Professor’s Web site offers glimpse at life in Amsterdam’s past
By Bob Cudmore, Daily Gazette, 6-19-04
One hundred years ago this month, things were pretty quiet in Amsterdam. True, a man named Raymond Walters drowned in the Erie Canal on June 25 of 1904. And Fire Department Major A.V. Morris rang the first alarm on a new fire bell that month. The policemen defeated the postal employees in baseball at Creeler Park. Local news dealers formed an association. Plus, there were marriages and deaths to report, such as the demise of William H. Chettle on June 19 from an overdose of chloral hydrate, a sleep-inducing medicine.
All these news headlines are easily accessed with a few clicks of a computer mouse thanks to a Web site created by Frank Yunker, a computer information systems professor at Fulton-Montgomery Community College (FMCC). This past semester, Yunker served as interim dean of business, technology and health professions.
Yunker does computer-consulting work on a part-time basis and his history database serves to demonstrate the kinds of projects he can do. Also, Yunker taught an FMCC course in Web site development in the spring semester and wanted to provide his students with a practical application.
Yunker had been looking for Web site projects he could work on partly while at home, caring for his three children. Yunker’s wife Cathy is a midwife and they live in Niskayuna so Cathy has quick access to Bellevue Maternity Hospital and St. Clare’s maternity department.
A native of Rotterdam, Yunker minored in history at college. Probing his own family history, he started work on a database of the vital records of St. Joseph’s Church in Schenectady, where his great grandparents married in 1895. Work on this project, however, entailed spending time in Schenectady and Yunker decided to seek historical material at FMCC.
At the Kenneth Dorn history room in the college library, Yunker found a collection that was ideal--yearly almanacs published by the Amsterdam Evening Recorder newspaper from 1886 to 1925. The almanacs contain news headlines (not complete news stories) from most every day of each of those years.
First, Yunker scanned the 400 pages of the almanacs into a word processing program. Then he cleaned up the copy, imported the information into a spreadsheet program and created an easily used database with 24,000 entries.
In November of 1917, for example, it is reported that the Woman Suffrage Amendment carried the city of Amsterdam but was defeated in Montgomery County by 318 votes. A search of the word “suffrage” turns up numerous headlines describing pro-suffrage speakers, including a speech by Susan B. Anthony in 1894. The next entry does not come until 1911 when there is a suffrage hearing at the Barnes Hotel, followed by several speeches and other events during the next few years. On June 18 of 1913, for example, “General Rosalie Jones and her hiking suffragettes” were in Amsterdam for “a few minutes.” The almanac reports there was “no reception nor speaking.”
Many of the headlines are tantalizing but incomplete. On May 17, 1923, for example, Henry Ford, motor manufacturer, stopped in Amsterdam for lunch and parked his car in violation of a local ordinance. Did the famous automaker get a ticket? What ordinance did he violate? The almanac does not say.
Yunker has created a companion database from another volume from the Dorn collection at FMCC by scanning an1859 book called “Gloversville: The Model Village” by Horace Sprague. This database provides mainly genealogical information.
Yunker said he is looking for other possibilities for historical Web site development.
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Frank Yunker’s Amsterdam and Gloversville history databases can be accessed at http://www.mohawkvalleyweb.com
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Hear The Bob Cudmore Show weekday mornings from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. on AM 1570, WVTL in Amsterdam. Tuesday, June 22 at 7:30 a.m., Bob interviews baseball expert and author David Pietrusza about the history of Herbert Shuttleworth Park in Amsterdam, the former Mohawk Mills Park.
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