Have you ever been to Danville? There are 24 places in America with the name of Danville, but our Danville is in Ferry County, Washington, just a few miles south of the border with Canada. 

Originally named Nelson from merchants Peter and his uncle Ole Nelson. An early reference to this settlement is dated 1896. The town was renamed in 1899 to prevent confusion with Nelson, British Columbia just across the border.  By 1897 the town boasted a jewelry and watch repair section of a general store, a post office, a newspaper (lasted only a year) and a sawmill. By 1913, the mill which produced 50,000 feet of lumber daily, was one of the three larger producers in the area.The 1920s brought increasing prosperity to Danville when it became a rendezvous for whiskey smugglers, who employed local guides familiar with the old trails to avoid detection by border authorities as they smuggled booze from Canada down into the “dry” U.S. 

The top image is of the U.S.-Canada border crossing station. The lower photo is the Nelson’s general store in the 1890s. 

 From the website MyNorthwest:  Danville is in the part of Washington that was once the Colville Indian Reservation. However, when valuable minerals were discovered there, the land was taken away from Indigenous people by the federal government and opened to settlement and mineral claims by white homesteaders and miners. This little-remembered episode surely ranks as one of the great injustices in the state’s history.

Sue Kreikemeier is president of the Whitman County Genealogical Society. Her editorial in their November 2025 newsletter was a real zinger and I asked permission from her to share it with you.

“Dear Readers, I am sure many of you can related to the quandary I find myself facing on a continual basis… how to manage my plethora of notes, hard copy records, unlabeled family photos and other ephemera from my genealogical pursuits. How do I know what to keep and what to toss out? Might something seeming irrelevant become an important clue in the future? 

“Asking myself what is a “keeper,” I went to Google and found many definitions. My favorites were (1)a person whose job it is to guard to take care of something or (2) a curator. This gave me a new way of looking at those challenging piles and files. Instead of thinking about which items I should keep, I started thinking about how I might better define and deliver on my role of “keeper” especially as it relates to family history.”

Sue went on in this editorial to tell about how she and her siblings were collaborating on putting down their memories of a very frightening event that occurred in the family when Sue was about nine years old. Sue says she has realized that “sometimes being a “keeper” means sharing something that can’t be found in any document or archive.”

Isn’t that just another way to say WRITE YOUR STORIES NOW! I think Sue would second that motion. 

Do you know what an ossuary is? What it was used for….and when? Well, let’s learn!

An ossuary was usually a smallish chest or box used to hold the bones or cremains of the dead. As far back as 40 B.C. ossuaries were popular among the Jewish population.  Historically they have been used in areas where burial space was scarce or in situations were large numbers of people died in a short time such as a plague or battle. Also, over time, they were used when the bones were exhumed from a grave to make space for a new burial. (Very common in Europe even today. You have your cemetery space or plot for x-number of years and then the plot is reused.)

Are ossuaries used today? Certainly yes. How many have their deceased loved ones still with them sitting on the mantel?? There are funeral urns even for our beloved pets!