52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 6 - Social Media

 It's already Week 6 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge! This week the prompt is ‘Social Media’.

Many years ago I was helping to clean out our church library. I came across a stack of old newspapers from the small town where the church was located. The papers spanned the 1950s. One thing that struck me was how ‘chatty’ they were. Stories about who visited who, and what child suffered a dog bite or fell off the swings and needed stitches. There were stories about people traveling to St. Louis for the day, about 30 miles away. Now many people routinely make the trip daily for work or play. Definitely not newsworthy today!

This discovery of mine was before I got involved on Facebook. It didn’t take too long for me to realize those ‘social’ articles were the equivalent of a Facebook post today. So this week I am sharing a newspaper clipping. It tells of my great-uncle John Janco visiting my great-grandfather Paul Janco’s farm in Michigan.

Michigan Newspapers, 1817-2009, MyHeritage.com [online database], Michigan Newspapers, 1817-2009
MyHeritage.com [online database]

I created a simulated Facebook post to show how that news might be shared today. I guess sometimes we are more like our ancestors than we realize!