Monday, December 23, 2013

A Puzzle for New Year's Day ?


I've decided to be come a SCRIBE! This only means that I'm helping to index Washington state birth records from the Washington Archives site  ( https://scribe.digitalarchives.wa.gov/Home/Index ) which is VERY fun and VERY easy. I recommend it to all of you!

Doing some entries for Spokane County births, I came upon a female child, unnamed but born alive, to Henrietta Day, age 34, and was her 6th child, and father John McNeal. The little girl was born on 3 Sep 1893. What caught my eye was that under "location" it stated that she was born "on bluff street near river bank." Hummmmm..... thanks to some images from our Spokesman Review found in Google images, I wondered:  is this where the family was living???

So here is your puzzle for New Year's Day if you do not care to watch football all day! In all fairness, I did check the 1900 and 1910 censuses for Washington and did not find the McNeal family. Nor did I find any listings in our Washington Digital Archives.

If you would care to weigh in on this puzzle, please do! And please let me know what you find.............. did this baby girl grow up and have a life??

Donna

4 comments:

Charles said...

Well Bluff Street was later renamed Summit Boulevard. I checked the city directories 1892-1896 and the only McNeal was Frank McNeal. Frank is close to the same age as John and lived west of Spokane near where Geiger Heights is today, so maybe a brother? 1893 was a terrible depression in the USA, and so it is possible John did not stay in the area long, but moved on looking for work.

Larry Cebula said...

Charles, do you know when Bluff was renamed Summmit?

I found this 1896 municipal code that refers to both Bluff and Summit streets, so at one time they were distinct: http://bit.ly/1dpHM1K

Larry Cebula said...

Oh, and thank you for promoting Scribe! We at the Washington State Archives are very proud of it and would love to have more volunteers!

Charles said...

Larry Not sure which one of the city directories had the name change, but I think it was 1895 or 1896, I only checked one year for the street name and it had that change to Summit Blvd.