Labels

Shinn-Dig: My Adventures in Microfilm

The Inaugural Shinn-Dig

or

My Adventures in Microfilm

or

Better Living Through Reading 150-Year-Old Newspapers


Welcome to the very first Shinn-Dig! As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, "Shinn-Digs" are posts that aren't necessarily directly related to the "Lucy Letters" (as we call them), but are somehow tangentially related to the Shinn family or the era the letters were written (1874-1881).
 
As I also mentioned in my previous blog entry, many of the Lucy Letters were undated. For the past year, I have been reading through the letters, playing detective, looking for clues that would help me estimate when the undated letters were written.

This has involved getting familiar with the surprising number of online historical newspaper databases available, many of them free! For California specifically, I’ve found the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC) to be an invaluable resource in hunting down leads. If you have a San Francisco Public Library card (which any California resident can get!), you can access the San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive. Elephind is another free resource for historical newspapers from all around the world. And if you are willing to pay for a subscription, newspapers.com offers historical newspapers from all over the country, as well as some international papers. (And I’m sure there are more databases that I don’t know about! Leave a comment if you know of any!)

But even with all these newspapers at my fingertips, I found myself wanting... more.

~~~

Prior to getting involved with the Lucy Letters, I had never laid eyes on a microfilm reader, had never dreamed that I would ever use one. I had read about people using microfilm (probably in true crime stories or murder mysteries), but thought of it more as an outdated medium for viewing old, boring newspapers. Something like this picture of a microfilm reader from the 1980s:

Woman using microfilm reader (Wikimedia)

Well, microfilm readers have come a long way in the intervening decades. Here’s an example of the setup at my local library:


My first foray into microfilm was at UC Berkeley. They happened to have issues of a newspaper that was published in the next town over from where the Shinns lived. The Shinns lived in what was then called Vallejo Mills, now called Niles. The paper I was interested in, the Alameda County Independent (ACI), was published in Washington Corners, which was close to what is now known as Lake Elizabeth (then just an unnamed lagoon). UC Berkeley had issues of the ACI from 1875-1879, which overlapped nicely with the years the Lucy Letters were written (1874-1881).


I went to UC Berkeley's Doe Library without a clear goal in mind, mostly just curious if I would find mentions of the Shinn family in the ACI that would help me get a better sense of who they were. I found that and more—I'll be sharing some of the more interesting tidbits in future Shinn-Digs.

The ACI was a four-page, weekly periodical edited by W. W. Theobolds. It was published in what was then called Washington Corners, or just Washington, as this article explains:

Alameda County Independent, 6/5/1875

If you want to get a better idea of what I was working with, click here. The pages were huge and the print so tiny! They were able to fit a lot of information in just four pages.

~~~

Because of the way this particular microfilm reel was scanned or loaded, I didn’t get to the first issue until the getting through the whole reel. I was very pleased when I finally reached the first issue, because it had an explanation of the charming logo in the paper’s header.

Header for the Alameda County Independent newspaper

Detail of the Alameda County Independent header

Alameda County Independent, 6/5/1875

I thought it was very cool that the logo is based off a drawing done by a young woman (and that they even mentioned that!). And I love how it incorporated the most important features of this area of Alameda County, at that time: namely, transportation via steamer and railroad, Mission San Jose, Washington College, and of course the iconic silhouette of Mission Peak.

Mission Peak as seen from Lake Elizabeth (Wikimedia)

~~~

The other articles in this issue gave some insight in to the creation of the ACI. Apparently, the editors received some complaints about how long it took for them to get their first issue out. They assert that "we [the newspaper] do appear now, just when, and just as we expected—and intended to do."

Alameda County Independent, 6/5/1875

Knowing that newspapers at the time relied heavily on sensationalism and drama to sell papers—the "clickbait" of the 1800s—I did a bit of digging to see if I could find any critical mentions in the local papers about this delay. All the mentions I could find were overall positive, like this article from the June 8, 1875 Oakland Tribune:


However, within a month or two, a rivalry apparently developed between the ACI and the Oakland Transcript, as evidenced by this article in the ACI from July 17, 1875 (click here to bring up a bigger version, it's worth the read).

Oooh, burn!

I tried locating the original call-out article in the Oakland Transcript, but no luck—the San Francisco Chronicle Historical Archive is missing some issues from the Transcript around that time, unfortunately.

~~~

I was also pleased to see that the ACI had a joke column—but found myself perplexed at some of them. I guess not all humor translates across decades. (I'll probably write another Shinn-Dig about some of the rabbit holes I've gone down trying to understand some of the more obscure jokes.)

~~~

And finally, to bring this back around to the Shinns, Millie's older brother Charlie (Charles H. Shinn) contributed a poem for the first issue, but they didn't have space:

Alameda County Independent, 6/5/1875

True to their word, the editors printed his poem at the start of the next issue. Let's let Charlie's beautiful poem close out this post.

Alameda County Independent, 6/12/1875

~~~

References

A new paper. Oakland Tribune, June 8, 1875. California Digital Newspaper Collection. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=OT18750608.1.3&srpos=1&e=-------en--20--1-byDA-txt-txIN-%22alameda+county+independent%22-------1.

Alexandrov, Oleg. Mission Peak — over Lake Elizabeth in Fremont Central Park, Fremont, California. December 30, 2012. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mission_Peak_over_Lake_Elizabeth,_in_Fremont,_California.JPG.

Dear Millie.... Shinn-anigans (blog), July 29, 2022. https://shinn-house-history.blogspot.com/2022/07/dear-millie.html.

Haynes, M. B. “Alameda Co. 4.” Official and Historical Atlas Map of Alameda County, California. Oakland, CA: Thompson & West, 1878. David Rumsey Map Collection. 
https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~21362~620064:Alameda-Co--4-.

———. “Alameda Co. 5.” Official and Historical Atlas Map of Alameda County, California. Oakland, CA: Thompson & West, 1878. David Rumsey Map Collection. 
https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~21365~620067:Alameda-Co--5-.

Our heading. Alameda County Independent. June 5, 1875. UC Berkeley Library.

Our town. Alameda County Independent. June 5, 1875. UC Berkeley Library.

Postponed. Alameda County Independent. June 5, 1875. UC Berkeley Library.

Shinn, Charles H. “A Breath of Trees.” Alameda County Independent. June 5, 1875. UC Berkeley Library.

Unknown. Microfilm Reader for Articles and Daily Papers, Haifa University Library, the 1980s. 1980s. University of Haifa Younes & Soraya Nazarian Library. 
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Microfilm_reader_for_articles_and_daily_papers.jpg.

~~~
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment