We recently received a rather odd time capsule found during the renovation of Mech Lab. It’s a Prince Albert tobacco canister with two items inside. The first is a piece of wood that has been written on with pencil. The other is a piece of paper crammed down in the bottom with potentially the same information as the piece of wood. The paper was so brittle and wadded up that I could only make out the name to confirm that the transcription of the wood was correct.
The text on the wood reads (we think): Jacob Boehler, 902 Ninton St., Toledo Ohio, 1911. I found a Jacob Boehler via the 1940 census living in Toledo, Ohio. At that time, he would have been 51, which would make Boehler approximately 22 yrs. of age when he “put himself” in the can, assuming this is the same man.
A “Jacob Boehler” does pop up in some newspaper articles from Toledo, but our library doesn’t have access to the newspaper.com database. I reached out to the Local History and Genealogy Department of the Toledo Library for information and will provide an update if I learn more.
As for the address, I can’t find a Ninton via Google maps. That doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist, but I couldn’t find it via a 1904 Toledo map either. Feel free to see if you can discover where he might have called home.