William's immediate relatives including parents, siblings, partnerships and children in the Soothill family tree.

William's Family

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

In 1876, in the year that William Riley Soothill was born, on June 4th, the Transcontinental Express - an express train - arrived in San Francisco, using the 7 year old transcontinental railroad line. It took 83 hours and 39 minutes from New York City - about 3.5 days - to cross the country.

In 1885, he was merely 9 years old when on June 17th, the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor. Two hundred thousand people and hundreds of boats greeted the statue. It had to be assembled but that had to wait until the pedestal was completed the following April.

In 1890, he was only 14 years old when on June 1st, the U.S. Census Bureau started tabulating census returns with punch cards. Herman Hollerith's "tabulating machine" used punch cards to more quickly compute census information, taking the time to get census results from 8 years in 1880 to 6 years for the 1890 census. Hollerith's company eventually became IBM.

In 1915, at the age of 39 years old, William was alive when Audrey Munson, playing a model for a sculptor in the film "Inspiration", became the first actress to shed her clothes on screen. Fearing that banning the film would mean that censors would also have to "ban Renaissance art" the film was released, with Munson in the nude scenes and a stand-in doing the acting. (Munson had previously been "America's First Supermodel" and posed nude as the model for many famous artworks.) The film was a hit with audiences.

In 1920, in the year of William Riley Soothill's passing, speakeasies replaced saloons as the center of social activity. After the 18th Amendment was ratified and selling alcohol became illegal, saloons closed and speakeasies took their place. Speakeasies, also called a blind pig or blind tiger, were "so called because of the practice of speaking quietly about such a place in public, or when inside it, so as not to alert the police or neighbors". There were a lot of them and they were very popular. And where saloons often prohibited women, they were encouraged at speakeasies because of the added profits.