The Warsaw City Bulletin in 1858 admitted they were publishing a rumor. While it serves as a reminder that not everything in a newspaper is necessarily true, that’s not the point of this item.

This published “rumor” of a hotel fire in Plymouth, Illinois, serves to make a few reminders about newspaper research.

Some microfilm is difficult to read. Some newspapers were difficult to read in the first place, particularly if the opposite side of the page has bled through. If the microfilming of the pages was done when microfilming was in its infancy, the images may create additional challenges for the human eye to read–let alone a machine scanning those images. The legibility issue impacts automatically created indexes from digital copies of those microfilmed images.

This published rumor is actually one of the easier items to read from these papers during this time frame. I’ve made many of my discoveries in the earlier issues (especially pre-1900) of this newspaper by performing manual searches as the queries to the database came up empty handed. The human eye is the most sophisticated digital analysis tool there is, although it certainly is slower than mechanical methods.

There’s also the reminder here that newspaper items may involve your ancestor, but never mention his name. This article could just as easily have been written without including the name of the hotel proprietor. As it was only his last name was mentioned.

It may have been a rumor that the hotel in Plymouth, Illinois, burned in 1858.

It’s not a rumor that you still have to search some papers yourself, one page at a time or that your ancestor may be mentioned in a newspaper without his name ever appearing on the printed page.