Okay, so I decided to spend some time trying to piece together some stuff from my old town’s history a few weeks back. Wasn’t anything major, just got curious about some of the folks who used to run local businesses back in the day, like, way back.
I started off pretty simple. Dug out some old phone directories I inherited, the really thick paper ones. Flipped through the yellow pages, looking at the ads, trying to get a feel for who was who.
Then I went online, figuring I’d cross-reference names with old newspaper articles or maybe find some mentions in local government meeting minutes if they were archived anywhere. It was slow going, lots of dead ends, you know how it is.
Hitting a Wall (Sort Of)
And that’s when the name Dwight Lewis started showing up. Not just in one context, but popping up here and there over a span of maybe twenty years. First, I saw the name connected to a hardware store listed in the ’60s. Okay, simple enough.
But then, digging deeper into some scanned council notes from the ’70s, there was a Dwight Lewis mentioned again, but involved in some land zoning discussion. Was it the same guy? Maybe. The records weren’t exactly detailed.
- Checked business registries (the ones I could access online).
- Scanned through digitized local newspaper archives.
- Tried searching genealogy sites, but that got complicated fast.
Later, I found another mention, this time in relation to the volunteer fire department in the early ’80s. Could still be the same person, I guess. But it felt weird, like the name was common, or this one guy was just involved in everything. It made tracking the specific business owner I originally started looking for much harder because this name kept muddying the waters.
It became less about finding the original info and more about figuring out this Dwight Lewis situation. Was it one incredibly active person? Or multiple people? The records were just too sparse or disconnected to be sure. You’d find the name, but no other details to confirm if it was the Dwight Lewis from the hardware store or some other Dwight Lewis.
Ended up spending a whole afternoon just chasing this one name through different decades and different contexts. Didn’t really get a solid answer, just a notebook full of mentions of “Dwight Lewis” tied to different places and times. It’s funny how you start trying to do one thing and end up completely sidetracked by something else you didn’t even know you were looking for.
So yeah, that was my little adventure into the local archives. Didn’t quite achieve my original goal, but I sure learned a lot about the persistence of the name Dwight Lewis in that town’s records. Maybe I’ll try again sometime, see if I can untangle it.
