Favorite Find: Week 2 #52ancestors

I don't have a particular favorite find:  a lot of things have delighted me when I found them and I will revisit them to enjoy them again.  The particular find I'm going to talk about both answered and opened many questions about my family's connection to the Skagit Valley* where I live now in Washington state.  My parents moved here from Olympia (where they both grew up) in the late 1940s, presumably so my father could work on the dams on the Skagit River, or in logging.  This remains a relatively rural place with nothing that could be described as a city, and a lot of farms.  A fair chunk of the county is in the North Cascades National Park.  I was born here in the mid 50s, but my parents packed us up and left in the mid 60s when the work ran out.  

But what brought the Skagit Valley to my parents' attention in the first place?  I still don't really know precisely but looking at my father's brother's birth certificate gave me a clue.  By the time I found this, my sister had told me she thought that my grandfather had done some roofing in the valley in the 30s, but the birth certificate suggests she was off by ten years:  Uncle Jay was born in the biggest town in Skagit County in 1925!  More digging found that my father's half-sister married a man in the same town in about 1927 (Ione would have been about 22 I think).  The marriage was short-lived, though the ex-husband remained here after the divorce, remarried and lived out the rest of his life here:  he's apparently buried in a cemetery in town.  I keep meaning to go look for him but I haven't even looked for my aunt yet (she's buried in small town in eastern Washington).

So, I don't know the exact answer to why they came to the Skagit Valley in the 40s, but at least my father had an earlier connection which he had never talked about.  It feels like home to me so my husband and I have retired here (and there are still people living here who knew me when I was a child!).

*The Skagit Valley (and river and county) is midway between Seattle and Vancouver BC.  It is incredibly scenic, particularly in the spring when the tulips bloom.