It takes a village to raise the dead

“Funeral notice from March 20, 1944, newspaper issue of The Daily Chronicle, found on microfiche, Timberland Regional Library, Centralia, WA.”

This is the caption I wrote today on a profile page for Thomas Willis Lackland in my Ancestry.com tree. I posted photo images of newspaper clippings from the The Daily Chronicle edition that announced that Thomas Willis Lackland, of Centralia, Washington, died of a heart attack at age 79, and that graveside services would be held on the upcoming Tuesday at Greenwood Memorial Park, now Sticklin Greenwood Cemetery.

I wrote the select few words in the caption above because a librarian at the Timberland Regional Library in Centralia, Washington, looked up the newspaper for me on microfiche records and emailed me pdf images.

And because I emailed the @asklib email address posted on the Library’s website and asked if they had archived records of that day’s newspaper.

Also because:

A librarian copied that day’s edition of The Daily Chronicle onto microfiche.

Another librarian preserved a print issue of the March 20, 1944, edition of The Daily Chronicle.

A local publisher printed a daily newspaper in Centralia, Washington, where Thomas Willis Lackland lived and died.

Numerous people worked countless hours to print that day’s edition of The Daily Chronicle.

There were readers of a daily newspaper.