This is the second, and so far last book, about Kitty Weeks. The first was “A Front Page Affair”, which I posted about in February of 2022. Kitty is still working as a reporter for the Ladies’ Page of a New York newspaper, and still living in a grand apartment with her wealthy father, still dealing with everything women of that era had to deal with. The plot of this story takes her from an upscale girl’s school, to a dinner honoring Woodrow Wilson, to an apartment in the Bowery section of New York.
Without giving away too much of the mystery, Kitty gets involved (too involved, according to others in the book) when a student she has interviewed for a story on the girl’s school is found dead. There is a non-suspicious explanation for her death, but Kitty does not think it is that simple. In digging for answers, she learns more than she ever wanted to know about the batteries used to power submarines, meets several women working to get the right to vote, and maybe discovers a plot against President Wilson.
One thing the author does skillfully is to weave the headlines of the day into the story. Being a reporter, Kitty is always reading the newspapers. Usually, when we read a book about history, it focuses on one aspect at a time – this war, that invention, this societal shift. But that’s not how we experience day-to-day life now, and it’s not how our ancestors experienced their world either. Sometimes these things influence each other, but even if the news stories of the day are totally unrelated to each other, they could still have had an impact on our ancestors.
If this was your family, how would you research them? When we do newspaper research, we search for our ancestors, and when we find them, we just look at the snippet of the paper they are in – usually birth or death notices, or marriages. But what were the headlines in their home-town newspapers on the days that were important to them and their families? What else was going on in the world? Could these things have influenced decisions they were making, say, maybe to move to another part of the country that might have more job prospects or better weather?