{"id":1663,"date":"2012-09-13T15:18:19","date_gmt":"2012-09-13T15:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.genealogybank.com\/?p=1663"},"modified":"2012-09-13T15:18:19","modified_gmt":"2012-09-13T15:18:19","slug":"family-memories-finding-my-grandfathers-stories-in-the-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/family-memories-finding-my-grandfathers-stories-in-the-newspaper.html","title":{"rendered":"Family Memories: Finding My Grandfather\u2019s Stories in the Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was a kid my grandfather would drive us over to see the old family sites in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. I remember grandpa was quite the storyteller. Every corner had a story attached to it, including the story of Joseph Plummer (1774-1862) of Meredith.<\/p>\n

\"collage<\/a>
Collage of newspaper articles about New Hampshire hermit Joseph Plummer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Why was that story memorable? Because Plummer was a hermit.<\/p>\n

A hermit\u2026that was kind of spooky, mysterious\u2026but there we were\u2014parked near his grave. My grandfather showed us where Plummer\u2019s cabin stood. As we drove around the Lakes Region, my grandfather brought us to the old Baptist Church where some of our relatives were once baptized on Christmas Day\u2014after chopping a hole in the ice. Later, he showed us the place where another relative was buried in a glass coffin, a sealed vat of alcohol, in an attempt to prevent his body from decomposition by being buried in the ground.<\/p>\n

These were great stories I heard while growing up in New Hampshire. It didn\u2019t matter that we didn\u2019t have TV; we had our grandfather to keep us spellbound with his stories\u2014\u201cour\u201d stories. Today, remembering his storytelling provides some of my fondest memories of time spent with grandpa when I was young.<\/p>\n

Over the years I have found documentation in old newspapers that filled in my memory of the stories he told us when we were children.<\/p>\n

Bingo: here is another one of my grandpa\u2019s stories verified. I found information in an old newspaper article about the New Hampshire hermit Joseph Plummer that my grandfather told us about.<\/p>\n

Over the years the newspapers wrote a dozen articles about Joseph Plummer, giving many of the details of his life.<\/p>\n

He was interviewed in 1862 and asked his age: \u201che answered: \u2018I was born the 9th hour of the 13th day of October, in 1774.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"New<\/a>
Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah), 15 October 1862, page 123<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another news report gave an episode in Plummer\u2019s life that my grandfather didn\u2019t include in his telling of the hermit\u2019s story.<\/p>\n

It seems Plummer didn\u2019t quite know how to go about dating the Deacon\u2019s daughter. His brothers married two other of the Fox daughters\u2014but for Joseph it wasn\u2019t to be, despite his apparent determination: \u201cJoseph on one occasion made up his mind to sally forth from his retreat and woo the remaining daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for Joseph, as the old article relates, \u201cHe was somewhat original in his method and broke down in his project.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
Washington Reporter (Washington, Pennsylvania), 19 February 1873, page 7<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After failing in his attempt at romance, Plummer bought land and built his cabin far from the \u201ccrowds\u201d and cares of the world.<\/p>\n

\"Hermit's<\/a>
Broad Ax (Salt Lake City, Utah), 21 May 1898, page 2<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These old newspaper article clippings bring back memories of time spent with my grandfather and add depth to the stories he told us as children. They provide perfect material for family memory books and scrapbooking projects to share with family generations to come so that they remember grandpa and his stories. Family stories are a treasure\u2014even more so when we can document and expand on them in the deep newspaper archives of GenealogyBank.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was a kid my grandfather would drive us over to see the old family sites in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. I remember grandpa was quite the storyteller. Every corner had a story attached to it, including the story of Joseph Plummer (1774-1862) of Meredith. Why was that story memorable? Because Plummer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12713],"tags":[5,45,5288,5289,5301,1129,1658,2233,12,1758,2423,2421,465,2419,2420,5354,2422,412,5366,27,734,481,5460],"class_list":["post-1663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genealogy-research-tips","tag-books","tag-christmas","tag-christmas-day","tag-church","tag-daughter","tag-family","tag-family-history-2","tag-family-research","tag-genealogy","tag-grandfather","tag-grandfathers","tag-hermits","tag-historical-newspapers","tag-joseph-plummer","tag-lakes-region","tag-life","tag-meredith","tag-new-hampshire","tag-news","tag-newspapers","tag-nh","tag-tv","tag-young"],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1663\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}