Tuesday, December 02, 2014

No luck finding my grandfather at the library

Over Thanksgiving vacation, I sent a book request to the Northern Regional Library Facility. It's a huge complex in Richmond that holds 6 million "infrequently used" books for the UC and CSU systems. I thought I'd hear back from them in a couple of weeks. I got an email on Monday morning that the book was ready for me to look at. I had a couple of hours between appointments so I zoomed over to the library and parked next to a white Saab wagon.

As soon as I entered the lobby, the guy behind the counter knew who I was and handed me the book. Now that's service!

Here is the book I wanted to look at. Alas, my grandfather's name was nowhere to be found. It's got about 40 pages of names and an index with everyone's telephone and telegraph(!) numbers.

The last time this book was checked out was in 2005.

Pardee Lowe was a Chinese-American who survived the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

Unclassified.

Page 1.

My grandfather shared the same last name of Yu as Yu Yu-jen. However, I could not find my grandfather's name or his alias (which I didn't discover until last week) anywhere in the book.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's a bummer. Do you know where to find more information now?

Maxichamp said...

@Ripituc: Nope. Waiting for the translation of the bio first.