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| Tarbor' Press (Tarboro, N.C.), 1844_01-06 Source: http://library.digitalnc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/newstarboro/id/4276/rec/1 |
This
article, The Daily Southerner of
Tarboro to end publishing, recently printed in the News and Observer, was a painful article
to read. A version of this newspaper has been in print since 1824 making
it one of the few NC newspapers whose existence can be traced back almost 200
years. It served the community of
Tarboro (population about 11,000 in 2012) and much of Edgecombe County
Community
newspapers such as The Daily Southerner
(or the Tarboro Free Press or The Southerner as it was alternately
called through time) add so much richness to our research when we find articles
about our family in them. Such newspapers often had pages and pages
devoted to "social news" and similar scattered throughout every
edition. No bigger city newspapers could or do have the local flavor of a
newspaper like this one. As part of my work as a professional genealogist
in NC, I do a lot of research in the many NC newspapers looking for death
notices, marriage announcements, birth notices, who was in the hospital, who
was visiting from out of town, court cases notices and much, much more and
every time I am looking for something specific, I am always distracted by all
the notices that are such delightful-to-read personal tidbits about life in a
community – a visit from extended family, attending an event out of the area,
the death of a loved one living elsewhere, business travel and so much more.
This is not
the type of news that one finds in modern newspapers nor, over the years, in
the bigger city newspapers. I grew up in a small town, Newtown (CT), and The Newtown Bee is still published. I can still “see” the offices as I mentally
drive through town. The “Bee” came out
every Friday (if memory serves me) and you couldn’t wait to read it to find out
what had been happening in town that you might not have learned via the
grapevine. For bigger city news we read
the Danbury newspaper.
Some of the same purpose of distributing local news is now often served by Facebook or other social media sites and it’s not like each town has a Facebook page nor does it include the same types of news as a local newspaper. And, how many people print out and save a
Facebook page entry for their scrapbook? How much news across the breadth of a
community is reported via Facebook? Social
media is just not the same as a newspaper.
There is still something about the touch and feel of a newspaper ... (and,
yes, I love physical print books also!)
Sigh ...
let’s hope that we and future generations are great stewards of preserving
social media sites as I suspect that the Daily
Southerner will not be the last small town newspaper to disappear ... with
each one that stops publication, what once was the heartbeat of a community is
silenced.
The North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill via
its Facebook page gave a nice summary of where one can access extant copies of
this newspaper.
+ Library
of Congress' Chronicling America site (1835 – 1975, 1225 issues)
+ Earlier
issues can be found on DigitalNC (March 26, 1824 – December 21, 1844, 991
issues)
Has your community recently lost its newspaper?
What is the neatest
piece of personal or local news you found printed in a small-town newspaper?
What impact has the loss of the newspaper had upon your community?
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