What Did John Do?

… or, at least, what was John alleged to have done? Once again the Hobart Gazette is annoyingly discreet. From the "General News Items" of January 27, 1905:

The case of Annie Berndt of this place against John Chester, of Ainsworth, begun last Monday at Hammond before Judge Jordan was adjudicated before coming to trial.

The 1910 Census shows an Annie Berndt living in Hobart, a farmer's wife, who would have been about 60 in 1905, while John would have been 19 or 20.

I searched three other Lake County newspapers without finding a mention of this matter. And I've looked over every issue of the Gazette since 1899 without seeing any previous mention of this matter. Another mystery that will probably never be solved, I guess.

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Yes, as I've mentioned, I'm spending a lot of time and energy these days reading Hobart newspapers on microfilm, one after another, in chronological order, starting (for some reason I no longer recall) with 1899. It's a huge but necessary task. I probably should have done it before I started this blog, but I wasn't being particularly logical when I started this blog. Those papers are a gold mine of information; however, the time I have to spend doing this — first, at the library, reading the papers, taking notes and printing out whatever I need a full copy of; then, at home, typing up all my notes into searchable form as well as cataloguing and filing all my hard-copy stories so they don't become hopelessly disorganized — takes away from my blogging time, which is why my posts have gotten so short and disjointed.

I've been doing this for about a month, I think, and I've gotten from January 1899 to May 1905.