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The year is 1913 and the place is Seattle, Washington. We’re researching Roy Archibald (1889-1917) and this is the first time and place we locate Roy outside of his home state, Wisconsin, where he was documented the prior year and where he had been attending business school in Green Bay in 1910.

What brought Roy to Seattle, where he would marry Hazel Clara Redmond a year later and, by 1917, re-locate to Portland, Oregon, working as a ticket agent for the Oregon-Washington Railroad and Navigation Company (known variously as O-WR&N and OWRR)?

We’ll start with two facts: 1) the 1913 address we have for Roy is 603 Marion St. and 2) he was a bookkeeper when he lived there, according to the Seattle city directory. Google Maps reveals that this address no longer exists, as the Marion 600 block was leveled, along with several parallel blocks, to make room for the construction of Interstate 5 in the early 1960s.

View from 7th Ave. and James St. in 1963 – Seattle Times

Consulting a Seattle map from 1913, however, we find that 603 Marion St. was located about 15 blocks from the O-WRR dock, where goods were loaded and unloaded between railway cars and ships docked in Elliott Bay to the west.

Further research revealed that the house at 603 Marion was built by the entrepreneur Joseph F. McNaught around 1881 and it was the McNaught family home until sold and converted to a rooming house called the Ross-Shire. There is no known connection between the McNaught family and Roy Archibald.

The only other photo discovered for this house was from 1914, taken during one of Seattle’s many re-grading projects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Presumably, Roy had left this address by 1914.

Having found a fair amount of information on the building itself, we turn next to tracking down what we can about anyone else living at 603 Marion – and whether they had any connection to Roy – while he was a resident there.

Fortunately, the Ancestry.com city directory database, where we found Roy’s residence record, is searchable on specific keywords like the residence address. So, to find Roy’s neighbors at 603 Marion in 1913, we enter 1913 and Seattle in the Any Event fields and select “Exact” for both. Next we enter “603 Marion”, in quotes, for the keyword and select “Exact” for that field too.

When we click “Search”, the database returns the list of people found in the city directory at 603 Marion in Seattle in 1913. Roy and his neighbors!

Selecting each of these records, we’re shown the basic information that appeared in the directory and a screen shot of the actual page. And in city directories, this information usually includes the resident’s occupation.

So our next step is to search U.S. census records from Seattle in 1910 and 1920 (the censuses taken immediately before and after 1913) for each of the names on our list. We’ll use the occupations we found in the city directory to (hopefully!) confirm that we have the right people.

This type of research into individuals other than our main subject is called “cluster research” or, alternatively, “FAN club“, meaning “Friends, Associates, Neighbors”. The aim is to find out what we can about the people who were in the subject’s social or family “cluster”, hoping it tells us more about the subject him/herself. Sometimes “FAN” even extends to people in the cluster of the people who were in the cluster of our main subject (twice-removed, if you will) looking for some useful information or connection back to him/her.

In our case, however, the connection is quickly evident:

Name	Occupation	Census	Birthplace	Age in 1913
Henry Williams	Stenographer	1920	Wisconsin	24
Georgia E. Cote	Bookkeeper	1920	Minnesota	29
Mabel E. Currier	Stenographer	1920	Michigan	26
Emma H. Hardin	Furniture	1910	Iowa	51
W.F. Johnston(e)	Salesman	1920	Iowa	29
Frank Patton	Plumber	1910	Kansas	34

Henry Williams was the same age as Roy, born in the same state, and had an office job, as did Roy. In fact, the 1920 census shows Henry working as a stenographer in the railroad industry.

Looking further into Henry’s past, we find that he grew up in Oconto, Wisconsin, the town where Roy was born, and that Henry was working as a bookkeeper and a stenographer for a lumber company in Oconto as early as 1910.

Clearly, Henry and Roy knew each other from their home town and they probably came west to Seattle at the same time to do office work at the same rail company. Perhaps they went to business school together or maybe Roy followed in his friend’s footsteps to prepare himself for an office job like the one Henry had in 1910.

How Roy and Henry found out about the job openings in Seattle with O-WR&N is still a mystery but we do know that the business college regularly solicited local companies in need of the stenographers the school was training.

One of several ads placed in the Green Bay Press-Gazette between 1910-1913.

Perhaps this outreach extended beyond Green Bay. Or maybe the school was in touch with the local rail company for news on open positions in the industry. Or, possibly, Henry Williams’ family had connections to Seattle or the railroads – clues that more FAN research might uncover (though none were found on this project).

We may never know exactly why Roy Archibald chose Seattle, moving nearly 2,000 miles west of Green Bay in 1912-1913. But, with the aid of FAN, we now know that Roy didn’t go west alone.