I haven’t done a Sunday Obituary post in quite a while, so I thought I would do one this week with my grandfather’s obituary. Actually, I’m doing it with two obituaries for him. My grandfather, Earl Link, was born in Wyandot County, Ohio, but was living in Ft. Wayne, Indiana when he died. My grandmother had saved the obituaries from both locations after grandpa passed, and it was interesting to see the difference in the information contained in each.
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| Obituary for Earl Link (Ft. Wayne News Sentinel, 5 May 1967, Ft. Wayne, Indiana) |
The first of the two obituaries is from Ft. Wayne, where Mom and her parents were living when Grandpa died. The obituary is much more focused on Grandpa Link’s career and his descendants than it is his earlier life. Noticeably, the obituary mentions nothing of his parents, his birth or even his marriage. It simply gives the details of his career and his immediate family. One of the most significant pieces of information that I gained from this one is that he was a member of a railroad union! (I’m still working on getting access to those records.)
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| Obituary for Earl Link (Paper unknown, 05 May 1967, Wyandot County, Ohio) |
The other obituary that I have for Granpa, comes from his “hometown” newspaper in Wyandot County. This obituary focuses much more on his family information than the one from Ft. Wayne. This article talks about Grandpa’s birth, his parents, his marriage to Grandma, as well as the information about his career and surviving family. This one even mentions Grandma’s parents! The one piece of information missing here that was in the other is about the union membership.
The difference in the two obituaries makes sense when you think about where each was from and who the readership would have been. For readers of the Ft. Wayne obituary, the Pennsylvania Railroad was a significant factor in the town, and many people were likely to have known Grandpa because of his years of service to the railroad. Whereas, in Wyandot County, the readers were much more likely to have known Grandpa and Grandma as children and from their early lives together. These people would also have known Grandpa and Granma’s parents.
Digging Up Roots 