Discovering History Through Great-grandma’s Words

Recently, I was blessed with a true treasure of family history. My aunt was able to have three cassette tapes of an interview my great-grandmother did in the 1970s converted to digital. The digital files were then put on the cloud by her son and forwarded to me. It’s been truly amazing listening to her voice for the first time (I met her once when I was a baby but remember nothing). In the next few weeks, I will go through these tapes and share what I can on this blog. Meanwhile, I’ve been checking out some of the names that she references in the interview and I’m truly amazed by her memory. In one discussion on steamships she used to go from Skagway to Tacoma and other places she just rattled off the names like it was nothing. Curious to see what these ships looked like, I looked up one, the Princess May, and found one of the coolest photos of a grounding that I’ve ever seen. According to Wikipedia, the ship was leaving Skagway in 1910 when it encountered heavy fog and ran aground off the coast of Sentinel Island (near Juneau). So, without further ado, here is an awesome photo of a ship run aground!

The Princess May in 1910.