Taking it easy by going back in time

I’m somewhat limited in both my physical and mental abilities until my body gets used to the dilantin I’m now on to deal with my seizures, so I’m undertaking some “occupational therapy” by doing something I love – digging into Yukon-Alaska history. A few years ago I started a listing of drownings in the region due to the extremely large number of them I was finding while looking for other facts. As times permits I’ve been adding the original newspaper articles about the accidents, and this morning I added 3 more:

• Tom Drury, a 15-year-old boy drowned in the Yukon River at Selkirk in 1933
• RCMP Constable John Patrick Hartnett, drowned in the Yukon River at Carmacks in 1936
• Patrick McCanney, RCAF, drowned in the Yukon River at Whitehorse in 1945

I found a lot of other great stuff in a short search at the Yukon Archives yesterday, but I’m tired so that’s all the typing I’m doing today. The search was actually prompted by a request by a reader from Utah for information about her great uncle. Unfortunately, although I found a glowing article about him with a good photo, I also found that he committed suicide – certainly not what most people want to discover, but one of the hazards of genealogy.