The Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

"On Wednesday, April 18th, at 5:14 A.M. I was wakened by the crash of falling furniture, and a rocking, heaving house. Jim was sleeping in the next room, but I am used to slight earthquake shocks, so I lay still. The meteorological record has announced later that there were seven shocks in ten minutes, seventeen in the whole day, and numerous slight shocks every day since. I felt very calm, paralyzed perhaps, but I thought, "This is the worst thing I ever knew, and we may be going to be killed, and I want to die together." It was as much as I could do to walk across the floor, because it heaved so, and it made me very sea-sick. Jim always wakes slowly and dazed, and when I opened the door he thought the walls were falling in." (From a letter by San Francisco resident, Mrs. Eleanor Watkins.) Available online here.

The exact time of the first foreshock to the "Great Quake" is recorded as 5:12 A.M. on 18 April 1906. About twenty seconds later, the earthquake began and lasted for forty-five to sixty seconds. The quake occurred along approximately 290 miles of the San Andreas fault and was felt from southern Oregon to Los Angeles and as far inland as central Nevada. Measured by our current earthquake scale, the San Francisco earthquake measured from 7.7-8.3--one of the largest ever recorded in North America and the first of twenty-seven separate quakes that day--but the quakes were just the beginning of the destruction.

The damage done by the earthquake alone was estimated to be 80 million in 1906 dollars. But the earthquake was not the most destructive force; the subsequent fires that devastated San Francisco pushed the total damages to over 400 million dollars. The quake ruptured many gas lines and overturned lamps and stoves, starting fires in various parts of the city. A housewife starting up her stove to prepare breakfast started what was known as the "ham and eggs" fire.

On top of all this, the fire alarm system for the city was destroyed by the earthquake, and the fire chief was killed by the first temblor. When the firemen reported to their posts, there was little or no water to fight the flames, as most of the water-mains for the city had burst during the quake. The firemen stood by helplessly and watched many parts of the city devoured by fire. The fires lasted three full days and destroyed 2,831 acres of the city. It consumed thirty schools, eighty churches and left over 250,000 of the city's 400,000 people homeless.

The municipal government initially reported a death toll of less than 500 people, because they were afraid that any larger number would scare away investors and hinder the re-building of the city, but the actual numbers were probably more than 3,000 killed by the quake and fires. The exact death toll will never be known because so many bodies were incinerated in the fires and almost all of the city records were destroyed.

As you search for information on the effects of San Francisco earthquakes and fires on your ancestors, you have many sources at your disposal. Here are some convenient online sources where you can begin your search.

The Library of Congress has digitized and placed online several films of San Francisco before and after the Great Quake and Fire of 1906.

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I Can't Find It

In the seven and a half years that I have been writing this column, readers have followed me through searches for people who changed their name, lied about their age, moved for no reason, disappeared without a trace, appeared from a UFO, left no records, left too many records, and a variety of other situations. Part of the difficulty in locating these people centered on locating various records. This week we look at some ways that our searches of records can be stymied...

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[ Read Past Helps ] [ Read Past Tips ]

Complete Idiots and Everything

If you have no clue what this title means, I promise it will make sense momentarily. Many of you are familiar with certain book series that are heavily associated with a color. There’s the orange series always entitled The Complete Idiot’s Guide to ______, and there’s the white series called The Everything ______ Book. You might be aware that there are several genealogy books in these series. Some of you probably even have a copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Genealogy and/or The Everything Family Tree Book on your shelves, but if you do, they’re now officially out of date--unless you’ve dashed to the bookstore very recently.

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Clues in Obituaries: Research Steps

Since each of us has a unique brain, we don't understand or process information in the same way. One person needs detailed, written instructions, another needs visual examples, and yet another reads through a record and a research plan immediately evolves. Most of us know the importance of checking obituaries, death notices, or funeral stories for research clues. What if you are a fledgling genealogist and don't immediately relate to this step?

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Early American Life

Each Early American Life article has presented a detailed look at a tiny piece of our ancestors’ lives. Each investigation to research the article revealed that there was far more to a simple topic than expected. Juliana has been generous about letting me write long articles, but I’ve still had to leave out many things I learned during the research, including alternative information (especially when I felt it was somewhat inaccurate). The material I most often omitted tended to be not quite general enough, given the wide diversity of the interests of the readers of Ancestry Daily News.

Readers have occasionally told me of interesting tidbits that I failed to discover or hadn’t considered, which indicates that there is always more for us to learn. This doesn’t surprise me at all. And, occasionally, I make mistakes. So, I apologize to any reader who was trying to find the book by David Cressy that I mentioned in the previous column (on provisioning), erroneously spelling his name Cressey.

One thing that has been highlighted in comments from readers is that although I’ve been writing about an amorphous time period that I have been calling “early America,” many of the things I’ve written about continued into the twentieth century. They just aren’t widely known.

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Relating Relationships

Last week we left the Smith family at the poor farm (see article here). Their entries on the poor house register hinted at their relationship, but like most records more questions were raised than were answered. This week we learn that there was more to the Smith family than their time spent at the poor farm.

The poor farm was only the beginning of our research. An exhaustive search of birth, marriage, death, census, probate, and court records for Mercer County, Illinois, was necessary to determine the family structure as accurately as possible. Noticeably lacking from the entries were any male members of the Smith family. This included Philip Smith, father of all the Smith children. While he was not admitted to the poor farm, Philip was the connection that the two women, Sarah Smith and Nancy Kile shared with all eight Smith children. But it did not begin at the poor farm.

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