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!

On the top is the Frederick Longbotham Building. Constructed in 1909, the building was designed to provide residential rooms for working men…….. and after the 1889 fire devastated Spokane, workers flocked in to help rebuild the city. This building provided 57 rooms on the upper floors while renting street level spaces for local businesses. Opening in the 1910s as the Frederick Hotel, it was one of the most successful and prominent Japanese-owned businesses in Spokane. The building was renamed in the 1930s by the new owner, Lewis Longbotham. This building is historically interesting also because of it’s “ghost signs:”  Albers Rolled Oats, Rex Flour, Bull Durham Tobacco, painted in places of high visibility to appeal to workers passing through from the nearby rail depots, are still faintly visible today. 

The Rainier Tower in downtown Seattle is a 41-story skyscraper completed in 1977. It has an unusual appearance, being atop an 11-story concrete pedestal base that tapers towards ground level like an inverted pyramid. The design was chosen in order to preserve the greenery of downtown Seattle and allow more ground space to be devoted to a retail shopping plaza. Locals often refer to it as the “Beaver Building” as its physical appearance looks like a tree being felled by a beaver. It has also been referred to as the “Golf Tee Building.”

Ever been out on Fairchild Air Force Base and driven past the real-life B-52 parked on display there? My father, Francis Harold Potter, was the AC (Aircraft Commander) of that very plane! My son took the serial number of that plane and did the research to prove that fact.

Dad would have been 105 years old today. He’s been gone for 22 years. And I realize every day that I should have given him more of my time. 

I’m so glad I talked to him over the years gleaning his stories….. from a poor, rural Illinois childhood, to a brilliant career in the Air Force (he flew in the Berlin Airlift and Operation Chromedome), to a great grandpa to children. He did his last waterskiing at age 80. He and Mom traveled the world. He could change rocks into candy for big-eyed grandchildren. He was a great guy.

Asking my grandmother how she named him, she explained that she liked “Frank” but that sounded too grownup for a baby so they settled on Francis. As for Harold? She giggled and lowered her voice to tell me “It was after an old boyfriend…but I never told Mel!” 

The point of this post today is to beg you to procrastinate no longer! Talk to your elders and learn their stories!  And get your own stories down either on paper or computer. Please just do it.