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To complement yesterday’s post about oil field workers in Long Beach during the 1920s, we will focus on one worker, Fletcher Bownds, whose name appears in an important QHGS resource, the B. W. Coon Co. Funeral Home, Long Beach, California Funeral Register, 1922-1926. His entry in our pdf abstracted transcription looks like this:

The original record of Fletcher Bownds’ funeral on page 146 looks like this:

It describes Fletcher as an oil driller’s helper, tells where he lived in the city, and states that he died, aged 18, at Seaside Hospital from burns suffered in an oil field explosion. It also tells us that his body was shipped out of state to be buried in Texas where his parents lived.

Using dates provided on the funeral record, one can look for newspaper articles describing the explosion and fire that took Fletcher’s life. The California Digital Newspaper Collection, A Freely Accessible Repository of Digitized California Newspapers from 1846 to the Present is available at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=LMJ19240523.1.2#. This website provided the following information from Livermore Journal, Volume 5, Number 35, 23 May 1924, page 2: “California News Briefs: Frank Giesinger and Fletcher Bounds [sic] of Long Beach are dead as a result of a fire which destroyed the Frye No. 2 well of the San Martinez Oil company on Signal Hill. Two others were seriously burned.”

RESEARCH TIP: It is very important to research every child in a family—not only the child who is your direct ancestor. Fletcher Bownds is a good example of this. Although he was unmarried and probably died without issue, he may have had siblings who did marry and who carried on the family name in Texas. If you were a descendent of one of those children and did not know the maiden name of their mother, reading Fletcher’s funeral record would supply it.