112 years later, New York Times acknowledges misspelled name in obituary

New York Times
Last month the great-grandson of Lt. Milton K. Schwenk wrote to The New York Times to tell them that the newspaper misspelled Schwenk’s first name (“Melton”), among other errors, in an obituary published in 1899. In researching the issue for the Times, James Barron discovered errors in other Times stories about the family — as well as in other newspapers’ obituaries — and came away with other questions that couldn’t be answered. “It is never too late to set the record straight,” Barron writes. “If journalism is indeed the first rough draft of history, there is always time to revise, polish and perfect, even if pinning down the details about Lieutenant Schwenk after so many years turned out to be less than straightforward.”