Interesting isn't it? First of all, it shows that the Dunhams never wrote and told the Goeldners that Stanley Ann was married and had a baby...so that when the Goeldners asked who that boy was they had been looking after, Madelyn told Virginia that the boy's mother died in 1970. And then, in the same original (now removed from the web) article, (saved for posterity as an excerpt on FR) Virginia talked about Stanley Ann as the dead mother.
One might just jump to the conclusion that the woman who was his mother may have died in 1970, and she certainly wasn't the Dunham's daughter. Madelyn obviously never found it worth the trouble to 'enlighten' Virginia after 1982 that her daughter was still alive...or tell the Goeldners that Stanley Ann died in 1995.
Get's complicated, doesn't it?
Read it again. You'll find as I did, that if Stanley Ann Dunham had died in 1970, and not in 1995, the story is what Virginia believed. I can imagine the look on her face when she realized what she had done. She had compressed the life of Stanley Ann Dunham from birth to death into the period from 1942 until she 'died' in 1970...no wonder that article was quickly scrubbed and replaced, and now all there is, is this:
The requested URL /articles/2008/11/13/the_times/local_news/nws01.txt was not found on this server.
It's simply just another example that Anna Obama and Stanley Ann Dunham were two different women. In the preface to 'Dreams' the author tells us that some of the characters are composites. We should have taken notice.
It’s simply just another example that Anna Obama and Stanley Ann Dunham were two different women. In the preface to ‘Dreams’ the author tells us that some of the characters are composites. We should have taken notice.
Ain’t that the truth!
What makes the entire story about the mother dying in 1970 so interesting is the fact that, rather than just correcting the original article, with an explanation for how the mistake happened, they changed the story and then disappeared the first version—off the Web as well as off the Internet Archive, where it still resided up until about a year ago. Then it disappeared from the archive, too.
If it were just a simple matter of a small-town reporter being confused or “mishearing” what the woman said, then a correction would have explained that fact. But instead, the story simply mysteriously changed, and the other was scrubbed. One can envision the powers that be coming down on the head of that Maumelle reporter.