No comics today, just some history.

It was an unseasonably bright and sunny day in Portland yesterday so I decided it was a good time to go spend with the kid. The one big thing that has spurred me on to do more research into the real life of Baby Otto, and thinking that he might have living relatives still in the area, is the fact that his headstone looks a little too new compared to the other graves from the same time period, as though it had been replaced at some point. Well, yesterday that thought wouldn’t leave me so I went into an hours-long frenzy of internet searching, and I came upon this… (Click to view the whole thing)

This is the US Census record for 1900. The first thing I noticed is also the reason why I couldn’t find any record of siblings on my first few research attempts; everyone else in his family was born in Germany. At the time this census was taken, Otto was less than one month old, and besides his father who came to the US in 1896, the rest of his family, Emma, Ernst, Minnie, and Frida, had been in the US for less than a year. (I found their immigration papers as well, which I’ll probably show later if people are interested in the real story as well as the comic?) Through further census records searching (1910 and 1920), I know that Ernst and Minnie both had children (7 combined). Sadly, most of the 1930 census records were lost in a fire at some point decades ago and aren’t available and all newer census records are not archived in the same way so I could not access them last night.

Finding out that Otto had three siblings and at least seven nieces and nephews (some of whom could in theory still be alive in their mid-80s to early 90s) does not really change the scope of what I’m trying to do. I always knew that I would be researching Otto’s real life at the same time that I was fabricating a new one for him. The story will continue as planned.

Let me know if you all are actually interested in the historical information behind BOZ. If not, I’ll just stick to posting the comics. Personally, I find researching Otto just as fun as drawing him.

Tags :: BOZ