth, marriage, death). The same way we look up a new contact on social media, whether they are a new friend, a potential new employer or employee, we can look up our ancestors.
In the times when we did not have digital, before the radio and television, most small towns had a local print news outlet, or more. In Brazil, up until the first half of the 20th century, those would be affiliated with political parties. They offered a mix of local interest like police blotters, voter rolls, birth, wedding and funeral announcements, sympathy notes, public health advisories, party and church group meetings, boat and train schedules, arriving and departing visitors, hotel guest lists, undeliverable mail, local business ads, and of course editorials that allow us to see what issues were at the top in the political environment.
All of these things offer great subsidies to family history. There is a good bit of gossip, normally signed under a pseudonym, and the indispensable arts. We find poetry and fiction, typically published in installments. Students’ grades, and tax collector’s lists were also printed, because public shaming works (not). This is all ancestry jackpot. In my family, we had newspaper writers, and several that were the subjects of stories. When you put it all together, it’s the social media of the olden days. Also, there was typically the other newspaper, owned by the political opponents, which also adds to the research as you read the opposite side of certain stories. So, without more ado, here is a little sampling of what we have:
The social column giving interesting details about my great-grandparents Godofredo Schneider and Noêmia Serrano’s wedding. The bridal party gives us a good idea of whom they were closest to, some of them from out of town, that will provide leads of where to look next. I was able to get a great outline of Godofredo’s life from newspapers spanning decades. His academic performance in a preparatory school, college, passing the exam to become a lawyer, a short-lived first marriage with the premature loss of wife and child, the move back to the home state, his marriage to Noêmia, incursion in politics, becoming the mayor in my hometown during a period of turmoil, and many other facts up until his death in 1971. My father and late uncle appear as pallbearers in a very poignant last picture.
Another common function of social media is the rants. People will go on about all sorts of issues, with politics being typically the hottest topic, a solid engagement generator. So, how did you achieve this before social media and cell phones at hand to record everything? A public space? Perhaps a busy train station? That is exactly what my second-great-grandfather Anésio, Godofredo’s father-in-law, did. He went on a thunderous tirade against Brazil’s then-president Floriano Peixoto, nicknamed “Iron Marshal”, in the middle of a busy railway platform. Some bystanders who were Floriano’s supporters did not like it, and Anésio went viral more than a century before TikTok.
It is not all about cats. Babies are a hit, too. Here’s my grandmother, Maria Helena, probably past her nap time.
Influenced by Queen Victoria after Prince Albert’s death, mourning became an elaborate (and strangely fashionable) tradition, newspapers offered several art choices to embellish funeral announcements. I am absolutely fascinated by this trend, and I will come back to it at some point.
Take note of every person mentioned in those announcements. They’re family history gold.
My great-grandfather João Bastos published poetry, short stories and signed a column as an art critic for A Gazeta, a daily newspaper from Vitória – ES. My aunt Lígia’s name came from the poem Salamandra, which I find beautiful:
There are many other pieces I would like to add, and I don’t want this to be a tl;dr post. I’m sure during this year of weekly blogging there will be plenty of opportunities to share more old-timey social media, but I would like to ask, did you ever have something really important go on your spam folder? One of my main research lines was saved by a letter that was not delivered to the recipient. After several tries, the postal service would publish a list of pieces of undeliverable mail. This is a story I’m saving for sometime in the future, but a note in tiny print, tucked away several pages deep into a Rio newspaper, solved the mystery of where my 4th great-grandfather was living in 1879, all thanks to his brother-in-law who wasn’t home to receive a letter.
See you next week! 😊