In 1910, a woman in Salem mailed a letter to her sister.
The message included mundane notes about the weather, a car ride and a dress she made, along with an ominous complaint about a swollen neck.
Nothing about it would be particularly newsworthy except for one detail: The letter was recently found inside a historic Oregon City home, and a real estate agent didn’t want to see it thrown away.
Robert Whiting has taught math at Oregon City High School for 30 years, but he also moonlights as a real estate agent.
In 2020, he sold a fixer-upper at 210 Washington St. During extensive renovations, the new owner discovered two letters behind a wall. They were dated 1909 and 1910 and addressed simply to Daisy Etchison, Oregon City.
Back then, that was all the information the U.S. Postal Service needed.
Earlier this year, the owner contacted Whiting again, this time to list the renovated house. The home sold a few weeks ago.
But Whiting remembered hearing about those letters.
Did the owner still have them? And would he mind if Whiting tried to track down Daisy’s descendants?
“I kind of felt in my heart that this is a physical, tactile document that can’t be thrown away,” Whiting said. “It’s over 100 years old. It shows a little piece of heart, of what life was like then, and how they communicated with each other. If there’s living relatives that can have that, it just couldn’t go in the trash.”
The homeowner agreed, and Whiting turned to the place where many people seek local information today: the Oregon City Chit Chat Facebook group. He shared a photo of the envelope and asked if anyone knew family of Daisy Etchison.
“I got inundated with a whole bunch of suggestions,” Whiting said. “One that came up consistently was somebody with the same last name over on the coast. I reached out to him, and he checked with his sister, and unfortunately was not somebody who was related to them.”
Whiting’s post garnered 48 comments, including one from me, offering to help.
Over the years, I’ve returned dozens of lost items after readers reached out about personal belongings they found, including wedding rings, class rings and even a camera.
Whiting provided me with the home’s address and copies of the letters, and the hunt began.
Both letters were signed, “your sister, Ethel.” Using Ancestry.com, I quickly determined the letter writer was Ethel Rosella Hughes Zwicker of Salem.
“I went to see the doc about my neck,” Ethel writes in one letter. “It has got so that it pains me a good deal. He gave me some medicine to take. My neck has grown till it is 16 inches around.”
That passage was particularly sad to read because Ethel died in 1913 at age 32. Her death certificate lists pneumonia and an “exophthalmic goiter” as contributing causes of death.
Daisy was born in 1886 and married John Etchison in 1909. As several people had already pointed out on Facebook, John worked as a postal carrier in Oregon City. In the 1910 U.S. Census, the couple were living in the house on Washington Street.
Daisy and John ultimately divorced in the 1920s, but they had one son together.
Ancestry is excellent for old records, but it offers little help in finding modern-day relatives. That’s where LexisNexis comes in. It’s a paid research service The Oregonian uses for news-gathering purposes.
Using a combination of Ancestry records, newspaper obituaries and LexisNexis, I tracked down Matt Etchison, one of Daisy’s great-grandsons, who lives in Portland.
It turns out Matt Etchison was exactly the sort of person who would be interested in his great-grandmother’s letters. He is the keeper of the family photo albums and has traced his lineage to his great-great-grandfather, Beckwith Cook, who immigrated to Oregon in 1852.
“It’s just fascinating to me that a lot of people don’t know their roots,” Etchison said. “He came over on the Oregon Trail. I mean, that’s a huge part of our country’s history, and he’s part of that. And I like to know about my part in it, too.”
When I met up with both men at Westmoreland Park last week to return the letters, Etchison arrived with a wealth of family photographs dating to the 1800s.
Daisy died in 1971 at age 85 at Edgefield Manor, now the site of McMenamins Edgefield. Matt Etchison was too young to have met her.
But he had a photograph of Daisy and John together: John seated in an ornate wooden chair and Daisy standing beside him in a long dress, her hair styled in the “Gibson Girl” fashion popular at the turn of the 20th century.
The three of us chatted for a while as we looked through old photos from Oregon City, Salem and Gladstone.
Whiting was glad the letter found its way to someone who would cherish it.
“There’s a history connection there,” he said. “These letters might not have a significance to me, but ... these may have some meaning to somebody who can go, ‘hey, this is part of my heritage.’”
Returning lost items has become an occasional reporting series. Have you found a lost object with a clue to its rightful owner? I may be able to help return it. Email me at sswindler@oregonian.com
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