Starting The New Year Right

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY!

We hope everyone is having a happy but safe holiday season. Pretty soon you will have to get back into the routine of work or school. Family will have returned home and now it’s time to get back in the saddle. We have been going by the Blanche Hotel almost every week since the renovations started taking pictures of the progress and keeping copies of the article sin the local newspapers. We will be compiling a nice little video of those changes in the next two weeks or so.

The book is progressing but slowly. With all the holidays recently I haven’t really had a chance to sit down and read through old newspapers in a while. I am almost even with my research and my postings but hope to finish off the 1920’s this week and move onto the 1930’s next month. There are two whole years missing during this decade (1933 and 1937) so that will put a hole in our research right there. If there is anyone with old copies of newspapers from this time period and would be willing to share I would greatly appreciate it. If you know why they weren’t sent for microfilming that would be great to know as well.

We are still looking for relatives of any of the manager of the Blanche, no matter in which years, and still have to take a trip Central Florida to follow-up research on Blanche Brown Chandler and to Alabama to get more material on J.W. Ettel and his family. If anyone is a relative of David W. Brown or any of his children and might have some pictures and stories to share to finish off the biographies would would love to hear from you.

Finally, if ANYONE has any of the Blanche Hotel Registration Books and would be willing to let us scan those we would be forever grateful. There should be over 60 years worth of these books somewhere and any one of them would be a great fount of information as well as just fun to be able to look through. Gathering names of guests from the newspapers sort of petered out after World War I when they quit listing them. Which is a shame.

We have been playing around with different designs for the book cover again and below is a copy of our latest. We would like to thank Twanda Royal for allowing us to scan in her postcards of the Blanche from her collection.