Newspaper clipping puzzle solved

The puzzle
Back in January I found a clue to a mystery that although minor, had been puzzling me for some time. The mystery was the connection of a young man, mentioned in a newspaper death notice among my grandfather's papers, to my family. The young man had accidentally drowned overseas in the late 1970s.

Why did I think there was a connection? Well, most obviously because the clipping was kept with family papers. It also mentioned that the young man had a grandparent known as "Couper" - which is one of my family names.

My apologies for being a little coy about naming names here. I have decided not to name the people, as some family members close to the deceased man may still be alive.

The clue
The clue I stumbled across was the burial place of the young man. It appears his body was returned home to Australia for burial, as he was buried in the same plot as one of my great-granduncles. Also in the plot was the relatively recent burial of a woman whose first name was a variation on the mother's name from the death notice and surname matched the son's surname. Always check who else is in the plot!!

It looked very much as though my great-granduncle was the "Couper" mentioned, the woman was his daughter and the young man his grandson. It all looked very promising, but I wanted a bit more certainty before I entered anything into my database.

The search
The dates were too recent for birth and marriage information (births and marriages in Victoria are currently only available up to 1908 and 1942 respectively). I had an Ancestry.com subscription at the time so I checked out the Australian electoral rolls. I was hoping to find the mother living in her parent's house before marriage, then disappearing and neatly turning up in her husband's house with a new surname.

I didn't get quite what I had hoped for. I did find the couple, but when they first appeared on the electoral roll they already shared a surname and were living in her (supposed) parent's house. This was completely consistent with my theory. The only trouble was that all it really showed was that the couple seemed to have a close relationship with my great-granduncle.

I put the puzzle to the side for the time being.

The solution
A few days ago I finally found something that gave me the confidence to enter the relationships into my database. Like so much of the information I have found lately, it was thanks to the wonders of Trove! More years of newspapers have come on line since January. Enough years, that I found a marriage notice. It gave full names and parents for both partners and even had a photo of the happy couple!

If you haven't tried Trove, I encourage you to give it a shot, even if you're not Australian! So that there can be no excuses, here's the search box...





Let me know if you find anything!

Getting more from my newspaper archive searches

I've been experimenting with Google's News Archive Search, which we were recently reminded of by Randy Seaver. I had this post in mind before I read his article, I swear!

Although I'll be talking about the application of the Google News Archive Search to the National Library of Australia's (NLA's) newspaper archive site, I imagine my comments would be applicable many of the newspaper archives indexed by Google.

I noticed that the NLA newspaper archive is picked up by the Google search. I was interested to see how the site's own search, and the Google search, would compare. It's possible to make a comparison by adding an appropriate site restriction to the Google search term. eg, site:.nla.gov.au

I compared the search results I got from:

1. the NLA site's own search (http://newspapers.nla.gov.au/) , and
2. the Google news archive search (http://news.google.com/archivesearch), limited to the NLA archive.
   

The first search I tried was the surname STANNUS. It's the surname I usually use for experimenting with new databases. It's common enough that I get hits, but rare enough that the number of hits doesn't overwhelm me. Also I have some idea of how most of the people returned (outside of the USA) connect to my tree, which is nice.

Running the search on the NLA site, I got 259 hits. The Google News Archive Search, limited to site:.nla.gov.au, gave me 61 hits.

This was about what I expected. The NLA seems to have added a lot of newspapers lately and it looked as though the Google indexing had not yet picked up the additional newspapers or changes to the archives (the NLA OCR results are user editable). I could see that Google had picked up older edits to the NLA archives, because a few I had made several months ago came up in the Google search.

Then I noticed something interesting in the Google results. This:

You see how the OCR of newspaper text split the word STANNUS into STAN and NUS? Google picked it up as a hit, the NLA site didn't. (The Stannus referred to turns out to be my GG Uncle).

Further experimentation with a search on "Couper, Oakleigh, butcher" gave 151 results on the NLA site, the first of those being the story about the death of Leslie Couper Miller. There were more hits - 453 - on Google. That was a surprise. I could see that Google had also included hits for "Coupe" and "Coupar". It's a pity that there's no easy way (correct me if I'm wrong!) to find out what set of words Google searched on. I didn't see any Coopers or Cowpers in the Google results. When I tried a search on Couper|Coupar|Coupe I still got 453 results (the "|' works as OR in the search term). I don't think those other common name variations were included.

If I forced Google to look for exactly the search terms given (adding a + in front of each or putting quotation marks around each word works here) I found only 31 results. They did not include the article about young Leslie's death.

All this will change my NLA newspapers search strategy, if only slightly. I think that I will definately still use the NLA (or other archive site) first, thanks to the better coverage and finer options available. I will then follow up with a search via Google as it might pick up some name variations, or OCR errors, that I hadn't thought of.

If you find this interesting or (especially) if it helps you with your searches, please leave a comment!

The old newspaper article that made me cry

The first time I went horseriding with school, my mother warned me not to wrap the reins around my wrist or hand. The warning came with a story about her uncle, who had been killed as a child when a horse he was leading had bolted, dragging him behind.

Years later I found this uncle easily enough. He was my mother's great-uncle. His name was Leslie Miller COUPER, born 8 June 1887 and died 2 March 1897 aged just nine years old. He shares a grave in Oakleigh Pioneer Cemetery (Victoria, Australia) with his parents who died many years later. His headstone says that he was accidentally killed.

I have known what happened to Leslie (in general terms) for a long time. I always thought, theoretically, "how terrible" but it has never affected me that much. I did take my mother's advice about holding the reins though...

A few weeks ago I was playing with the National Library of Australia's Historic Australian Newspapers site. The site is very well done, and worth a look even if you don't have relatives in Australia. I found a newspaper article relating to the death of Leslie Miller COUPER, but it was still undergoing quality checks so I couldn't see it right away.

I was thrilled when I searched again and could read the short article. I wasn't prepared for how I would react to reading it though.

Perhaps it was the graphic description of the injuries. Perhaps it was the fact that the dying boy was taken back to his family home, prompted me to think of him as part of a loving family. Whatever the reason, suddenly I found myself in tears for someone who had died over 100 years ago.

Here's a link to the article.