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12 November 2012
Are Alumni Newsletters Holding Clues?
If your missing ancestor went to or attended college are there clues about their life hiding in college alumni newsletters? Alumni offices, university archives, or other facilities may have these periodicals which may provide clues about your relative after they left the college or university.
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Fraternity newsletters and magazines are an absolute gold mine of info. They can include all sorts of details about members throughout their lives. For example, the man in my life—a low profile guy—was totally busted in his fraternity newsletter when his name appeared in a list of 20 or so brothers who had built a false wall and closet in his fraternity house. He had told me about going into the closet and closing the door, which allowed you to open a secret door at the back of the closet and enter a bar. At the time, it was illegal to drink on campus. The detail that he had never mentioned was that he was one of the student engineers who conceived, designed, and built the wall and closet. That detail came to light when the current crop of brothers found a sort of time capsule in the wall when they took it down during a remodeling effort—a beer bottle stuffed with paper that included the list of builders’ names and design details for the wall and closet. According to the drawings, controlling the smell was their worse problem. Alumni newsletters and magazines are filled with these type of delicious details that would certainly round out any profile a person’s college career.
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