January 28 » Walter Arnold of East Peckham, Kent, becomes the first person to be convicted of speeding. He was fined one shilling, plus costs, for speeding at 8mph (13km/h), thereby exceeding the contemporary speed limit of 2mph (3.2km/h).
June 15 » The deadliest tsunami in Japan's history kills more than 22,000 people.
July 9 » William Jennings Bryan delivers his Cross of Gold speech advocating bimetallism at the 1896 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
August 16 » Skookum Jim Mason, George Carmack and Dawson Charlie discover gold in a tributary of the Klondike River in Canada, setting off the Klondike Gold Rush.
November 1 » A picture showing the bare breasts of a woman appears in National Geographic magazine for the first time.
Day of death March 12, 1897
The temperature on March 12, 1897 was about 4.6 °C. The airpressure was 75 cm mercury. The atmospheric humidity was 94%. Source: KNMI
February 28 » Queen Ranavalona III, the last monarch of Madagascar, is deposed by a French military force.
April 18 » The Greco-Turkish War is declared between Greece and the Ottoman Empire.
April 30 » J. J. Thomson of the Cavendish Laboratory announces his discovery of the electron as a subatomic particle, over 1,800 times smaller than a proton (in the atomic nucleus), at a lecture at the Royal Institution in London.
May 26 » The original manuscript of William Bradford's history, "Of Plymouth Plantation" is returned to the Governor of Massachusetts by the Bishop of London after being taken during the American Revolutionary War.
June 16 » A treaty annexing the Republic of Hawaii to the United States is signed; the Republic would not be dissolved until a year later.
June 22 » British colonial officers Charles Walter Rand and Lt. Charles Egerton Ayerst are assassinated in Pune, Maharashtra, India by the Chapekar brothers and Mahadeo Vinayak Ranade, who are later caught and hanged.
When copying data from this family tree, please include a reference to the origin: Hans Weening, "Family tree Weening", database, Genealogy Online (https://www.genealogieonline.nl/stamboom-weening/I132200.php : accessed October 22, 2026), "Jelle Spoelstra (1896-1897)".
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