Librarian Unearths 100 Year Old Coverup

From Liz Frame: “The official death toll from the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed much of San Francisco was 478. To former city librarian and retired city archivist Gladys Hansen, that just didn’t seem right.” So begins the story of one woman’s crusade to tabulate the death toll from the 1906 San Francisco Quake, which is nearing its 100th anniversary.

April 13, 2006 by Librarians Libraries

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2 Responses

  1. GregS* says:
    April 13, 2006 at 7:30 pm

    doomed to repeat what?
    I think its great what she’s doing, its an appropriate thing to do after the dust has settled. But there’s nothing wrong with what the city did. When big tragedies hit you minimize the worst, maxmize the best, and move on.

  2. Darla says:
    April 13, 2006 at 8:10 pm

    They were sent elsewhere…
    My mother-in-law has a 94 year old uncle who’s father helped out after this earthquake. He told his son, who told me last year, that they just had to get people out of the city for their own good. So they loaded them up on to trains, and just shipped them out of the city. To where ever, it had to be better than where they were. Many of these displaced people may be showing up as “missing”, or dead. Communication and record-keeping wasn’t as good back then. If your relative was shipped out, you just may never have seen them again, and not known what happened to them.

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