Death and Dying in Two Mid-Nineteenth Century Communities

 
Your assignment is to search the abstracts of a nineteenth-century newspaper to explore common causes of death in Augusta County, Virginia, or Franklin County, Pennsylvania, from the late 1850s to the early 1860s. Learning about causes of death will help give you an understanding of how life around 1860 was both similar to and different from life today.

Like today, newspapers covered national, state, and local politics, and they reported local events such as school activities, local elections, marriages, and deaths as well. Some of the articles that you find will be linked to full-text transcriptions of the articles, and you should read these whenever they are available.

Searching for the word "died" in the abstracts will result in a list of dates and short phrases containing the word "died." Click on the dates to go to the full abstract for that issue. Then use your browser's "find" function to search that issue for the word "died" to find the actual article. Keep using the find function until you are sure that there are no more articles about deaths in that issue. Then click the browser's "back" button to go back to the list of dates and start the process over again.

Click the link below to open a new browser window with the search page for the newspaper that you have been assigned to. The student instruction sheet will remain on your desktop; to read these instructions, just click anywhere on this window.

• Group One: Staunton Spectator (Augusta County, Virginia)
• Group Two: Republican Vindicator (Augusta County, Virginia)
• Group Three: Repository and Transcript (Franklin County, Pennsylvania)
• Group Four: Valley Spirit (Franklin County, Pennsylvania)

In the years box, select "all." In the string to search for box, type the word "died."

You will soon see a list of dates, followed by very short excerpts of article abstracts that contained the word "died." Click on the dates to go the actual newspaper abstracts. Then use your browser's "find" function to search for all occurences of the word "died." Keep searching until you are sure that there are no more articles to read about.

For each death notice that gave the AGE and/or the CAUSE of death, record the name of the deceased along with the age, cause of death, and any other interesting information on a piece of paper. For each note, write down the date of the newspaper.

If you have time, go back to the search page, and search for the words "killed," "accident," and "death."