Going back to the 1900 census to do similar searching, I learned that my house was not there at all, and so had apparently been built some time between 1900 and 1910. Useful information indeed! I focused now on the family I’d found, and now that I had a family name to go by, my search was much simpler.
The Seattle City Directories listed residents by name, and I could find out lots about the Nienau family, going back before the 1910 Census. I learned that Henry, the father, most often identified as a “laborer,” worked some years for bottling firms, and that his son, Herman, worked as a driver, a bottler, or a packer for a bottling company, sometimes Rainier Bottling. Looking backwards year by year, they showed up at my address, with varying family members there, until 1904, when they were listed but not at my address. In the years before 1904, they boarded at various places, sometimes together, sometimes not. Henry is listed as a laborer in the 1899 directory, and by 1894/95, there are no members of the family to be found.
I could imagine the family coming to live in Seattle, boarding in homes east of downtown (all the residences were just east of the business district), finding employment, and eventually getting a house together. The house was not shown on the street in the 1900 census, not listed as the common residence until 1905, so it seemed that the likely date of construction was 1904—not 1910, as the City of Seattle believed.
Additional checking in other sources (the Digital Sanborn Maps, also available in print format in the Library’s Seattle Room) confirmed 1904 as the effective date that my little four-room house must have been built on the property. (In addition, there was in addition a barn or shed of some kind, so the Nienau family had had a horse at one time.)
I believe that the house was actually built by Henry Nienau, the laborer father of the family. It was (and is) a common place, unadorned little house, had only one closet, was heated by coal (a cookstove in the kitchen) and somehow provided shelter for all those people. It made sense to me that Henry, in his building, had gotten a drillbit stuck in one of the walls he was putting up. Since the family was never wealthy, always working class, that loss might have been a blow.
I wondered more about the Nienau family now as I bounced the drillbit in my hand. Had they chosen the ugly wallpaper in the bedroom? Was it their dog that made pawprints long ago in the basement floor? Had Lucy, the wife, used the cooler I found nailed shut in the kitchen, with rusty screen openings to the outdoors? How had all those people lived in my small house? Somehow, I didn’t have the same curiosity about the residents of my house after the Nienaus lived there. Only a few years after the Nienaus appearance in the 1910 Census, they were scattered—Henry, the father, was dead by the 1920 Census, and there were boarders living in the house along with the remaining family members. A
son had moved around the corner to a new house. I found Henry Junior’s WWI draft registration, but the traces of the family grew faint. The house survived earthquakes and other upheavals through the years and was occupied by careless renters, until I came.
I told myself that my research gave me a special rapport with the Nienau family, that I almost knew them. And, when I held Henry’s drillbit in my hand, it was almost as if they were there with me.
~John S
Leave a Comment