Seattle History: July 15, 1916

On this day in Seattle History....

July 15th 1916

 "William Boeing incorporates Pacific Aero Products Co. for $100,000. Boeing buys 998 of the 1,000 stocks issued and moves the operation to the shipyard he bought in 1910. Many years later, this "Red Barn" building is moved to Seattle's Museum of Flight."

<http://www.boeing.com/boeing/history/chronology/chron01.page> William E Boeing (1881-1956)  The first of William Boeing's flights almost didn't make take off.  According to Boeing history, "Conrad Westervelt was posted East before the plane was finished. William Boeing continued the project and, in 1916, completed two B & Ws. When it was time for the B & W's first flight, the pilot was late. Boeing grew impatient and took the controls himself. As the pilot rushed to the hangar, he saw Boeing taxi to the end of the lake, turn, gun the engine and lift off for a quarter-mile hop. Although the loss of Westervelt was a setback, it did not affect Boeing's commitment to his fledgling company."  In 1917, the name was changed to the Boeing Airplane Co. <http://www.boeing.com/boeing/history/narrative/n003boe.page> William E. Boeing and pilot Eddie Hubbard flew the first international mail flight to the U.S. on March 3, 1919 from Vancouver, B.C. to Seattle. UW alumnus Clairmont Egtvedt later designed the Model 40 plane that in 1927 won Boeing the contract to deliver mail from San Francisco to Chicago.

http://www.washington.edu/news/2012/11/09/uw-department-of-aeronautics-astronautics-named-for-william-e-boeing/

PART 3: UNLABELED-KNOWN photos

If you are following along this month's series of photo organization then hopefully you've been able to get your pile of photos down to something less overwhelming and more manageable.  Know that one size organization does not fit all.  My goal for this series is to help organize photos in a simple, genealogy based basic way that will not only help preserve and organize the photos but also jump start your own photo display and family storytelling.

Up until now we've organized identified photos and used genealogy tools to look at clues for better identification.  Now we get down to the tricky stuff.  In many cases there will be photos that will always be a mystery as to the who what when and where of it.  In some case we can still use basic genealogy sleuthing skills to discover a better idea of who the little girl with the teddy bear is.

Here we go! 

The first step in this part of the process is to go through the photos and find ones that you THINK you know or are SURE you know.  The one of your great grandfather holding a baby on the front porch where the baby is your uncle. Or you grandma's first communion photo.

 The photo does not tell you this but you can ask and answer 3 questions.

• Are you directly related to them?  Like your mom or siblings.
• Do you personally know them?  Like your uncle or grandparents.
• Do you have other photos from the same time period where the people are identified?

If the questions can not be positively answered then put them into a separate pile.  The last question is important but tricky.  The idea is to stay away from assumptions.  Just because a photo is identified as "Fanny Stowell 1895 6 mos." and shows a baby sitting in a fancy wicker or carved chair does not necessarily mean it's the same child in the chair 5 years later just because it's a girl about the same age that Fanny would have been.  The chair could have been give to a relative or the girl could have been a neighbor or friend and the chair was the fanciest one in town.  If it doesn't say, don't assume unless you can answer the 3 questions.  Instead the photos should be easier to identify with our 3 question rule, like your mom and dad's wedding picture or your mom as a baby with Aunt Sally who always wore big hats.  Once you've completed this task,  go back to step 1 from the first post and fill out your worksheet, labels and sleeves.  

 The next task is to use your sleuthing skills.  You might not be able to answer the three questions exactly on some photos.  Instead, you say "I think this is Aunt Rose." or "I think this looks like cousin Lavern."  If you can sort them into a surname category, then do that and put them into envelopes that you can take to show other relatives.  It's best to choose 10-20 photos, put them in sleeves for protection and bring a notebook.  You can use a basic label and give each photo a number and surname (if you know which family side it might belong to.) Like this:

You may also want to label the actual photo.  Be sure to use labels that are acid free and removable.  Your notebook should contain specific action items:

• Who
• What
• When 
• Where

In the picture above we can tell the male is wearing a sailor uniform of sorts.  The collection of photos was from a specific family member so I know the surname of family I can ask.  The time period can be identified to WWII so that narrows down the what and the when.  Now I just need to find someone in the family that can tell me the who and where.  The more information about the photo we have, the more accurate it will be.  The person giving the information should be able to answer the earlier 3 questions.  

This photo activity should keep you busy for awhile.  Just remember to break it down into manageable sections and only work on a few at a time, especially when visiting relatives.  

Look for a few other non photo related posts this week and like my Facebook page Emerald City Genealogy for interactive discussions on organization, Seattle history and more!

Organizational series-Photos Part 2: Who Are They Really?

 Last week I began a series on organizing your old photos. Let's recap!

 We sorted our photos into piles and started with one that were already identified by what was on the back. What that means is someone at some time wrote a sort of ID on it.  We then put them in sleeves, relabeled them, created a worksheet for them and then created a file folder for them.  You can learn how to do this here. One note of caution,  although your photos may have a name on the back or be identified as "my mother's wedding photo" mistakes and mis identification does happen.  This post explains how we will better identify what we have when all we know is "Nana's cousin."

The materials I suggested in the last post allows for easy adjustments. (Easy to remove photos from sleeves and removable labels, for example.) To sort our ID'd photos further we must examine each photo closely.  If your photo says something like "Betty Jean Oliver, age 6mos. 1895" then mostly likely the information is correct.  You can sometimes check the age by looking at clues like type of photo (cabinet card, tin type, etc.), clothing, hairstyles, backdrop, etc.  Even then errors can occur but unless you have reason to believe otherwise, the photos that look to be accurate with this information can be considered done and ready to be filed away.  There is always more we can do of course, like research the story behind the photo or research what the family was doing at the time the photo was taken, but for now take a deep breath and hold your itchy fingers still.  Today we are only organizing our mess of photos!

The next step is to turn our attention on photos that have identification but seem fishy.  They just don't seem accurate or are confusing, using nicknames or were written by grandma and just say "auntie's children." Here is a good example...


Take a look at these two photos.

The first one is labeled "my mother's in her wedding dress" but is crossed out and underneath is written "MD Pease" in some completely different handwriting. 

The second photo is labeled "Grandma Hubble in wedding dress".
Both photos were together in an album but not an album of the era.  For awhile I believed what was written.  They were added to my family tree as is.  Photo 1 was M.D. Pease and photo 2 was Elizabeth "Grandma" Hubble in her wedding dress.  I was wrong and so was the identification.  How do I know? After working on the family tree the photos didn't seem right anymore.  I decided to look at other clues.
Take photo #1. Is it "my mother" or "M.D. Pease?" The photos belonged to my father in law.  They were members of his family and the album they were in was not an album of the era. You know the kind, black paper that has every photo glued down for life.  Her aunt was M.D. Pease.  For those who know Seattle history, MD Pease was a well known woman business owner.  She sold hats in her popular millinery shop on Front St. in Seattle.  Her shop burned down with many others in the Great Seattle Fire. I needed to find out if it was his mother in her wedding dress or his grandmother in her wedding dress or if it was Aunt Pease.  I needed to use my genealogy skills for process elimination.  Which one was married during this time and who was in Seattle?  It was NOT Mrs. Pease.  I did a quick search and M.D. Pease was a widow in 1880 and did not show up in Washington Territory until 1887.
So it was either my father in law's mother, Hazel, or her mother, Elizabeth aka "Grandma."  Hazel was born in 1892 and married in 1917.  Looking at the backround and dress style I googled "wedding dress in 1917 U.S."and clicked on the image button.  I scrolled down and clicked on a link to one of my favorite sites for era clothing,  Fashion-Era.com.  The examples of styles in 1917 looked nothing like the picture.  So I canceled out Hazel and looked at Elizabeth.  Was this her? She was married in 1891 in Ohio.  She was not married in Seattle either!  I did the next logical thing, I looked up the photographer. "Braas."  I didn't need to know much, just when this business was up and running.  Thanks to google and University of Washington's digital collections, Braas was taking photos between 1889 and 1893.  Most likely this photo was of Elizabeth.  Hazel would have written "my mother's in her wedding dress" and someone else could have written M.D.Pease at a later date.

Now to confuse things. Let's look at photo #2.  "Grandma Hubble."  This was trickier except for 1 thing.  The photographer's name and date.  This took a trusty magnifier to see but I was able to identify "James Bushnell 1906" on the photo.  I also compared the 2 photos since they were together in the same album. The person in each photo looked like the same person or extremely related.  The eyes, eyebrows, chin and even the way the earring hung off her left ear as well as nostrils and lips and the tilt of her head.  This could be Elizabeth.  Now I had questions.  I knew the picture was taken by a James Bushnell in 1906, but where and why?  Back to google! That really didn't do much, so I went to Ancestry.com and went right to the Seattle city directory to find the name "Bushnell." Still not perfect.  The closest I came up with was a Correy Bushnell who worked for "James & Bushnell". More sleuthing! For only 1 picture!  So flip to James and find "James and Bushnell, photgrs." Bingo! I could also have gone straight to the back of the directory and looked under photographers.  Either way I found what I had hoped for.

So, my conclusion about the photos is that #1 is almost definitely Elizabeth Hubbell and not M.D. Pease.  It may be her wedding dress but it was not her wedding in 1892 Ohio.  Photo #2 was taken by James & Bushnell in 1906 in Seattle and is likely to be Elizabeth based on photo comparisons and other clues i.e written "Grandma Hubble," but it is not her wedding photo. It is unknown why it was taken.

What does this all mean for photo organization?  It gives you a good example of how slow going yet rewarding it can be.  Each piece plays a part in the discovery of the family history stories.  They are not just names and dates.  You may never find out who "Honey and Bud" were exactly but investigating the most likely relative they were connected to will start the clue solving. Sometimes the picture is not of a relative at all.   In case you were wondering, "Honey" was my grandmother's best friend. I made up Bud.  My grandmother has dementia now and can't tell the stories any longer but the name "Honey" is on the back of a photo.  Later I found a newspaper clipping in my grandmother's old album announcing the marriage of Violet.  It was Honey.

How does this all fit in to organization?  The goal is to identify as many of our photos as possible until we are left with (hopefully) just a small number of "who the heck are these people?" type photos.  Now finish up your next group of identified photos so we can move on to the next topic: Unlabeled photos.