Searching the Archives for Same-named Strangers

Yesterday, while recovering from a wisdom tooth extraction, I decided to search my own name. Not on Google, but in a digital newspaper archive, where the best practice is to put your name in quotes, and sort oldest to newest.

First result: The Brooklyn Daily Eagle of December 14th, 1868. There I was: “Robert Stenson,” inked in metal type. The occasion? Brooklyn, Bushwick, and Williamsburgh were merging into a single municipality, and the new city of Brooklyn had asked the paper to announce (to the world) that I owed them $14.46. But it also mentioned the property’s address: a block of Williamsburg that, these days, faces a Blue Bottle.

Somehow, oddly, I felt a deep connection to this forgotten property owner, a person who is less than a footnote to history. I now have every intention of visiting that block in Brooklyn. And yes, I had taken a painkiller just an hour prior, but I was pretty sure, and am still, that this search was worth my time. More than feeling a connection, I had found a way to extract a cross-section of American history — a core-sample of newspaper substrate.

True, I do have the good fortune of a name that falls somewhere between generic and rare, meaning the archives weren’t too cluttered with boring things, but they were full enough to take up my whole morning. Of course, “Stenson” is common mostly to Irish- and some Scottish-Americans, so I had expected to find, and did, a procession of melancholy Scots-Irish like myself.

For instance, in May of 1883, The Leavenworth Times reported that I had been fined $16 for disturbing the peace while drunk — an astonishing sum, something like $400 in 2016 dollars.

June of the next year I was a marine engineer, employed on the dredging scow Norfolk. On the morning of June 3rd we floated on the Harlem River at Manhattan’s edge, right where 2nd Ave. ends. A normal morning, but then we heard something explode and we rushed to the boiler room, where our shipmate lay scalded, inside and out. He had inhaled enough steam to burn his lungs. Cause of explosion, as The New York Times reported: a corroded boiler. (Was that my fault?)

But in 1895 I was something further afield: a Glaswegian polygamist, a Mormon with three wives and seven children. I had decided to immigrate to America — Salt Lake City, to be precise — but my family and I had made it only as far as Quebec, where we applied for American citizenship and were honest with the government: we were committed polygamists, and intended to keep at it. While we waited in Canada, American papers caught word of our application and proffered opinions on the big question of the moment: should the United States let me in? The archive had no answer, but the Treasury Secretary Mr. Schiff was convinced I should be barred.

Forty years passed before my name appeared in print again, though this time I was no recently potato-starved Gael. In 1935 I was a black man in Alabama, where I had found work as a counterfeiter, making quarters and half-dollars. But on the morning of April 10, the Secret Service arrested me and my colleagues — four whites, four blacks — in Birmingham.

In 1939, I died of heat exhaustion in Milwaukee, when I was six months old, then nine years later I lived in Portland, Oregon and two teenage kids stole my car. The year after that me and my brother visited my aunt and uncle in North Adams, Mass.

Two years after that it was 1951 and I lived in Hollis, Queens, with my wife and three children. One night some snot-nosed patrolman walked by my door and, being that I was drunk off my ass, I decided to punch him in the head. Next thing I know he’s in my house and he sees beer cans everywhere. A month later I read about myself in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, since I had to sit in front of a judge on charges of child neglect. My wife got bail; I did not.

In June of 1965, when I was in Jackson, Tennessee, I led a freedom march, and I spoke to an AP reporter about the struggle for my human rights. “We will march in the streets until everybody knows about the Freedom Democratic Party,” I told him. “We will march, ride, or do whatever the spirit tells us to do.”