My attention is always drawn to the people in our family tree with an UNKNOWN death date. Where did they go? What’s their story?

Such was the case today with Michael H. Hickey, born about 1867 in Waseca County, Minnesota, and apparently named for an older brother who’d died as a young child. Michael was a cousin of my husband’s grandfather, born just a couple years later.

I feel the need to resolve when he died, like putting a period at the end of a sentence.

For me, the Michael Hickey trail ended in Sand Point, Idaho, where the 1910 US Federal Census showed him as a single man, working as a sexton in a Sandpoint cemetery.

This morning I sent off an email inquiry to the Bonner County (ID) Historical Society -- and received a same-day response! Unfortunately they did not locate his obituary, but they did send along two newspaper articles:

"Northern Idaho News, 16 Feb 1906 The Case hotel narrowly escaped going up in smoke last Friday night. The fire caught in one of the rooms on the third floor which had been occupied by Mr. Hickey and it is thought he must have dropped a match when visited the room that evening, and that it set some bedding afire. The fire smouldered along all night, there being no draft and was discovered in the morning by Mr. Casey after it had burned quite a large hole through the floor." "Pend Oreille Review, 27 Oct 1911 Mike Hickey is back to his old town. Mike worked in the harvest fields in the Davenport, Wash., country during the summer but when the chill October days set in he decided Sandpoint was the place for winter quarters and hied back to his old haunts. The first man he looked up was Undertaker Brower, and Mr. Brower took Mike back to his old job as gravedigger and caretaker at the cemetery. Mike says Sandpoint looks good to him and that things are as lively has as anywhere."

The photo (above) was posted on an Ancestry family tree with the caption, “Mother’s Brother Mike Hickey in 1889.” Mike would have been just 21 years old and possibly on his way west to seek fame and fortune.

The Bonner County Historical Society mentioned having longer news items including another story about a fire. Hmm. They also reported “the name Hickey is fairly well-known in Bonner County as there is another family of that name that purchased a homestead in the early 1900s.”

I’m not aware of any other of “our” Hickeys who settled in Idaho. I wonder if it’s more than just coincidence?