Newspaper Miscellanea - continued

Last month I blogged about newspaper articles here. I told about a newspaper article handed off by my sister Unmitigated, that had been saved, we thought, by our grandfather.

Some investigation later, I discovered that indeed one of our grandparents had saved this article about a blast under the Detroit river. My regular readers might remember that my grandfather, John Percival, was an engineer for the city of Detroit and his particular specialty was tunnel construction. While he was not one of the people injured or killed in the blast, he was still probably in charge of that project.

I found it interesting that the person who may have caused the blast was a White county, Tennessee man, Pleas Tollison, and who worked for one of the subcontractors. Since that is the county immediately south of our adopted home, I was intrigued.

Ancestry searches yielded censuses for 1910-1930, a Tennessee marriage record and two articles in their newspaper collection relating to the blast. A further search on Find-a-Grave yielded more information on the White county man and a contact with the submitter of the information. He put me in contact with Mr. Tollison's great granddaughter, and last Friday I was able to hand off the original article that my grandfather had saved and my further research to her. Our contact inspired her to search out what information she could find, and in doing so located photographs of Pleas Tollison and other family members. I think the genealogy bug may have bitten her too.

Mission accomplished.

Copyright 2010, ACK for Gene Notes