Honestly, it does not take much to send me working on a different family line. I must admit that I get distracted by shiny objects. This morning a friend of mine posted photographs of her trip to Chama, New Mexico, on Facebook. Among those pictures was a photograph of a train engine from the Denver & Rio Grande line for which my husband's grandfather Iley Nunn Selph Sr. worked. That sent me searching newspaper databases for any new tidbits on the Selphs, and I found a choice nugget.
Since Iley Selph is a distinctive name, I searched without narrowing down a time period or location. The pay off for that is that information appears in unexpected places. For this search, my best and newest result came from a Colorado newspaper instead of a New Mexico newspaper:
Iley N. Selph Jr. was my husband's uncle. This article gives me a description of him. It tells me that he had gone to work at a ranch near Wheatland, Wyoming in the fall of 1929. If I did not already know that they lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, it would point me to their location on the 1930 U.S. census.
This census indicates that Iley N. Selph Jr. was located and made his way back home. It reveals nothing of the family drama that the newspaper's article provides. There is no way of knowing that Iley Nunn Selph Sr. had been in a car accident serious enough that Carolina (Sandoval) Selph needed additional help from her son Iley Jr. A newspaper item about the car accident probably appeared in the Santa Fe newspaper between November 1929 and January 1930, but I have not found it yet.
The newspaper article, like the census, provides a street address for the Selphs. However, since it is featured more prominently in the article, it occurred to me that Santa Fe is an old city with plenty of old houses still standing. A google search of the street address produced a contemporary picture of the house in the street views of google maps:
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| 377 East Garcia Street; Santa Fe, NM 1930 Home of the Selph Family |
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