Eureka!

1. Eureka! My dear wife has found a newspaper report regarding her father-in-law’s death. It was published in the Straits Echo and Times of Malaya dated 26 November 1956. It’s an item that we’ve been searching for since the beginning of the year.

2. As we were scanning through the volume of bound newspapers last Wednesday evening, an announcement came over the loudspeakers that the library would be closed in ten minutes time. I thought I would call it a day, so I rose up and started to walk away while my wife was still at the table scanning through the pages of the newspaper. I walked down the stairs to the toilet on the ground floor.

3. Having relieved myself, I was walking towards the lobby when I caught sight of my wife stepping half-way down the stairs. “Found it! Come quick!” she gasped, looking very excited indeed. I gasped in disbelief. Together we climbed up the stairs to the first floor. The library assistants were already off their desks and started to move along when we got to our table. So I whispered to my wife that we’d come the next day to look at her “discovery.”

4. We might have missed the article every time we scanned through that particular page because we were looking for particular words like ‘Ismail Merican,’ ‘M. I. Merican,’ or ‘death’ whereas the death report in the Straits Echo carried the headline ‘Link with SAHC Past Severed.’ It was a stroke of luck that my wife had noticed the abbreviation ‘SAHC’ which instinctively made her turn her focus on the article. So, there it was – a rather lengthy report on the death of Mr. M. Ismail Merican.

5. The report or article was dated November the 25^th. The first paragraph read:

ALOR STAR, Nov. 25.-Mr. M. Ismail Merican, J.P., died yesterday afternoon after a bout of illness, at his new house in Alor Merah. He was 74. He leaves behind his wife and two sons aged nine and seven and a daughter aged five years. He had no children by his earlier marriage.-Straits Echo and Times of Malaya, 26 November 1956.

6. This means that my father passed away on November 24, 1956. The report stated that he was born on February 24, 1882. We’ve been searching for his dates of birth and death in archives and libraries since 2012. Thank God we’ve found the dates. Apart from that, we’ve also discovered interesting facts about the late Md. Ismail Merican.Alhamdulillah!

 

 

  Cuttings from the Straits Echo and Times of Malaya, 26 November, 1956