Sunday, February 23, 2014

Sunday's Obituary/Russell C. Galloway

    For quite awhile I've been looking for the obituary of my great-grandfather Russell Carlton Galloway who was born in 1867 in Butler, Wayne County, New York.  I was sure there had to be one, the Galloway family had been in Wayne County for years and had even operated businesses there, but search after search came up empty.  Finally in desperation I did a wide search for the words, Galloway, Wolcott, (the closest large village) and the year on his tombstone --1919.

     Below is what I found:


     No wonder searches for Russell C. Galloway failed to produce an obituary.  Not only did they leave out an r at the end of his name, (though I did try spelling variations), but look at the mangled letters!  Websites use software called OCR, (optical character recognition), to scan and render searchable, all sorts of documents including newspapers.  But if the characters are unrecognizable the software can't do it's job.  Even the children's names are barely legible, but since they are my aunts and uncles and Grace is my grandmother, I know their names -- Merritt, George, Jessie, Grace and Vincent, but it would be difficult to figure out a couple of them from this image, and the software would undoubtedly miss most of them too.

     And what the heck is brain trouble??????????

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like a cerebral hemorrhage, maybe? Nice to have these newspaper announcements - my family did not go in for them much, unfortunately.

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    1. You're probably right, some sort of hemorrhage, a stroke or aneurysm?

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