Does anybody living remember little Freddie Whitehouse? 

This dear soul rests in a remote part of Greenwood Cemetery in Spokane. The inscription reads:  FREDDIE, son of L.M. and H.M., died July 28, 1888, aged 5 years, 7 months, 27 days. He was likely named after Lewis’s brother, Fred, who died in 1872. 

In the summer of 1888, there was an epidemic of typhoid fever in Spokane. Is this his cause of death? 
A (well sourced) family tree found on Ancestry shows him to be the son of Lewis Hanson Whitehouse, born 1844 in Maine, died 1919 in California, and Hannah Mein, born 1845 in Scotland, died 1926 in California. Little Freddie had siblings Lewis, Herbert and Eva. Lewis and Hannah had married on 17 Aug 1871 in Port Townsend, Jefferson County, WA. 

Somehow Lewis and Hannah migrated unmarried from Maine and Scotland by 1871. So the Whitehouse family was in Washington Territory well before statehood and were living in Spokane by 1885.
Does anybody remember little Freddie Whitehouse?

This is why it is so important to record family stories. Not one child deserves to be forgotten. Take part of your day-after-Christmas to write down a memory from yesterday, Christmas Day, 2025. 

Susan Gallyon Dechant, president of the Northeast Washington Genealogical Society, does have a beautiful smile but she was not smiling when she gave a thoughtful presentation to her group on Wednesday, November 12.

Susan knew that her father, Charles Gallyon, had served in WWII in the Army’s10th Mountain Division but not much more. Upon her brother’s death, Susan inherited their father’s trunk containing treasures. These included artifacts, photos, notebooks and some 400 letters he’d written to Susan’s mother during his service years.

The 10th Mountain trained in the high mountains of Colorado for nearly two years before being sent to Italy in 1944. Their mission was to wipe the German presence from northern Italy. It was winter; the terrain mountainous…just what they’d trained for. And they succeeded. AND Susan’s father lived to return home.
Susan tearfully recalled reading the letter dated May 1, 1945, telling his wife what he had been doing in the war ……. that very day Susan was being born in far away California. 
In September, 2025, to mark the 80th anniversary of the 10th Mountain’s success in Italy, Susan, her two sisters, and Lora Rose (another member of the NeWGS group whose father was also attached to the 10th Mountain) went on the anniversary tour. They tearfully walked the very places where their fathers walked. To their amazement, they were feted every day of the trip by the Italian people still in thankfulness for their liberation some 80 years previously. 

Why share Susan’s story? To remind you that every family has family stories! Every grandfather did something to be remembered for. And it’s up to us, you and me, to ferret out those stories and tell them.

Don’t recall how I discovered mudlarking, but once I watched a few of Nicola White’s mudlarking adventures walking the foreshore of the River Thames in London, I was hooked. London has been there for 400 years and as it sites where the tide sloshes the shores twice daily, Nicola (and many others) find all sorts of treasures, from old to new from valuable to silly.

Google defines mudlarking as “the activity of scavenging the muddy foreshore of a river, most famously the River Thames, for historical objects that have been lost or discarded over centuries.”

Hers is not the only YouTube website for this type of adventure. Briefly there was Below the Plains, where the fellow would (with permission) dig into old outhouse pits and find hundreds of old bottles and other artifacts. 

And there are other good places to watch while eating lunch. SiFinds is one; Adventure Archaeology is another (they walk the banks of rivers in the US south); Bottle Fever is one. And if your interest is piqued, I’m sure you’ll find others. 

Remember: these mudlarkers of any ilk are finding the artifacts from our ancestors’ lives.