Digging For Roots Genealogy Library Holds Fascinating Secrets For Those Willing To Dig Into It

In every family, it is said, there lurks a mystery.

For the past 25 years, genealogy sleuths have been solving them, or at least trying, at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ family history center in the Spokane Valley.

Take Rosette Hanshaw, a Valley resident and one of 30 volunteer librarians at the center. She began digging into family lineage several years ago, and soon uncovered a bizarre secret.

Using yellowing documents and microfilm at the family history center, as well as records found in libraries and courthouses elsewhere around the region, Hanshaw pieced together a profile of her son-in-law’s great-great grandfather, MacClellan O. Reed.

Reed, a lawyer who worked for area timber companies, died in 1913 in an automobile accident near Newman Lake. He was 37 years old, and was survived by a widow and a son in Spokane.

Through her genealogical research, Hanshaw discovered something more about Reed.

“He left a family behind he never told a soul about,” she said. “He had a wife and two kids back in Nebraska, where he had come from.”

Not everyone unearths such juicy tidbits while digging at their roots. But for folks with an interest in genealogy, the Valley family history center is often the place where questions are answered and answers lead to more questions.

Gordon Hawkins is the center’s director. He points to four computers, 10 microfilm and microfiche readers, and stacks of bound archives that folks like Hanshaw use in tracing their kinfolk. The Valley library also can obtain records from the world’s largest family-history archive at LDS headquarters in Salt Lake City, he said.

The Valley genealogy library, originally on North Pines, moved in 1994 to its current site in the LDS East Stake Center at 40th and Highway 27. There are now three other Mormon genealogy libraries in Spokane, but the Valley’s is the area’s oldest and it remains the largest.

Genealogy is important to the Mormon church because members construct ancestral pedigrees, then go back and baptize relatives who were not in the church during their own lifetimes. Members also seal, or bless, non-Mormon marriages in their families’ pasts.

But people don’t have to be Mormons to use the facilities here. In fact, Hawkins said, half of the people using the library are not church members. About 500 people use the library every month.

Liberty Lake’s Marie Larson has been a volunteer at the family history center in the Valley almost since the center opened.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do nearly as much research on my family, or as economically as I did it, without the library,” Larson said. “As an armchair genealogist, I don’t see how you could not use the family history center.

“To really do research and dig into records, there is no substitute for the microfilm,” she said. “Not unless you can go to the place where your family lived and see the records themselves.”

Quite a task, considering many of those records remain buried in musty vaults back in our forebears’ native countries. Fortunately, the library has records - or can get copies of records - from all over the world.

Kathy MacGregor, another volunteer at the center, is one of five LDS-accredited Native American genealogy researchers in the United States. Her grandfather, George Haines, was a member of the Spokane Tribe. Her mother - Haines’ daughter - was born here in the Valley.

Through her research, MacGregor also has documented Native American ties to some of the Spokane Valley’s most prominent pioneers, including Steven Liberty (for whom Liberty Lake was named), William Newman (Newman Lake), and Daniel Courchaine (one of the Valley’s first settlers).

All three men married half-Indian women from the same family, MacGregor said. “Would you pass up an opportunity like that? These women were sturdy, they could build a house anywhere. And they knew how to live in this country,” she said.

Jack Goodwin, a retired Valley physical therapist, estimates he has spent 400 hours researching his family history since he started a year and a half ago. And he’s not finished yet - not by a long shot.

“It’s a never-ending story,” Goodwin said. “The farther you go back, the harder it gets.”

He said he decided to research the history of his family simply because he knew so little about where they came from. He said he knew virtually nothing about his father’s ancestors.

“Now, I’ve got it back five generations, back into the late 1700s,” he said.

Knowing your family’s genealogy is a means of getting to know yourself, where you came from, Goodwin said. It’s also a hobby that he can pass on to his two children, should they develop an interest.

“It’s exciting to know the past,” Goodwin said. “My goal is to find a living second cousin and be able to call them up and say, “Hi, I’m your relative.”’

Behind the front desk at the library, Hawkins talks proudly of his own family. He’s of English stock, descendant from adventurous folks who came to the United States in the 17th century.

His own children all left Spokane to attend college in Utah, but have since returned to raise their own families here.

Other parents aren’t so lucky, Hawkins said. Children scatter, generations pass by and one day families are left with little idea of their roots.

“You’re where you are and doing what you’re doing because of other people,” he said. “You came through these lines.”

That’s why the family history center has become so important to genealogy buffs, he said. It is the broom, sweeping the errant chaff into neat piles for people to piece back together like so many strands of gold.

MEMO: Family history center hours Monday, Thursday and Friday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday: noon to 9 p.m. Saturday: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.