John Reginald Lear (1888 - 1918)

Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during John's lifetime.

In 1888, in the year that John Reginald Lear was born, on January 12th, the 'Schoolhouse Blizzard' blanketed Dakota Territory. Montana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas were hit, leaving 235 dead. Many of those who perished were children on their way home from school. The day was relatively warm when it began and the blizzard hit unexpectedly, catching most by surprise.

In 1893, by the time he was only 5 years old, on May 5th, a crash on the New York Stock Exchange started a depression that lasted 4 years. It was the beginning of the Panic of 1893.

In 1899, John was merely 11 years old when the meaning of Chinese "oracle bones" was rediscovered. Farmers in China had been turning up the bones in their fields for generations but most often they were ground up and sold as medicine. The chancellor of the Imperial Academy and a friend noticed, before they ground the bones, that they had writing. The bones had been used around the second millennium BC for divination.

In 1900, John was just 12 years old when a massive hurricane, known as the Great Galveston hurricane, hit Galveston Texas. Winds hit up to 145 miles an hour (category 4) and it remains the single most deadly event in U.S. history. Between 6,000 and 12,000 died (most estimates are around 8,000 dead). The population of Galveston at the time was about 36,000 people in 1900.

In 1918, in the year of John Reginald Lear's passing, in July, Russian revolutionaries executed the former Tzar Nicholas II and his immediate family. While it was rumored that two of the children had survived, it was later proven through DNA analysis - when their bodies were found - that the entire family had been killed.