Sept 15 - Productive Library Research In Wichita

Today we spent several very productive hours in the genealogy library room of the Wichita Library. Gary has learned to bring along his own personal novel to read while I browse and search the volumes of information in search of Stocker ancestors and he knows me well so he settled in for a long read today.

I zoned in first on trying to find obituaries on Bob and Lucy Stocker, Gary’s great great aunt and uncle who lived in the famous “porch house” (see previous blog posts). I was trying to find their two daughters and hoped that an obituary or death notice would list them and their married names. I could not locate anything on Bob, but did locate the 1991 obituary and also funeral home records for Lucy but they did not mention the daughters. Perhaps they did not outlive her, as she lived to be 100 years old. This ended up being at this point a “dead end” literally and my desire to “visit with” current descendents of this branch of the family will not be fulfilled at this time.

Next goal was to obtain some additional information on what was going on in Wichita in 1880 to 1910 when Gary’s great grandparents lived here. What had gotten their son (Gary’s grandfather) Orrin into the job of being a “lineman”?

I was browsing through books on Wichita history and “magically” turned the page to a power pole full of linemen (over 30 of them on one pole)…. a larger scale of the picture we have of 10 men up a power pole (one of which is Gary’s grandfather). The picture I found in the book was from a convention held right here in Wichita around the turn of the century for the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers). It is not difficult to imagine, Orrin getting excited by these climbing daredevils and in 1910 turning up (according to the census) in San Francisco working as an “Electrical Lineman”. I look forward to doing further research to look up the dates of that convention to better put together the possible/probable story.

This is the exciting part of genealogy and I am really enjoying it…and Gary is getting a lot of adventure novels read !