Week 6: Social Media

I found interesting clues about the day-to-day life of my grandpa Angus Cleon Scott with a subscription to Newspapers.com.  People today on Social Media like to post highlights of their lives with shots of their vacations, achievments, restaurant meals, and picture-perfect families.  But I found a different story in the small town newspaper social and local news columns in northern Indiana.  

                                            

A.C. married my dad's mother Eva Bird in 1920.  Twelve years later they separated.  I've never been able to find the divorce papers for A.C. and Eva but this detailed article appeared in The Bremen Enquirer newspaper on 4 Oct 1934.  It seems like a lot of personal information to be published but it provided vital information to me.  The older child who went with A.C. was only 14 at the time but he wasn't mentioned as being a minor child here.

Does this article give a hint of my 25-year-old grandpa's temperament?  I always saw Grandpa as a dog lover when I was growing up but this gives a different picture.  From The Bremen Enquirer on 28 Aug 1924:

Tracking a family between the Census periods can sometimes be hard, but thanks to the local newspapers I was able to make a time line of moves that Grandpa and his three wives made. This appeared in the South Bend Tribune on 23 Jul 1926:

Five months later on 23 Dec 1926 the Bremen Enquirer stated that:

In 1935 after Grandpa and his first wife Eva divorced he hired a housekeeper to take care of his sons while he worked in nearby Michigan.  After a couple of years of commuting Grandpa moved the family to Dowagiac, MI.  In 1937 former housekeeper Miss Hazel DeVoigne became the second Mrs. A.C. Scott for a short time before her death in 1940.  This from the Bremen Enquirer on 7 May 1936:

                                         

Next it was a move to southern Indiana as seen here in the South Bend Tribune dated 29 May 1943.  A year earlier Grandpa had married the grandma that I would know--Irene Shumaker.  

This article from The Bremen Inquirer on 2 Aug 1945 showed a sweet side of Grandma Irene Shumaker and a clue that the family was no longer living in Tell City:

The last clue I found was four years later on 16 Jun 1954 from an Angola, IN newspaper:

This move took Grandma and Grandpa to the farm that I knew as their home in Steuben County, IN.

Finding the small clues and mentions in these small town newspapers helped me to follow Grandpa and the moves that he and his wives and sons made.  With all of them gone now it was so interesting to me to be able to piece together the changes in their lives by reading these news snippets, the social media of A.C.'s time.