RHODA LYON'S NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS of wedding notices and obituaries come mainly from the Miami News of Saline County, MO. They were pasted into a thick report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the late 1890s. Although no family history is known to tell the story, we deduced that the clippings were gathered from the late 1880s to 1899 and pasted in the book during her last years before her death on April 29, 1900. The wedding notices have some chronological order, but the obituaries are pasted where they fit, with related persons on the same or adjacent pages. The subjects appear to have been mostly neighbors, relatives, and acquaintances of the Lyon family. Some clippings have a year or a day and year pencilled on them. Others have no indication of year, either in the text or on the page.
THE CLIPPINGS are an incomplete record, but they are presented because it appears that copies of the Saline County newspapers for that time are not easily available. Most clippings are presented in their entirety. A few have had the generic editorial prose regarding a person's heroic qualities deleted, in order to reduce file size. The clippings were scanned at 600 dpi, cropped, enhanced to clarify typography, and reduced to gif format with a column width of 300 or 350 pixels.
PROVENANCE: The scrapbook was inherited by the niece of Horace W. Wolfskill, Jr., whose maternal grandmother was Rhoda Lyon. Also inherited from Horace W. Wolfskill was an Erwin family bible with the handwritten name "Rhoda Monroe" inside at several places. The handwriting is similar to the notes in the scrapbook.