Category Archives: research resources
Annexed Cities
One of the most common questions I receive on my blog is about the Seattle City Limits and on what date different areas came into the city. Some neighborhoods of Seattle such as Ballard and Ravenna started out as separate … Continue reading
Seattleness
Did you know that Seattle residents live under 240 days of gray skies per year? The cover illustration of this wonderful book, Seattleness, is a histogram featuring color samples from the Seattle sky measured over a year’s time and laid … Continue reading
Seattle Stream Names
The City of Seattle has at least fifty streams flowing across its ridges, through meadows and wetlands into bodies of water including Puget Sound and Lake Washington. There is no one source for a list of Seattle streams and their … Continue reading
Seattle Street Names North of Lake Union
Seattle historian Rob Ketcherside has previously cataloged the street names which were reorganized in a major City ordinance in the year 1895. This was when the decision was made to have streets keep one name along their entire length, instead … Continue reading
Discovering History through Digitized Newspapers
Washington State is rich in digital resources for historic research. Many of the research collections of the Washington State Library are on-line. The Washington State Library, a division of the Office of Secretary of State, has launched a new website … Continue reading
Fremont Drug Company in Seattle, Part One: Beginnings
In the 1880s the City of Seattle had been growing slowly and was only the second-largest city in Washington Territory, after Walla Walla. At the end of that decade, Seattle experienced a growth spurt from an unexpected source: a major … Continue reading
The Naming of Seattle
Along with the story of the naming of Seattle’s downtown streets, here on this blog I have also explored ways to find out the meaning of street names outside of the downtown area. The origins of the naming of the … Continue reading
Searching for the Origins of Seattle Street Names
There is no resource list of the meanings of Seattle’s street names or how the street names were derived. Even the granddaughters of Seattle city founder Arthur Denny were left to speculate on his choices of the names for twelve … Continue reading
Finding House Histories in Wedgwood
Do you know the history of your house? Information about your house, including its age and its setting in the Wedgwood neighborhood of northeast Seattle, can tell you about the house itself and about the people who have lived on … Continue reading
Original Resources, Real History
Have you heard of Frederich Drumpf, a German immigrant who operated a restaurant in Seattle in the 1890s? Real historians use original documents and verify their sources, and in this essay by Seattle historian Rob Ketcherside, we see that getting … Continue reading
