Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: A Day in the Life

Randy Seaver has come up with another fun exercise for this week's installment of Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along; cue the Mission:  Impossible! music!):

(1) What were the newspaper headlines the day one of your grandparents or great-grandparents was born?

(2) Use any newspaper provider (Chronicling America [https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov] is FREE) to find the headlines.

(3) Tell us who your subject was, when and where the person was born, and three or four headlines on the front page of the newspaper for that date.

(4) Share your finds on your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or on your Facebook page.  Please provide a link to your work as a comment to this post.

Okay, here's mine.

My paternal grandfather, Bertram Lynn Sellers, Sr., was born April 6, 1903, in Mt. Holly, New Jersey.

I chose the Jersey City News because it was the only New Jersey newspaper published on April 6, 1903 that appeared in the Chronicling America collection.  Here is the front page:

The front page headlines were:

• HAD LONG PLANNED TO DIE
Suicide in the Hotel Washington Not the Result of Momentary Impulse

• WANTS HIS WIFE
Aged Armenian Gets a Habeus Corpus for the Custody of His Fourteen Year Old Spouse

• GAINED FIFTEEN POUNDS
Richard J. Clarke of Plymouth, Mass., Saved by Father John's Medicine
(actually an advertisement masquerading as an article)

And that's it for headlines!  They still went with "if it bleeds, it leads", as evidenced by the suicide.  But Jersey City had only two lead articles on the front page, as opposed to six in San Diego.  California must have been more exciting.