Improbable Coincidences / Synchronicities

Francis Thompson McShane's Survival and Return

Published October 15, 2026 at 1:25 PM

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Young Woman's Journal Research

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Following a battle in India where Francis was reported killed in a newspaper, his family mourned him for years. Francis, who was actually wounded and survived, returned home and discovered his family had emigrated to Utah. Through a chance encounter on New Year's Eve, where Francis stayed as a stranger in his own brother's home in Gunnison, he was recognized by his mother. The false report of his death was traced to a printer's error in the Daily News that transposed his name from the list of wounded to the list of killed.

In Their Own Words

“The manager produced the old files, when the mystery was speedily solved. The telegraphic dispatch correctly enough recorded me among the wounded, and the first proofs of the printer found me in that list; but the compositor had misspelled my name by omitting the p in Thompson, which the proofreader had marked to be inserted. The printer took up the line and made the necessary correction, but in putting it back again he somehow got it transposed, and when it came out in print my name was among the list of the killed. — The Young Woman's Journal 6:4”

Sources & References

The Young Woman's Journal, vol. 6 no. 4 (January 1895). L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University digital collections. https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/YWJ/id/11525 (account extracted verbatim from the collection's page-level OCR; research confidence: high)

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