(click to enlarge photos)
Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 5, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 8, 2026
Family Ties:
For 100 years, Seattle Public Library has helped families explore their roots
By Jean Sherrard
On Nov. 6, 1950, CeCe Moore’s aunt, Jean Proctor, gave birth at Renton Hospital. Sedated for the delivery, as was common then, Proctor awoke to be told her baby boy had died. She never saw him and was never included in a burial. For the rest of Proctor’s life, she suspected her son had been stolen.
Moore grew up hearing that story. In 2021, a DNA match led her to the truth: The baby, Moore says, had been “stolen and placed for adoption.” He grew up as Edward Warner and raised a family of his own. He had died by the time Moore made the discovery, but she was able to telephone Proctor, months before Proctor’s own death, and tell her she had been right all along.
The genetic genealogist for PBS’s “Finding Your Roots with Henry
Louis Gates Jr.,” Moore shared her dramatic story at a recent daylong program at Seattle Public Library’s Central Library.
Her talk helped celebrate the centennial of the library’s genealogy collection, which began in 1926 with a small donation from the Seattle Genealogical Society, then just three years old.
In its early years, reference head Ruth Calkins set aside a corner of her room for the collection. In 1949, Carol Lind became the first of only five dedicated genealogy librarians to date. “I would rather do
this than anything I can think of,” she told The Seattle Times in 1969.
Darlene Hamilton followed, for 40 years. Heather McLeland-Wieser joined her in 1999 and later created the two full-time positions now held by John LaMont and Mahina Oshie, who share their predecessors’ devotion. “Every day is a joy,” LaMont says.
The tools of genealogy have changed. Online databases now let 
researchers work “from your living room,” Oshie notes, and DNA has “jumped things forward quite a bit.” Yet LaMont finds the work itself to be similar: the same family group sheets and charts, and patrons arriving with familiar questions.
So, too, the collection’s lifeblood: donations. The library can’t accept boxes of loose research. But “compile that into a family history,” LaMont says. “We would love to take that.” And since so many Seattleites’ roots lie elsewhere, Oshie adds, a donated history “doesn’t have to be Seattle or even Washington.”
DNA can upend what families believe about themselves. Oshie’s
advice: Be prepared emotionally, because “you may find information that you did not know you didn’t want.”
Still, a family’s surest record may be the stories it tells. Proctor kept hers alive for more than 70 years, until science proved her right. Ask your elders, and record everything, on paper, audio or video. For more help, the library offers free appointments with a genealogy librarian.
WEB EXTRAS
To see our narrated 360 video of this column, recorded on the Central Library’s 9th floor, CLICK HERE.
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