Last week I extracted marriages and deaths from Rochester newspapers from the second half of 1840. It would probably only be a small percentage of those events that would end up being recorded in a newspaper. The ones in the Rochester newspapers often cover the counties surrounding Monroe County.

There are some marriages that don’t make any sense. One was a marriage in Greece of Stephen Mead, of Niagara Co. to Phebe Perrin, of Allegany County. Why did they get married in Greece?

There are deaths for people that had lived in Rochester and had already moved west.

Included are a couple of reports from the Rochester police court. TThe reporter’s description of what happened on July 4th is a classic.

In August that was a visit of a menagerie (traveling  zoo). One of the animals that was going to visit was a giraffe but it had died after being shipped to the US. So they had the giraffe stuffed and would bring it along on the tour.

Then there is a concert given on Sept. 28th. The headliner was Master Diamond, shown in the horribly racist cartoon on the right. The description of the concert says he 13 years old and the “best Negro Dancer living.” His name was John Diamond. He was actually about 18 years old. Even worse, was that he was an Irish-American doing a blackface act. So this concert was an early Minstrel show which, thankfully, are no longer being given.

Probably not going to scan much or anything this week. Got other things to do.