- Dates
- 1955-03 – 2011-04
- Eras
- Modern era
- Concepts
- historiographycommunitycommunication
- Within
- Beaver Island
Summary
The project holds 625 monthly issues of the Beaver Beacon spanning March 1955 to April 2011, every one of them transcribed. That is 625 of the 674 calendar months in the span; 49 months have no issue on hand.
Only one of those 49 is known to exist: May 2000, which the Clarke Historical Library indexes and we do not hold. The other 48 months are absent from the CMU inventory as well, which is the digitized run of record.
The practical want list for this newspaper is therefore a single issue, not forty-nine. Recording that distinction is the point of this article: a raw gap count invites forty-eight searches for things that were probably never printed.
What the comparison shows
Set comparison against the CMU inventory over its own range, 1955-03 to 2002-07:
| Months | |
|---|---|
| Indexed by CMU | 521 |
| Held here and indexed by CMU | 520 |
| Held here but not indexed by CMU | 0 |
| Indexed by CMU but not held here | 1 (2000-05) |
| Held here, outside CMU’s range (2002-08 – 2011-04) | 105 |
Two collections assembled by different routes — the Beaver Island Historical Society set and CMU’s digitization — agree on which months carry an issue, with a single exception. Where both are silent, the likeliest explanation is that no issue was published.
That inference has a real limit. The two collections may not be independent: if CMU digitized from the same physical run the Historical Society holds, then their agreement reproduces one collection’s gaps rather than confirming them. Until the Beacon’s own publication schedule is checked against a masthead, the 48 unattested months are unconfirmed, not disproven.
The 48 unattested months
Two-thirds fall in clusters where the whole year is thin, which is what a paper publishing six or eight times a year looks like:
| Year | Months absent | Issues held that year |
|---|---|---|
| 1978 | 05, 07, 09, 12 | 8 |
| 1979 | 03, 07, 08, 09, 11 | 7 |
| 1980 | 01, 03, 06, 07, 09, 10 | 6 |
| 1981 | 01, 04, 08, 10, 12 | 7 |
| 1987 | 01, 08, 09, 11, 12 | 7 |
| 1988 | 01, 02, 03, 04 | 8 |
The remaining 19 are isolated single-month gaps in otherwise complete years: 1968-06, 1969-09, 1970-07, 1971-05, 1971-09, 1972-07, 1972-11, 1973-10, 1974-06, 1974-10, 1975-06, 1975-09, 1976-06, 1977-03, 1977-11, 1982-03, 1983-02, 1985-09, 1993-10.
These skew to June, July and September — the island’s summer season, when issues were most read and most likely to have been kept, lent, or lost. Whether that reflects loss or a summer publication break is unresolved.
One specific cataloguing caution: the Beacon issued at least one combined number covering two months (May–June 1968). A combined issue filed under one month reads here as a gap in the other. Some isolated gaps may be cataloguing artefacts rather than absent issues.
Open questions
- Did the Beacon publish twelve issues a year throughout 1978–81 and 1987–88, or fewer? A masthead statement or a schedule note in a neighbouring issue would settle 29 of the 48 unattested months at once.
- Is CMU’s digitization independent of the Historical Society’s run, or derived from it? This determines whether their agreement is corroboration or an echo.
- How many combined two-month issues exist, and under which month is each filed?
- Does any issue survive for May 2000 outside CMU, in a form we could acquire without a reading-room visit?
See also
Sources
- Described in this archive: CMU *Beaver Beacon* issue inventory.The only external inventory of the run known to this project. Establishes which months an issue is known to exist for, 1955-03 through 2002-07. It does not establish that an unindexed month had no issue.
- Beaver Island Historical Society, *Beaver Beacon* issue set, retrieved by scripts/retrieve_beaver_beacon.py.Source of the 1955-03 through 2002-07 issues held locally. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
- Source of the 105 issues from 2002-08 through 2011-04, a period the CMU inventory does not cover.
Added 3 August 2026. Recent changes
Cite this article
Beaver Island Archive, “*Beaver Beacon* holdings census and missing issues”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/documents/beaver-beacon-missing-issues/, accessed [date], citing Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University, Digital Michigan Newspapers, Beaver Beacon (CharlevoixBB) issue inventory derived from an archived sitemap, snapshot June 2, 2025. (and 2 further sources listed on the page).
Last revised 2026-08-03. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.
BibTeX for “*Beaver Beacon* holdings census and missing issues”RIS for “*Beaver Beacon* holdings census and missing issues”