Dispatch archive back to 1871 a big hit with Columbus library patrons

A legend in Hannah Kuhn's family went like this: When her father was 15 years old, he swam across the Scioto River in March on a bet.

“You hear these things when you're a child, and you think, 'yeah, yeah, yeah,'”

But while on her way to researching another aspect of her father' life, Kuhn learned the truth with the help of the Columbus Metropolitan Library Local History and Genealogy Department.

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Within minutes, the library staff used a keyword-searchable database of digitized Columbus Dispatch archives going back to the first edition on July 1, 1871, to find a story and photo from March 30, 1927, proving that it really happened. Without the ability to search by key words, such as Kuhn's father's name, Louis J. Rotman, it might have taken hours, days or even weeks to find such a story.

“It was family lore that he had done this on a bet with his friends, and that it had been published in the newspaper, but no one had a copy, and he didn't have a copy to show us,” said Kuhn, 79, who grew up in Ohio and now lives in Simi Valley, California. “We knew he was a good swimmer and that he could probably do it, but we weren't sure we could believe it.”

The speed at which someone can do such research, or settle a bar bet, has made the Dispatch archive one of the more popular resources for Columbus library patrons in the past year, said Angela O'Neal, manager of the Local History and Genealogy Department.

Library patrons have made more than a half-million searches of the Dispatch archives since the library paid NewsBank Media Services $932,970 in 2018 for lifetime digital archive rights to the searchable content from 1871 to 1985. (The Dispatch content from 1985 to present already was available in digital form.)

GateHouse Media authorized NewsBank Media Services to begin the digitization process shortly after GateHouse bought The Dispatch in 2015.

Seeing the story of Kuhn's father's swim across the Scioto in the newspaper “was very exciting. I was like, 'Oh, my God! We finally have the truth!'”

And she had never seen a photo of her father at that age, she said. She called her younger sister and brother immediately.

The path to that Dispatch story started with Kuhn's interest in learning about a house her father had designed. He was a 1937 graduate of Ohio State University who opened his own architecture firm specializing in homes in the Bexley area.

“It all started because I had a glossy photo of a house he designed but had no address,” Kuhn said. “It turned out to be in Eastmoor.”

And while researching that, the library staff found more than two dozen other stories about her family, including a story and photo about the engagement of her mother, Dorothy Shiff Rotman, to her father, and another about their wedding.

Ohio residents with a Columbus Metropolitan Library card can access the Dispatch archives from any computer with internet access clicking on the “My History” image on the home page at ColumbusLibrary.org, and then on “Columbus Dispatch Digital.”

“We've gone from a stage coach to a rocket ship in terms of access to historical information,” said Pat Losinski, chief executive officer of the library system. “It's a revolution in how access is provided.”

“The Dispatch is the historical record of our community,” he said. “It's a remarkable resource, and we invite anyone in the community who might not know about it yet to come in and check it out.”

The Columbus library has among the highest volumes of use of NewsBank assets in the country, O'Neal said. Total searches in the past year were about 700,000.

“There is a strong interest in local history in Columbus,” she said, and it's not just from long-time residents. Newcomers from other cities and countries are looking for information about their new home.

“One thing I see is people coming here with their address to search the history of their address or their street,” O'Neal said.

“Here's a creepy one: A Columbus woman called on the phone and said she was really uncomfortable in her second-floor bathroom,” O'Neal said. “She said she felt like someone was watching her. She had been in the house a year or so.

“We found a story from the 1930s about a police chase of a person escaped from prison. He hid in the second-floor bathroom of that house and was shot dead there by police. There's no way we would have found that story in microfilm. With Dispatch Digital, we found it in five seconds,” she said.

A couple of weeks ago, a patron who said she was adopted wanted help finding her birth mother.

“She knew her birth mother's name, but nothing else. We put the name into the Dispatch database and we found a birth announcement. And we also found the obituary of her mother, who unfortunately had died last year. Still, the customer was able to connect with other family members, a stepbrother and sister, and she is now able to reach out to those people.”

In another quick search, the library staff found that the Martin Luther King Jr. branch of the Columbus Library, which opened on April 4, 1969, was the first library in the country named for him.

The most popular search categories are people searching for their own names, home addresses, family names, concerts or other events people remember and want more details about, O'Neal said, “like now people are looking for stories about the old Lazarus Downtown storefront windows decorated for the holidays.”

While library patrons can do research on their own, O'Neal said the library has a 15-member staff in the local history and genealogy department on the third floor at the main library who are available to help with searches.

amiller@dispatch.com

@dispatcheditor