Monday, January 30, 2023

EWGS Tours Our Washington Digital Archives

 

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. :-)

 If you have ancestors in the Eastern Washington area, there is most likely information on that ancestor at the Cheney Archives.  Yes, we’ve all happily used the online Washington Digital Archives, but as the ledger Lee is holding proves, not nearly everything in their holdings has been digitized.

 

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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