This 1961-1962 edition of the commercial Polk Directory, located at the Seattle Public Library, lists the precise address where a woman named "Anna Obama" lived on Seattle's Capitol Hill. (Mónica Guzmán/Seattle P-I)
In the 1961-1962 Polk Directory, a commercial index of people and businesses in Seattle, there is a listing for a student named "Anna Obama," a woman who just might have been our next president's mother.
According to a Seattle Times article published last year, Barack Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, twice lived in the Emerald City. First in her youth, as a student at Mercer Island High School. Then later as a single mother, when she enrolled for a spring semester at the University of Washington. We know she lived for a short time in an apartment on Capitol Hill by 1962 -- but not much has been published about where.
Enter the Polk Directory. Assuming the woman listed there really was Obama's mother, it would appear that she -- and quite possibly her infant son -- lived in a building then located at 516 13th Ave. E.
A student listed as "Anna Obama" lived in this building on Capitol Hill. (Washington State Archives, Puget Sound Branch, King County Assessor Property Record Card collection)
One detail puts that assumption in doubt. Obama's mother's name was Stanley Ann Dunham -- Stanley Ann Obama after she married Obama's father. Yet the index lists an "Anna." It is possible this was another woman, archival experts said. But typos were not unheard of in the Polk directories, archival experts told me. Besides, the Polk Directory is not a legal document; those listed did not have to give their official name.
What's more: No other Obamas appear in the 1961-1962 directory, and a peek through the surrounding 1960 and 1963 editions of the index turn up no one by that name. That suggests that the appearance of "Anna Obama" in Seattle, whoever she was, at least fits the biography of Stanley Ann Dunham.
"I think that it's a lead that's worth following," said Mike Saunders, regional archivist at the Puget Sound Branch of the Washington State Archives. "But it should be verified with the family."
The Polk Directory is available to the public in the Seattle Room of the Seattle Public Library. But only two inquiries about this listing have been made to the Puget Sound archives, which holds the 1937 photo of the building listed as Anna Obama's address. One was mine.
P.S. -- Credit for this find should go first to Capitol Hill resident Charlette LeFevre, who helps run Seattle's Museum of the Mysteries on Broadway. A couple weeks ago, LeFevre posted on a Capitol Hill discussion board suggesting she might track down this mysterious Capitol Hill residence. Then, on Jan. 9, she published her discovery of the Polk Directory listing -- plus the 1937 photo of the building where Obama reportedly lived -- in a Jan. 9 article in the Capitol Hill Times.
Considering the possibility that we might track down the location where Barack Obama spent a few of his first months, Justin Carder of the Capitol Hill Seattle blog wrote:
I'm interested to know more about this short period in Obama's life, if for no other reason, because it will be cool to have another interesting place of history on Capitol Hill to wander by and wonder what if. What if Ann Dunham had made it work here? Could this Capitol Hill have created a president?
Update, Jan. 15: As Playboy Buddy pointed out in the comments, a Seattle Weekly article published Oct. 21 mentions Stanley Ann Dunham's 1960s stay in Seattle but also says her son, Barack Obama, did not live with her and was already staying with parents in Hawaii. Don't know how the Weekly knows that. The Times article did not clarify the detail. From the Weekly:
Meanwhile, Obama's mother, whose parents Madelyn and Stanley Dunham had moved here from Kansas a decade earlier, left Mercer Island in 1960. But she returned to live in Seattle around 1962, after Barack was born in August 1961, leaving her husband, Kenya-born Barack Sr., and his newborn namesake in Hawaii. She lived on Capitol Hill and enrolled at the University of Washington.
Posted by Monica Guzman at January 14, 2009 5:12 p.m.