All, this is a very interesting collection of newspaper stories about solar storms reported in the news spanning from the 1800’s up.   Analyzing some of this quickly, many of the storms do not coincide with solar maximums.  I was surprised at the volume of the reports.  You can just imagine the chaos from a big solar storm today. 

https://www.solarstorms.org/SRefStorms.html

Mark WB5ANN