Joys of Researching

I've started a new book (Yay, back in the saddle again) and I'm getting deeper and deeper into the research aspect of the project. When I say deeper, I mean deep, deep into whatever is available to me. 

Actually, I didn't go down into some dark, damp, dungeonesque (if that isn't a word, you can imagine on your own what I mean) kind of room. I went upstairs to the second floor of the Caldwell County Heritage Museum, to the room I like to call Caldwell's Attic. There in the corner I found gold - at least a jackpot to me - bound copies of the local newspaper from the late 1800's through the entire last century and on into this new one. 

True, these are also digitally recorded and available at the North Carolina History Room of the Caldwell County Public Library. I have used that resource in other projects and will use it again I am certain.

But there's something about getting down and dirty in the actual physical version, and dirty I did get. My hands required a good lathering when I finished. I should have used gloves, more to protect the pages from my human remains than from the need to keep my hands free of print and dust or any other moldy entity. 

A friend of mine who volunteers at the museum selected the particular volumes I needed and brought them downstairs for me to the reading table, 1963 to begin with. November. I gasped when I realized the date I was searching was intertwined with the Kennedy assassination. While the nation was mourning a fallen president, the family of my person of interest was mourning her death. Double whammy. 

Then I delved into 1967 where I didn't have a specific date, just the year. I started at the beginning, January, and went page by page until I found what I was looking for. Therein lies the problem with my researching. I have no self discipline when it comes to taking a deep dive into the pages of history. This time traveling journey took me back into my early college years. I opened long shut compartments in my brain where I stored events for the sixties, and I relived them painfully since Viet Nam and racial strife made the headlines. I saw pictures of local people I've only come to know after they were long grown. I recognized my teen idols. I read about the men and women of the past who were mere names to me at the time I went about living my daily life. Looking back at their lives from the future days is eyeopening. I highly recommend it for a long, lazy afternoon.

I didn't have all day, not really. Fortunately I came upon what I was looking for in an article dated in early March. Okay, so I admit I had to keep going and at least round off the month since the volume ended there anyway. I would have to pull the next volume in the sequence from the shelves.

Bound copies of the Lenoir Newstopic from the 1800's on

Instead I went home, leaving the research for another day. My brain had taken all it could take for this trip down memory lane, but I'll be back.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen