Bringing the Ghosts to Life – Doing a House History

People who live in old houses must sometimes be aware of the residents who came before them. Just for the briefest time, there may be a shadow, or a current of air—something that suggests another presence or, perhaps, earlier residents. Sometimes they have left some physical object behind, tossed in a corner somewhere … that is how I came to own the drill bit.

Sitting in my (their) living room, I often wondered about the owners before me—what kind of people were they? How did they live? Living in their house, I felt curiosity, but only vague kinship, until the day I discovered, wedged in an unfinished basement wall, a carpenter’s bit from a brace and bit. Wedged pretty tight, too—I had to work to gouge it out. But holding it in my hand, I felt a very strong sense of the man who had worked there years ago, gotten it wedged into the wall, and finally abandoned it after some effort to remove it. (I could see very old chisel marks around where the bit had been.) This was so like something I might do, that I wanted to meet the man who had left the bit behind—but he was long gone, and maybe unfindable. I decided to investigate the people who’d lived in my house before me. Impossible? Not at all, as I discovered in the Library.

My first efforts involved contacting the Washington State Archives office where the old property records are held—assessor’s cards, most with a 1930s era photo of the building. The name of the owner at that time (ca. 1937) was also given, and the news that my house was older than that—the city of Seattle said 1910. That seemed incorrect, since I had found newspapers under a closet floor dated around 1900, but I was sure that the 1937 owner was not the man I was looking for. How to go further back? I knew that the Seattle City Directories listed residents by address, but quickly discovered that that kind of listing did not begin until about 1937, and I wanted to go much further back in time.

Records that are organized by address are very sporadic before 1937, so I turned to another source—the United States Census. I know that in the census records, people are listed sort of by address—census takers would go down streets house by house, recording the residents—but how to find my house? Pretty much all of the past census records that are available to family history searchers, or any other scholar, are now online, and Seattle Public Library offers access to these through some of its genealogy databases, for example, Ancestry Library Edition or HeritageQuest Online.

Faced with the prospect of looking page by page through computer images from the census takers’ records, I was helped by a passing librarian who showed me Stephen Morse’s Census Enumeration District Index on the web, which lists the census district for each street, for each decade’s census. Searching this tool for 1920, by my street name, gave me the enumeration district number and page number in the 1920 census taker’s records for the house’s inhabitants in April of 1920 when the census taker knocked on the door. I could do another search, and find out who was there in 1910. This was very valuable information, and I was maybe closing in on my drill-bit dropper. The search required me to scan through the computer-image pages of the census taker’s book, looking for my house number in the listings.

What I was most struck by, in encountering these people for the first time, was how many of them there were—four adults, four children—living in my tiny house, which at that time had only four small rooms! As it turned out, the family name was Nienau, and the patriarch, Henry, his wife, Lucy. Henry’s occupation shown here was “Gardiner” and his daughter Lizzie worked as an ironer at a laundry.

To be continued…
~John S