Wednesday, March 31, 2010

This morning, we tried to identify the living descendants of Thaddeus (Tad) Shideler, a track and field athlete from Indiana University who competed in the 1904 Olympics, so we could try to get a better photograph of him than the one we had for the sports exhibit.

We began by calling the registrar, who told us that Shideler has only attended Indiana University during the spring semester of 1904. We also learned that he attended Indianapolis Manual Training High School and died on June 2, 1966. We then called the Alumni Association to try to learn about his descendants, but there was no one there.

We checked the alumni magazines from 1966 in the hope of finding an obituary for Shideler, but we only found a brief death notice that again gave his death date as June 2, 1966 and seemed to indicate that he had died in Indianapolis. We checked the microfilm of the Indianapolis News and the Indianapolis Star at the Herman B. Wells Library for an obituary for Shideler, but didn't find anything.

We tried searching for Shideler in some newspaper databases and with Google, and, while we didn't find any obituaries in the databases, we did find a different date for Shideler's death on several websites--June 22, 1966. We also found him on the Phi Gamma Delta website. We checked issues of the Indianapolis News and the Indianapolis Star again around the new death date, but still didn't find an obituary. We also contacted the national headquarters of Phi Gamma Delta, but they didn't have any information on Tad Shideler. They did, however, have some information on another man named Shideler who was a member of this fraternity. We hoped he might be related to the Shideler we were looking for, but this was as far as we got today.

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We also received another email from someone in Ireland identifying two more of the Cushman photographs.

One of them was this one, which the person identified as Baldoyle Racecourse, which as since been torn down and redeveloped. We confirmed his identification with Google Earth and a few websites.

This person also identified the general location of this image, which we confirmed using Google Earth. It's near the intersection of Ravenswell Road and Harbour Road in County Wicklow, Ireland.

Here is the image of Baldoyle Racecourse in 1961 (it's since been demolished and mostly built over):


Here you can see a screenshot of the same location in Google Earth. If you look carefully, you can see the outline of the lower left corner of the racetrack and the outline of those two white buildings inside the track:



And here is the image of the area near the intersection of Ravenswell Road and Harbour Road in County Wicklow, Ireland in 1961:


And here is a screenshot from Google Earth showing the Ravenswell Road and Harbour Road area today: