Friday Find

 A Short Life Remembered: Oren Wesley Lighter

Have you ever discovered additional information about an ancestor simply because a newspaper you previously searched became available online?

Years ago, I spent hours scrolling through microfilm of Dodge City newspapers, looking for mentions of my Crawford family and their relatives. During that research, I discovered two newspaper articles about the birth and death of an infant in the Lighter family.

Now that these newspapers have been digitized and made available on Newspapers.com, I can search for a surname instead of scrolling through page after page of microfilm.

A recent search for the surname Lighter led me back to those original articles—and helped me discover a second death notice that I had missed!

A Birth Announcement

The January 25, 1900, issue of The Dodge City Globe included this brief announcement on page 5:

BORN—To Mr. and Mrs. A. H. Lighter, yesterday, at noon, a boy.

This announcement establishes that a son was born to Alvin H. and Lida A. (Crawford) Lighter on January 24, 1900, at noon.

That baby was Oren Wesley Lighter.

Unfortunately, his life would be tragically short.

A Death Notice in the Dodge City Globe

Just over a month later, the March 1, 1900, issue of The Dodge City Globe carried the following notice on page 5:

The infant child, age one month, of Mr. and Mrs. A. H. Lighter, died on Monday night. The child died of spasms. The burial took place yesterday. The sympathy of the community is extended to the bereaved parents.

Based on the publication date, Oren died on Monday, February 26, 1900, and was buried on Wednesday, February 28.

This notice also provides a reported cause of death: spasms.

A Second Death Notice

My recent digital search uncovered another notice, published in the March 2, 1900, issue of the Dodge City Reporter, page 5:

The infant child of Mr. and Mrs. A. H. Lighter died last Monday and was buried on Wednesday. It was only about a month old. The community deeply sympathizes with the bereaved parents.

While this article does not provide the cause of death, it confirms the dates suggested by the earlier notice.

Together, the three newspaper articles help document Oren's brief life.

Birth                 January 24, 1900

Death                February 26, 1900

Burial                February 28, 1900

Age at death      1 month, 2 days

How Does Oren Fit into My Family?

Oren Wesley Lighter was the son of Alvin H. Lighter and Lida A. Crawford.

Lida was a sister of my great-great-grandfather, Washington Marion Crawford. That makes Oren my first cousin three times removed.

Although Oren lived for only a little over a month, these newspaper notices preserve a small part of his story. They document his birth, death, and burial, while also revealing that his family's loss was acknowledged by their community.

From Microfilm to Digital Newspapers

When I originally researched the Dodge City newspapers, I had to scroll through reels of microfilm, reading page after page in hopes of finding a family name.

That process led me to two of these articles.

Today, thanks to digitization and searchable newspaper collections, I can enter a surname such as Lighter into Newspapers.com and locate articles much more quickly.

That doesn't mean digital searching is perfect. Optical character recognition (OCR) can misread names, particularly in older newspapers with faded print or damaged pages. Browsing the original pages is still valuable.

However, this experience demonstrates why it is worth returning to newspapers we have already searched.

A newspaper that once required hours of scrolling may now reveal additional family information with a simple surname search.

In this case, that search uncovered another account of the death of Oren Wesley Lighter, adding one more piece to the story of a child whose life lasted just 33 days.

Sometimes, a Friday Find isn't an entirely new discovery. Sometimes, it's finding something new in a source we thought we had already thoroughly searched.