Last October, a group of EWGS members made their way to
Cheney to visit and have a tour of our Eastern Washington Branch of the
Washington State Archives. This facility on the EWU campus is also the home to
the entire Washington State Digital Archives. We were there to meet with
Lee Pierce for a tour of the "downstairs," the "paper"
archives.” The photo below shows most of the group there that day.
Lee took us back into the area where these paper records are
shelved. It was cold in there and lucky were the ones who thought to bring a
sweater. “Cold and dry storage is what preserves records,” Lee
quipped. Here he shows us a great
example of what can be found at the Cheney Archives (the nickname). He’s holding a handwritten ledger listing the
inmates of the Spokane city jail in the early 1900s. The record gives so much
information! Name, age, where living, crime, etc. (I looked for your surname but, lucky for
you, didn’t find it. :-)
Please remember that you don’t do research in an archives by the name of the ancestor. You look for a group record where he might be listed. These sources include: birth, marriage, divorce, death, census records, frontier Justice, land Records, map records, plat books…. You get the idea. You don’t just walk into an archives. First you make an appointment. When you arrive you put your belongings in a locker and take with you only paper and pencil. Laptops or tablet are okay.
We were very grateful to Lee Pierce for taking time to
educate our EWGS group. As we left, he encouraged us to look at the enlarged
document hanging just outside the archives’ entrance. It is the death
certificate for Chief Garry.
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