Sometimes, it’s what you don’t know that matters most, as I learned the hard way on a recent research trip to Urbana, Ohio.
I was there tracking an author named Gertrude Crownfield, who wrote nearly two dozen well-reviewed works of historical fiction for children in the 1920s and 1930s. Long before she began writing, Crownfield spent a decade teaching school in Urbana, and I wanted to see what I could find out about those years.
Unfortunately, the trip had been a bit of a bust from the get-go. The Polar Vortex descended, the temperature plunged to -12 degrees F, and it began to snow heavily. The local university closed and with it, the university archive I was there to visit.
The Champaign County Public Library was open, though, and I knew from an earlier trip to Urbana that the library’s local history room housed microfilm copies of newspapers dating to the 1800s. I hadn’t had time to go through them on that first trip, but clearly, I was going to have plenty of time on this one.
Steering my rental car gingerly through the snowy streets, I made it to the library shortly after 10 a.m. and plunked down at one of the digital microfilm readers. The reference librarian assigned me a logon and explained how to use the machine. If I found anything of interest, she said, there were two ways to save it: transfer it to a USB drive or print a hard copy. The first was free, but I hadn’t thought to bring a USB drive, so good old-fashioned printouts it would have to be, at a cost of 10 cents a page.
For the next few hours, I scrolled patiently through issue after issue of the Urbana Daily Citizen, skimming for the name “Crownfield.” It wasn’t as random as it sounds: Small-town newspapers in those days printed just about everything, including – often — the names of teachers. Figuring that if the Urbana paper did that, it was most likely to occur at the beginning or end of the school year, I concentrated my efforts on May and June, August and September, beginning with the year 1883, when I believed Crownfield to have arrived in town.
Three hours in, I hadn’t found anything directly related to her, but I did have a long list of pieces that I wanted to print sitting in my queue: articles about burglaries, runaway horses, a man who could whistle two tunes at the same time; all of which I knew would lend color to anything I might write.
Deciding I needed a break, I stood, stretched – and watched in horror as the screen of the microfilm reader contracted and went dark. A moment later, the logon screen appeared.
I frantically beckoned the librarian, who looked dismayed. After three hours, she explained, the system automatically logged out and erased everything in the queue; she hadn’t thought to mention it to me because it never occurred to her that I’d be there that long.
As I was saying, it’s sometimes what you don’t know that matters the most.
This story has a happy ending, though. No, I didn’t recoup any of the lost articles, but since I’d also taken some notes, I knew I could find them again if I wanted them. But 20 minutes before I had to leave for the hour-long drive back to Columbus, I threaded one last roll of microfilm into the machine, and there, in an article from June 5, 1889, was the information I was looking for: Gertrude Crownfield, hired by the Urbana school board to teach primary school for the 1889-1890 school year.
Taking no chances, I saved it to my queue and this time, I immediately hit “print.”