Deep Roots Family Tree Blog

I wanted to try to stay ahead of the game as far as weekly posts come and I’m very thankful for the post scheduling feature on WordPress; but there are times where I get excited about a discovery that I can’t help but share.

This post is a little sad. I don’t think the recipient of the postcard really got to know his parents and, if my research is correct, he was raised by an aunt and uncle.

This postcard appears to have been sent from the Sea-Tac Terminal in Washington to Bellingham, Washington. It depicts the Nisqually Glacier in Rainier National Park, Washington.

I want to give a little backstory on what I found before looking at the body of the postcard.

It appears to have been sent from father to son. I had a feeling that “Junior” was not the kiddos first name, and without the dad signing his name, I wasn’t sure if I was going to get any information.

I plugged “Junior Dibble” into ancestry.com, living in Bellingham, Washington, and, to my surprise, the first thing that popped up was the 1930s census report.

There we go.

So from the census report and this newspaper clipping from the Bellingham Harold, I estimated Junior Dibble’s birth year to be 1924/1925. Also confirmed the information from the census as the newspaper article also mentions Junior’s aunt, Mrs. E. C. Holt Sr.,.

I was able to find many more articles celebrating Junior’s many birthdays while living with his aunt and uncle. After I was satisfied that I found the right family, I was able to narrow down my search to Bellingham Washington between the dates of 1920 and 1940 and found a birth announcement which gave us dads full name, making Junior “Nat F. Dibble Jr.”.

The excitement didn’t last long, however. Immediately after finding the birth announcement, I found an obituary. I scoured both ancestry and newspapers to see if I could find a cause of death but came up empty handed. The best I could find was “following an illness of a few days.” Another obituary I found stated that she had passed away after an illness about one week. Either way, Junior was less than 2 years old when he lost his mom, and likely his dad.

To recap: I found Junior living with his aunt and uncle in the 1930’s census and his mom died in 1925. My guess is that Junior went to live with them shortly after his moms death. All of the newspaper clippings I find of Junior mention them and many other members of the extended family. His dad is missing from all of them, but it he is still trying to keep in touch with his son, it appears.

“Hello sweetheart. I am awful sorry you were feeling bad. I sure don’t think you hurt yourself from that fall but hope that you are feeling better soon. Will write [unclear] you and auntie(?) tomorrow. Love, Daddy.“

I’m really not sure about the “sure don’t think” part of the writing. My other option was “I sure can’t think”, but that didn’t make much sense. I enlarged the postcard below so you can take a look for yourself to see if you can make it out. Please, help!! I also tried to make out what the rubber stamp was that is covering some of the writing but I have absolutely no idea.

Below you can also find some other articles that I found interesting.

I lost the trail after the 1930 census. There are a couple more articles mentioning Junior (the last I could find was dated 1935) which will be at the end of this post. I was hoping that I would be able to find 1940 census reports (and beyond) to see if I could figure out if Junior reunited with his dad or death certificates for anyone, but I couldn’t find anything. Find A Grave has some information, but no one has a biography with information.

Please comment if you have any guesses or other interpretations of the message on the postcard!

Junior appeared to be a pretty musical fella!

Another article (not pictured) in The Bellingham Harold that was written about 10 years after his mom died, Junior started going by “Junior Dibble Holt”. In this article Junior is playing harmonica at a dinner after a wedding.

This was a fun one. I never know what to expect when I start researching and I definitely wasn’t expecting to get a pretty decent look into life in the 1920s and 1930s through reading random articles in the newspapers where I found Junior. I still wonder what happened to him and his dad. I hope if they did reunite, it was healing for both of them.