Monday, September 19, 2011

Family of Boys - Itawamba - 1909

Recently I came across the wonderful Library of Congress webpage, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.  This site has over 4,000,000 pages from several newspapers.... digitized! .... from 1836 to 1922.  To test out the efficiency of the search engine, I merely put "Itawamba" in the search field and was instantly rewarded with some pretty cool results.

An interesting find was the news of nine children being born to one Itawamba family in three years.  This story was reported in the August 10, 1909 issue of the Hopkinsville Kentuckian newspaper, copied below.

Nine Children 
Born to One Mississippi Family in Three Years

In the past three years the stork has made successive visits to the home of an Itawamba, Miss. family.   The first time two boys were left, the second time three, and a few days ago four boys were left, making nine boys for three visits.  All the children are living.

Who was this Itawamba family?  I had to keep looking, but it didn't take long to find out.  In the Paducah (Kentucky) Evening Sun, July 13, 1909, the same story was reported but gave the name of Frank Sallis as the proud father.  I couldn't find this family in the 1910 census in either Itawamba or Monroe (The Sallis-Silas family lived in the southeastern corner of Itawamba but also over the line into Monroe County).  Has anyone heard this story?

1 comment:

Kimberly said...

See if you can contact Ray Silas. He lives on Bull Mountain Rd just off the highway in Turon. If he doesnt know he can surely point you in the right direction.