About this project.

I was born in Bellevue, and grew up on the Renton side of Squak Mountain, where it took a ten-minute drive to get anywhere. However, I spent my early '20's on Capitol Hill, where my first car was Metro and my second, a pair of boots. This skewed my sense of distance. So when I moved to Roosevelt in 1986, I felt as if I'd come to the ends of the earth.

In 1910, as it happens, Roosevelt (which wasn't called Roosevelt yet) was the ends of the earth (or, at least, of Seattle). The 1905 Baist's Real Estate Atlas of Seattle (viewable online through the Seattle Public Library) shows the city bounded by (NE) 85th to the north and 15th (Ave. E.) to the east. The people in the 1910 census were living in a new neighborhood. It was probably as bald of trees as any new suburban development. It needed time to mellow and grow green again. The new houses needed to age. The character needed to set.

At this writing, it's 2014, and Roosevelt is being transmogrified (as it was in the beginning, and again when Interstate 5 cut it off from Green Lake). We've got light rail coming. We've got boosters and new development. Houses that stood in the neighborhood from the beginning will, inevitably, fall. It's a good time to look back and see who first made them into homes.

There are 183 dwellings listed in Enumeration District 188 for the 1910 census. That's a lot of dwellings. I'm limiting my research to that which I can do online, at home, in my pajamas, with a bunny and some knitting close at hand. I will link to more thorough sources of information, when and where I find them.

Because when it comes down to it, I'm not a historian. I'm just awfully nosy.