Postal Forwarding Books
This is not a single book but a large group of books made by some unknown postal worker in the Spokane Post Office. The postal worker took apart city directories added four pages of lined paper between each page of the city directory. The city directory page was divided into four parts (see red lines on the city directory page), and when someone moved they were put on one of the lined pages, upper left of page on first page, lower left on second page, upper right on third page, and lower right on fourth page. The books were bound about an inch thick, so each year has 8-10 small books. This is a page from the 1913 Polk City Directory, and you notice a few corrections on this page, and some dates.
The second page is the fourth hand written page and contains Baileys from “F” to “O”. Most of the listings are for people moving to a new address in Spokane, but on this page there was mail forwarded to Colville, Ione, Waterville, Seattle, Cheney, Clagstone, Idaho, Kahlotus, Helena Montana, Tekoa, San Francisco, California, and Boise, Idaho. You also see dates like 4/2 and 4/4. We have never figured out the other codes.
Years ago I got a request to find a persons grandparents, they appeared in the 1910 census and gone by 1920, so I checked the postal forwarding books and found them. They had moved to a small town just south of Calgary Alberta Canada. It took a very large map of the area near Calgary to find the town. A month or so later I got an E-Mail back from the gentleman and his grandparents were listed in a cemetery in that town in Canada. Without these postal forwarding books there would have been no way to find the grandparents.
The earliest ones we have is from 1903 and the last ones are in the 1930s, but the last fifteen years they were not used a lot so very few names on the lined paper. Since they were in such bad shape from old paper and a lot of use the Spokane Library started digitizing them and was hoping to finish them during covid but only finished up through 1918. They are on the Internet Archive and are searchable at: Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine
The actual books are in the Inland NW Special Collections Room on the 3rd floor of the Central Library in Spokane Washington.