{"id":3798,"date":"2013-06-10T15:20:59","date_gmt":"2013-06-10T15:20:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.genealogybank.com\/?p=3798"},"modified":"2022-12-19T15:14:34","modified_gmt":"2022-12-19T20:14:34","slug":"finding-the-historical-articles-that-tell-my-ancestors-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/finding-the-historical-articles-that-tell-my-ancestors-story.html","title":{"rendered":"Finding the Historical Articles That Tell My Ancestor’s Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/em><\/strong>: In this article, Scott Phillips writes about finding old newspapers articles about a foreign-study program called \u201cWorld Campus Afloat\u201d that he once participated in\u2014the same program, it turns out, that a family member had attended years earlier. Scott is a genealogical historian and owner of Onward To Our Past\u00ae genealogy services.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

As a genealogical historian I often include what some people might call the \u201cback story\u201d on many of my ancestors. I, however, much prefer to call it the \u201cfront story.\u201d I take great enjoyment and pride in being able to add more to my family members\u2019 profiles on my family tree than just facts, figures, and dates. I think of each person\u2019s profile as a quilt. As a result, I need to find and attach as many of the unique squares\u2014the stories\u2014that represent their lives. I believe a terrific place to find such ancestor stories is in the historical newspapers<\/a> of the time.<\/p>\n

So it was that I found myself using GenealogyBank.com<\/a> while I was working on stitching up the \u201cquilt\u201d for one of our family members. I had made the discovery that they, too, had attended \u201cSemester at Sea<\/a>,\u201d the same foreign-study program that I had, although they had done it many years before I attended. Not being familiar with this program\u2019s roots, I decided to take a look for what was originally named the \u201cUniversity of the Seven Seas.\u201d Not expecting much, I was amazed to find that my search provided me with over 240 results!<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
Photo: the author as a youth (left) on board ship, participating in the World Campus Afloat program<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first article I read was a terrific find from the Springfield Union<\/em><\/a>. It featured an article that covered more than half a page of newsprint and told a detailed story about the very first voyage ever undertaken by the University of the Seven Seas program, and featured the first Academic Dean and a local student as well.<\/p>\n

\"SC<\/a>
Springfield Union (Springfield, Massachusetts), 23 February 1964, page 51<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The next article I read was published in the Boston Herald<\/em><\/a>. Again I found that the wonderful focus on detail provided by good newspaper reporting paid dividends: the news article listed dates of sailing, duration of the voyages, and ports of call. It also gave a bit of history, talked about the partners in the program at that time, and gave some personal insights by students.<\/p>\n

\"New<\/a>
Boston Herald (Boston, Massachusetts), 19 April 1964, page 264<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My next discovery led me to the fact that the program officially changed names from the \u201cUniversity of the Seven Seas\u201d to \u201cWorld Campus Afloat.\u201d Thanks to another capable newspaperwoman or man, this fact was nicely showcased in an old article published in the Trenton Evening Times<\/em><\/a> and provided me with yet more detailed information.<\/p>\n

\"Floating<\/a>
Trenton Evening Times (Trenton, New Jersey), 10 December 1967, page 53<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From a report in the U.S. Congressional Serial Set<\/em> from the \u201cHistorical Documents<\/a>\u201d portion of the GenealogyBank.com<\/a> database, I learned that a member of the program\u2019s faculty testified on United States policy toward Asia in front of a subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee in 1966. It was interesting to read the biography of this individual, Dr. C. Y. Pan, and then to follow along and read his actual testimony.<\/p>\n

\"United<\/a>
U.S. Congressional Serial Set: Vol. No.12725-3; Report: H.Doc. 488; 19 May 1966<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At this point I had lost all track of time and must have read more than 50 historical articles and scanned many more, but another one caught my eye and I had to keep going. It was published in the Greensboro Daily News<\/em><\/a>, and when I opened the article\u2014there was an old classmate of mine looking back at me from the newspaper photograph<\/a> showing up on my computer screen!<\/p>\n

\"New<\/a>
Greensboro Daily News (Greensboro, North Carolina), 26 December 1972, page 51<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I was about to conclude my searching for the evening when I found one more article of interest. Sadly, it was an obituary for the actor Jeff Corey. Jeff had been our Actor-in-Residence, drama professor, and a wonderfully friendly, open, and approachable member of our shipboard faculty. This was certainly a bittersweet find.<\/p>\n

\"Jeff<\/a>
USA Today (Arlington, Virginia), 3 January 2003<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So not only did I find enough material to more fully tell the story about my family member as I had set out to do, but I also found out a great deal more about an educational organization we both attended. In doing so, I rekindled old memories of my own. What a tremendous side benefit to my family tree research!<\/p>\n

Do you have anything like this in common with your ancestors? If so, please share with us in the comments. We love to hear your family stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scott Phillips writes about finding old newspapers articles about a foreign-study program called \u201cWorld Campus Afloat\u201d that he once participated in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"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":[12557],"tags":[4184,649,4180,4183,4179,4178,4182,4181,3314,4177,4176,4174],"class_list":["post-3798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genealogy-stories","tag-actors-in-residence","tag-asia","tag-c-y-pan","tag-corey","tag-foreign-affairs-committee","tag-foreign-study-programs","tag-jeff-corey","tag-pan","tag-phillips","tag-semester-at-sea","tag-university-of-the-seven-seas","tag-world-campus-afloat"],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3798","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3798"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88441,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3798\/revisions\/88441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}