It became clear to me that I never looked at every Habben lawsuit in Hancock County, Illinois.

Lewis Habben (styled as Hobbin in the Quincy Daily Herald article) was sued in May of 1925 in the Hancock County, Illinois, court for $10,000 in the death of popular Quincy, Illinois, citizen Joe C. Barlow.

The spelling of Hobbin in the article (and several others about the incident) made it clear to me why I had never located the item in the Quincy, Illinois, newspapers before. Why I did not locate the item in the defendants’ index to Hancock County Court records is not clear to me at this point.

My suspicion is that simply I was young and inexperienced when performing the research and since the plaintiff was a name I did not recognize, I decided the case was probably not genealogically relevant and not worth pursuing. That appears to have been a mistake.

I’m still trying to fix the location of where the incident took place. This article indicated that the car was headed “east on the hard road towards Carthage.” The hard road is a reference to what is now State Highway 136. Heading east towards Carthage would mean that they were west of Carthage probably putting the accident not too far from where the farms of Lewis Habben and his two brothers were located.

It will be awhile before I can get to the courthouse to look at the actual court records in this case. I also need to look for a reference to the accident in the local Carthage newspapers, which are not online. That will also take a little time.

In the meantime, we’ll have updates from the Quincy, Illinois, newspapers.

Stay tuned.