Ancestry Magazine

You know how you think you’ll remember a date, but when you go to retrieve it, it just isn’t there? I was having one of those moments. I was trying to get a better picture of my grandmother’s sister Meredith. I knew someone had once tried to snatch her from behind a bank in town, and I knew that the incident happened not too long ago, genealogically speaking—in the 1970s. But try as I might, I just couldn’t remember the date.

I called my mom. “When was Aunt Meredith abducted from behind the bank?” She didn’t have a date. So I went to the library to check our town’s weekly newspaper.

I knew the incident happened after I was married in 1973 and before Aunt Meredith’s sister Theone died in 1979. I knew Theone had been alive because of a family story: a fella went to Theone’s house to have her husband, an auctioneer, appraise some items. While there, the fella mentioned something about Aunt Meredith’s incident, which had been reported by the news. When he referred to Aunt Meredith as “that old lady,” Aunt Theone, never mincing words, said, “I’ll have you know that old lady is my sister, and she’s only a year and a half older than I am.”

I knew Uncle Paul, Aunt Meredith’s husband, had also died before the incident happened, so I checked the obituaries for Uncle Paul and Aunt Theone—the incident would have happened sometime between their deaths. Uncle Paul died 27 June 1974. But Aunt Theone had no obituary. I probably should have checked the Social Security Death Index online to get the dates before I went to the library, but since I hadn’t … oh well.

Cranking away at the microfilm of the Swanton (Ohio) Enterprise was yielding nothing about Aunt Meredith’s incident, so I decided to try the much larger Toledo Blade. With a narrowed-down range of 1974 through 1979, I went to the microfilm drawers and immediately saw how many rolls of film existed for the Blade—not a good idea.

I returned to the small weekly Enterprise. I got through one roll and headed for the next, and there it was on the front page of the 20 August 1975 edition—“Local Woman Abducted Friday.” That put the event on 16 August 1975 since the paper came out the following Tuesday.

This may seem like a lot of work just to find an article in a newspaper, but this family of girls, all six of them, and their mother, were such dynamic women. Their traits were passed on to each subsequent generation of women and survive not only in me but in my daughter, Lindsay, too.

The Enterprise article tells about Aunt Meredith’s abduction at gunpoint. The perpetrator—an escapee from the Lucas County Jail—was later caught about an hour south of town. He was charged in Fulton County, Ohio, with abduction and robbery and in Lucas County for felonious assault and aggravated robbery.

Knowing the date led me to the right microfilm for the larger Toledo Blade. Aunt Meredith, who was 71 years old at the time, had been beaten badly. But, being one of the Kennedy sisters, quite a feisty bunch of gals, she not only got the gun away from her abductor but beat him up, breaking three of his ribs. Upon his arrest, he confessed. Story was he’d rather confess than have to come face to face with that “old lady” again.

So I found my story and learned a little more about Aunt Meredith, and probably myself as well. The girls in my family? We’re all woman—but you don’t want to hear us roar.

Jana Sloan Broglin, CG, is a native of northwest Ohio. She’ll be speaking at the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, in August.