Here at Medford Public Library, we have undertaken the great project of digitizing our microfilm, which includes newspapers that date back to the 1880s, and can be found on our Local History site. As a librarian here, curiosity got the better of me one day and I started looking up what happened at my own home in Medford. I wasn’t expecting to find much but after I typed in my address in quotes, I got a treasure trove of information. 

The oldest mention of the house is related to someone giving a reward for a lost gold bracelet. That happened in 1913.

The first page that pops up is the Medford Mercury from 1946. It reports on the funeral of James M. Fitzgerald, the late son of Margaret (Fitzgibbons) and John Fizgerald. It doesn’t talk much about Mr. Fitzgerald but it does mention that the funeral happened at the house and that there was a requiem high mass being held for him as well. We will find out more about Mr. Fitzgerald later in the post. 

Some of the results are not relevant to my house, like an ad in the Medford Transcript from 2009 for a restaurant in Stoneham that shares the same address.

It gives me another name of someone who lived in my house in August, 1920–Jane M. Knight, a “woman voter.” The article talks about how 600 women have registered before the primaries and that 300 men registered as well. The names that were listed out were just the names of the women who registered that Tuesday. In another article that talks about what the women had to do to register, I found out there was a literacy test in which women had to read five lines of the constitution and sign their name to prove that they could write. 

Some things are mundane, like in 1950 they fixed the sidewalk in front of my house and in 1979 there was a rubbish fire. In 1967 the wooden steps were removed and replaced with brick (this was in an article about building permits). In 1936 J.M. Fitzgerald won the Mystic A A grand prize. I have no idea what that prize was and I couldn’t find any more information with a Google search. 

But now that I have these people’s names and addresses I can do even more digging on Ancestry.com. I just start on the home page, put in the person’s first and last name and address and can find out even more, mostly from census records. For Mrs. Knight, I learned that she was born sometime around 1892, and was married and her recorded age in 1920 was 28. She was married to Horace Knight who worked as a cashier at a shoe store. His parents were born in England but both of her parents were born in Massachusetts. They were renting the home. They had two children: William and Kathryn.

Mr. Fitzgerald had a more interesting housing arrangement. In the 1940s he lived with his siblings Elizabeth and John. He had completed an 8th grade education. The house was owned by the family. When you look at his occupation it says allen on the website, but when you look at the actual record it is just a misspelling of oiler. In this job, he mainly oiled machinery; a job that does not exist anymore due to changes in technology.  Neither Elizabeth nor John worked at this time but they were pretty old, 72 and 69 respectively. Their parents were born in Ireland. In the 1930s John was an auditor at a department store.

I find this sort of deep dive fascinating. What will you discover when you do a search in our newly digitized newspaper collection?