Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

People come up to me with questions and information all the time. Generally I like this—I don’t mind answering questions, and I like when people share things I hadn’t previously discovered. I love the public, and it’s always fun to talk with people.

“Can you tell me about the history of a house?” Sure can! “My father helped build the local railroads!” Great! I want to hear all about it! “Where can I find an obituary from 1918?” Happy to help! Great question!

About ten percent of the time, though, I get uninformed weirdness. People have some strange misconceptions, many of which come from not really understanding what they’re trying to tell me. I know this is a problem our society has had, well, forever, and the internet hasn’t helped that any. A lot of the time locally, this sort of thing tends to focus on me, with people coming up to me to try and explain things that are flatly wrong. But, hey, at least it’s good material for a column.

The Underground Railroad is a big one. I get people all the time, pointing out buildings that they believe were on the Underground Railroad. For some reason, they always assume I am not familiar with the building they refer to, which was invariably built in 1935.

Look. The Civil War happened from 1861 to 1865, after which there wasn’t much point in the Underground Railroad anymore. In Lock Haven, there is exactly one building that can be proven to be on the Underground Railroad, and it’s not the one you’re pointing at. (I once had a woman tell me that her grandmother was an Underground Railroad conductor, which I found unlikely as her grandmother was born in 1893.)

“My house is older than you think, but there weren’t any deeds before 1906.” I actually had a guy say this to me. Where do people get this crap? Does this guy really think nobody owned property in the 1800s? Deeds in America are as old as, well, America. People have been buying and selling property forever, and there are records of this going back for centuries. Just in Clinton County alone, deeds go back to 1839, when the county was founded. If you want to trace a property further back, you can do it in Centre or Lycoming, and even Northumberland.

A while back, a woman said to me ,”I’m trying to find my great-grandmother, but they didn’t used to put maiden names on the marriage records.” My response, the first thing I blurted out, was, ”The hell they didn’t.” Two seconds’ thought should tell you that there’s something not right about this one. The entire point of a marriage record is to record who got married to whom. It would be objectively pointless to not put a last name down, especially in the days when everyone was named Anne, Mary, or Sarah. In addition, Pennsylvania marriage certificates list parents on them, so there’s no way you won’t find a maiden name someplace.

Then there’s the people who somehow miraculously have their facts straight, but assume they don’t. They phrase this in terms of “rumor.” “There’s this rumor that the Queen of Spain built a mansion here.” “I heard a rumor that a famous artist was born here.” These things are not rumor, they are documented fact, and not hard to verify. I’ve been writing about this stuff for fifteen years or more. A quick search will show you the truth of it. To me, this sounds an awful lot like, ”I heard a rumor that a guy named Abraham Lincoln was president.”

Look, I love talking with the public. Please feel free to come and share with me. But if you really want to impress me, make sure you’ve got all your facts straight beforehand.