For us long-suffering family history buffs, we take solace in the warm comfort that we can consistently rely on a few safe, user-friendly sources that placate our demonic addiction.  For me, one such source has been the wonderful, online service named appropriately as newspapers.com.

Ah yes, newspapers.com, that wonderful resource that not only offers a plethora of small market and larger market newspaper archives but seems to consistently add more and more for us desperate family historians always hungry for a new nugget of information.

An intrinsic benefit to newspapers.com is that any match contains – well – a newspaper story, often complete with background, details, and eye-witness reports that can contain information beyond what we can reasonably expect to glean from the other documents we rely on such as census reports, birth records or death records.

Yes, to be sure if you’ve ever been successful in matching a research target as the subject of a newspaper article, you’ve no doubt felt the surge of unfettered joy and pure adrenaline that comes with such a discovery. 

There are times – though – when our instant felicity is soon replaced by a type of confusion when the details offered don’t match the narrative we’ve constructed in our heads.  It can be a new type of frustration when we find two separate newspaper articles that seem to offer a conflicting account of a person’s life.

Such was the case in my pursuit for information concerning the strange, dubious life of my grandfather’s first cousin, William Edward Turley. 

Unless you have read my latest book, The Lost Fifty-Seven: A Genealogical Journey of Discovery, Deception, Secrets and Scandal, you will be unaware of the curious role William Edward Turley plays in the mysterious life of my grandfather.  (See “Origins of a Mystery,” or “Evolution of a Mystery” in earlier blog posts.)

William Edward Turley is a person of interest to me, simply because he seems to be the adult best acquainted with my grandfather during my grandfather’s early years in Canada as well as later in his life.  During my research, I learned that there was much more to this man than as a footnote in my grandfather’s timeline. 

Check back to read about the mysterious, conflicting, events in William Edward Turley’s life.