The Mast-Head: No Longer Forgotten

The ubiquity of the Internet

Feb. 18, 2015

David E. Rattray

Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed something a little out of the ordinary on one of The Star’s recent obituary pages. Down in the lower right corner was a correction — nothing strange about that, of course. But what was unusual was that the notice concerned Phoebe Scott, an East Hampton woman who died in 1938.

That the matter came up at all speaks to the ubiquity of the Internet, on which old copies of The Star (and many other newspapers) can be found. No longer is “erroneous info,” as one of Mrs. Scott’s descendants, Jim Huling of Sumter, S.C., put it, confined to a musty old newspaper clipping. A quick Google search now can turn up all manner of information, including something like this written 76 years ago.

By any standard, the May 12, 1938, account of Mrs. Scott’s death was pretty well mangled. It identified her step-mother as her mother, did not name her mother at all, and gave the wrong first name for her first husband, Mr. Huling said in an email.

Feeling a bit like a smart-aleck when Mr. Huling’s message arrived, I wrote back asking what his sources were. My own grandmother’s “East Hampton History and Genealogies,” was the reply. That’ll teach me.

So we ran the correction in the Jan. 22 issue. What we did not get into were some of the remarkable details of Mrs. Scott’s life that The Star apparently got right in the original telling. These included the fact that she had 12 children in her 84 years who survived her, and an astonishing 64 grandchildren and 75 great-grandchildren.

Also intriguing was something Mr. Huling related about her first husband, Edward Payne: He disappeared in about 1885 after leaving for a school for sailors in New York City. Either he was lost at sea during a subsequent whaling voyage, or he moved to Smithtown but was presumed dead because he was gone so long.

This early mystery seemed not to bear down too heavily on Mrs. Scott. The 1938 account concluded, “Her jolly manner and wit made her a popular member of the community.” A fine eulogy if I ever saw one.