52 Ancestors 2023 Week 6: Social Media

 I'm just going to slip this in:  I forgot to do week six due to a busy week.  Mind you, I'm not exactly sure what I was so busy doing, but it did seem to take up a lot of time.

Part of the problem was that I wasn't sure how to approach "social media."  I'm a pretty steady consumer of social media myself:  I use Facebook and I occasionally check Instagram and Pinterest, but this is not particularly interesting.  Of course, these options were not available until the last couple of decades, so my ancestors were limited to letter-writing and the newspapers.  My mother's family did do a lot of letter-writing and a few of those letters are in my hands, but maybe more surprising to me is that they turn up in the social columns and occasionally even news stories in the Olympia Washington newspaper.  Thanks to Newspapers.com, I learned that my grandmother was a PTA president, that she got interviewed about the town clock, what people wore to my parents' wedding and where they held the reception.  My paternal grandmother's obituary appears in October of 1942 and presents another mystery about her death (there were already a couple of conflicting family stories and the paper presents a third possibility). 

There is still a lot of work to be done on other family obituaries and more cheerful announcements.  I am grateful that people have always felt a need to let the world know their doings, whether on paper or digitally!