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-------- "A Sense of Place" |
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LOCALITIES A - C |
LOCALITIES D - H |
LOCALITIES I - P |
LOCALITIES Q - Z |
Have you ever heard of "The Thumb"? Or "Gypo City"? Or "Punkintown"? Yes indeed, these ARE honest-to-goodness Snohomish County place names! Where WAS "Wana"? Did your great gramma live in "Grace"? Are there REALLY whales in Whaleback Precinct?
This Snohomish County Gazetteer is an attempt to gather ALL county place names into one finding aid for use by family and local historians as well as people who wonder about old-time localities.
People using this gazetteer for the first time might be surprised at what they DON'T find for a given locality entry - they won't find extensive information or stories about individual localities. Researchers are encouraged to check out the sources given for each locality to learn more about that locality. There's no search engine for the project pages because the data is already alpha-sorted, and there are links to the alpha sections at the bottom of each page.Sources for the information given for each locality are listed in brackets at the end of the locality's entry. Some of the sources were: Whitfield's History of Snohomish County; the GNIS online data base; the Tacoma Public Library's online data base; "Postmark-Washington"; two historical post office records groups on microfilm (from the National Archives); a gazetter of Washington from 1901; various maps and atlases; several reference books on "old railroads"; community histories; lists of precincts from censuses and from the Snohomish County Auditor's office and, of course, interviews with some wonderful SnoCo experts. Needless to say, the Gazetter wil grow as more localities are discovered.
What exactly IS "a locality"? For the purposes of this gazetteer, a "locality" has a name and defined borders. A person should be able to put his or her finger on a map and say, "Yep, 'Grace' (or 'Wana' or 'Bostian' or wherever) is/was RIGHT HERE, and THAT'S where my Great Grandfather's brother lived!" Thus census and voting precincts (if named) are considered "localities" because they have names and defined borders.
How did this project start?
A genealogy researcher who lives in the mid-West emailed me, asking where "Manor Lake" was. She said her target ancestor lived in "Manor Lake Township, Snohomish County" in 1930. She couldn't find this township on any county map. It took a bit of head scratching before I figured out that she had assumed that "Manor Lake Precinct" (as given on the 1930 census page) was, if not a "township", at least a "locality", which, when you come to think of it, it IS!
There are many really good place name reference sources - both in print and online. To find a particular Snohomish County locality, a researcher might have to look at many of these reference sources, and even then, may not find the target locality listed in ANY of them. Some localities are just too obscure, too unimportant to be included in a few of these sources.
The Snohomish County Gazetteer Project is an attempt to create a Master List of Snohomish County localities with source information.
Included in the data base are some entries that at first glance don't fit the definition for "localities" - lakes, mountain peaks, streams and the like. I've learned that county precincts often took their names from landforms and roads; adding these non-localities to the data file may provide clues as to where the precinct actually was (although not always!)
Human beings seem to have a tendency to name things. Many ancient people believed that if you knew the name of your enemy, you had power over that enemy - think Rumplestiltskin.
When our ancestors gave names to communities and landforms, they were doing more than just distinguishing one place or land feature from another. The naming gave them a sense of ownership of the place where they lived. Our ancestors knew that future generations would remember them and what they had accomplished.
Naming a locality after something or someone from Back Home helped our ancestors to recreate the familiar, reminding them of another time, another place, another person.
Researching our families is a bit easier when we have "a sense of place" - I hope this project will be useful in your research.
Comments, suggestions, additions, corrections, etc., are welcome! Email Marge at sigs@alderwood.org ATTN: website
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LOCALITIES A - C |
LOCALITIES D - H |
LOCALITIES I - P |
LOCALITIES Q - Z |
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