Halloween has come and gone — my favorite holiday by far! Yesterday I sat at the PA Room’s desk, dressed in full pirate regalia and eager to scare any kids who wandered too far from the confines of the Children’s Library. (Actually, I had candy for them. But they still seemed to be afraid of me.) It…
“According to the Pittsburg Sunday papers a trolley car was blown off the track at Oliphant. Outside of the fact that the incident is not true the story is all right.” — The Morning Herald, 18 Jan 1909.
This could also be filed under: When in Doubt, Read the Instructions. While I don’t use them all that much, I’ve always found the World War II Draft Registration Cards (freely accessible on FamilySearch or through a subscription on Ancestry) to be an interesting collection. They come from the “Old Man’s Draft” — that is, the…
Photo of an unknown pair from the recently donated Clyde L. Queen collection. Queen was a minister in Point Marion. Credit: Uniontown Public Library.
It’s a little remarkable to me that, being a connoisseur of all things dark and spooky, I’d never read about Frank Monaghan until I began working here. Yes, I’d heard the man’s name mentioned in passing — typically in connection with courthouse tours. But my real introduction to his case only came after I began exploring our Rare…
Next month marks the 109th anniversary of the Rand Powder Mill Explosion, a series of blasts at a Fayette County black powder factory that killed 18 people, shattered windows in Uniontown, and shook buildings as far away as Greensburg. The Pennsylvania Room maintains photos of the September 9, 1905 disaster that were taken by E.W. Hague,…
“Three more bankers were sentenced to the penitentiary Saturday. The gentle practice of appropriating other people’s money is sometimes subject to slight discouragements.” — The Morning Herald, 18 Jan 1909.
For all the inquiries about family history I get from visitors to the PA Room, I also field plenty of unusual questions about local history. One patron wondered where his uncle might have bought a Studebaker in Uniontown in the 1950s. (The Detweiler dealership, perhaps?) Another was trying to track down the name of the last…
“The fellow who wrote that ‘a woman’s only weapon is her tongue’ was evidently a bachelor, with no expert knowledge on the subject of pokers, broomsticks, and hatpins.” — “A Married Man’s Musings.” Genius of Liberty, 5 Jan 1899: 2.
Ah, the most mundane of library tasks: “reading the shelves,” or going book by book and putting everything in order. A few weeks ago, after reading the general history and genealogy shelves in the room — yes, all of them — I decided that it was time to sort through our yearbooks. The collection was reorganized…