Compiled by Lois Barris
For many years, Mrs Donna Yeager Johnson of Stow campaigned to have the one hundred and twenty years of the The Chautauqua News held at Minerva Library in Sherman NY onto microfilm. She worked with the library and with CCGS to prepare for microfilming and to apply for a grant to do the work of filming and purchase the necessary hardware (microfilm reader and cabinets) to make the film accessible to the public. As it turned out, the New York State Newspaper Project did the microfilming in 1999, building on Mrs Johnson\’s initiative, but without our help. In 2001, CCGS and the Town of Harmony together purchased a copy of this microfilm. Several members of CCGS volunteered to take portions of the microfilm and produce indexes to be used by our membership and other genealogical researchers……
Chautauqua News exists from its fortieth issue dated December 17, 1879. At this time Mr Charles E Sheldon took over as Editor from E W Hoag. There seem to be no papers surviving from the era of Editor Hoag, so we do not know the character of his paper. We can assure you that Mr Sheldon\’s paper was a staunch Republican voice in national and local politics, but also was strong in keeping his readers informed on local happenings, throwing in some advice on how good Republicans should live their lives……
When I volunteered to help with the project, Mrs Johnson gave me six reels of microfilm of the earliest days covering December 17, I 879 through August 1891. I started extracting for index only announcements of deaths, marriages, and births as reported in the paper. There was so much reporting of local social and business coming and going that I soon started keeping track of these-limiting those indexed to the ones giving at least three facts. This was usually name, address and relationship to the one being visited. We did not include all such items, so we encourage those who have an interest in persons living in that southwestern corner of Chautauqua County in the late nineteenth century to look up the microfilm or the original papers to get more news than may be extracted in this volume……
As the work progressed we realized that there were some local news items that needed special note and began saving these to word processing files. One of these files highlights the movement westward of many citizens of Chautauqua County during this time period. We skipped many of these, but saved enough to get the flavor of the importance of these travels in this time period. We saved almost all of the school records from the paper, and some of the notations about teachers at the various district schools in the area. We also saved several lists of citizens-like those who were over eighty years old, and those who voted for William Henry Harrison and were still alive to vote for his grandson. We saved many of the reports of family reunions……
When it came time to prepare to publish the index, we decided to included those extra files of news in an appendix to the alphabetic index. You will find this book arranged as follows:…..
Part One: Births, deaths, marriages, other items, arranged alphabetically a collateral
name index to the information section of this list……
Part Two: Appendix I – Family Reunions….
Appendix II – The Westward Movement of Chautauquans….
Appendix III – Some News Gems….
Appendix IV- School News Every Name Index to Part Two….
