Our whole research team is headed to the Central Regional Branch (CRB) of the Washington State Archives in Ellensburg for a 2-day research trip. Through outreach and research, we have learned that the deeds books for the years 1920 to 1960 for Klickitat and Grant counties are housed at the CRB rather than in the vaults of their respective county’s auditor’s offices–they can only house so much! While the CRB also contains relevant records for other counties, we have either: already visited those counties for a manual search or already obtained their digital records for OCR scanning. We look forward to working with the renowned archivist Brigid Clift at the CRB, who has been amongst the archives her whole life! Her knowledge will be invaluable to our work. The challenge for us will be the great number of deeds books for the years we are looking at for Klickitat and Grant counties. We have been informed that there are between 50 and 80 deeds books for each county spanning 1920 to 1960! This is much larger than our other eastern Washington counties that typically have about 10 books at 600+ pages per book for the time period we are researching. In cases such as these, we start in the decade we know produced the most racial covenants which is the 1940s. We have also chosen to start our 2-day, 5-person research endeavor with Grant County as our plat map research revealed 14 neighborhoods with racial covenants which indicates that we may find a number of racial covenants in the deeds books. Once we have worked through the 40s, we will broaden our search and determine if more research days are required to cover the books we are planning to search through.
