So, you’re asking about Edith Bates, or maybe what my whole deal with researching her was. Well, let me tell ya, it was a trip. I got this tiny mention of her name stuck in my head from some old thing I read, and I thought, “Alright, let’s see who this Edith Bates character really is.”
First thing, I did what everyone does. Fired up the computer, you know? Went online, typed “Edith Bates” into the search bar. And bam! Pages and pages. Turns out, there are a ton of Edith Bateses. Or people named Bates whose first name might be Edith. Or some E. Bates. It was a mess, like trying to pick one specific grain of rice out of a fifty-pound bag.
I must’ve spent a good solid week, maybe even longer, just clicking through stuff. My eyes were practically bleeding. I’d chase down one lead, think I was getting somewhere – an old census record, a tiny note in a local historical society’s digital file. And then, poof! Wrong Edith. Or the trail just went cold. It was incredibly frustrating, I tell ya. You’d find something that looked promising, get your hopes up a tiny bit, and then it would just turn into nothing. Over and over again.
This whole Edith Bates hunt, it really dragged up some old feelings. It took me right back to this other project I was obsessed with a few years ago. I was trying to track down the real story behind this local legend from my old neighborhood. Everyone knew the tale, but nobody knew the actual facts, where it started. I poured months into it – digging in dusty town records, bugging old-timers for any scrap of memory. I really thought I was going to crack it, you know? Write the definitive story. And what did I get? Zilch. Nada. Just more confusion and a pile of dead ends. It kind of knocked the wind out of me back then, made me realize that some stories, some people, they just don’t leave clear tracks. Maybe the clues are gone, or maybe they were never really there to begin with. So, when I started digging into Edith Bates, I guess part of me was already braced for that same kind of runaround. You start out keen, but there’s that voice saying, “Don’t get too attached to finding anything real clear, pal.”
- I scoured genealogy websites until all the names started to look the same.
- I went through digitized newspaper archives, squinting at blurry text.
- I even tried different spellings, thinking maybe someone just wrote it down wrong way back when.
So, after all that, what did I actually dig up on this particular Edith Bates I was after? Not much, to be honest. Whispers. Maybes. A few scattered mentions that might be her, or might be someone else entirely. It’s like some folks just drift through history, you know? Unless they were a big deal, made a lot of noise, or left a mountain of letters and diaries, they just sort of fade into the wallpaper.
Yeah, that was my big investigation into Edith Bates. A whole lot of searching, a whole lot of “could be,” and not much else. It really makes you ponder what gets remembered and what just gets lost to time. Kinda makes you sigh, but I guess that’s just the way it is when you go chasing ghosts in the archives.
