Infant Girl Moran (1882-1882)

Headstone GPS Coordinates: Burial location unknown.

Birth: 18 July 1882, Three Spits (Bangor), Kitsap County, Washington

Death: 18 July 1882,Three Spits (Bangor), Kitsap County, Washington

Relatives in Seabeck Cemetery: Sarah Moran

American Revolutionary War Patriots*: None

On July 18, 1882, in the remote logging settlement of Three Spits in Kitsap County (near present-day Naval Base Kitsap – Bangor), an infant girl Moran was born into a rugged and isolated frontier world—and died the same day.

She was the fourth child of Sarah Cartwright Moran and Thomas “Tommy” Moran, a lumberman whose work tied the family to the booming timber economy of Washington Territory. Her mother, Sarah, had been born on February 5, 1857, in Worcestershire, England, and had come to the Pacific Northwest as a young woman, working as a schoolteacher in Union City (now Union). Sarah and Thomas were married on May 31, 1877, in Victoria before settling along Hood Canal, where three sons were born: John William “Pat” (1878), Thomas Cartwright (1879), and Arthur Garfield (1880).

By the summer of 1882, the Morans were living at Three Spits, a small logging community north of Seabeck. Travel between settlements depended almost entirely on water routes across Hood Canal, as dense forests and primitive roads made overland journeys difficult and slow.

The infant girl’s birth proved tragic. Her mother died delivering her, and the baby did not survive. The following day, July 19, their bodies were carried by sloop across Hood Canal to Seabeck. On the morning of July 20, 1882, at 10:30 a.m., both were buried in Seabeck Cemetery by the caretaker, Jacob Hauptly.

Though unnamed in surviving records, the infant girl’s brief life was bound to her mother’s in both birth and burial. Her father later moved to Shelton, remarried, and continued raising the family. He died on January 10, 1915, and was buried in Shelton Memorial Park.

A curious mystery remains. Beside Thomas’s grave in Shelton stands a headstone for Sarah, inscribed with her birth and death dates. Yet cemetery records contain no evidence that Sarah—or her infant daughter—were ever reinterred there. The burial plot was not even purchased until 1911, nearly thirty years after their deaths, when an infant grandchild was laid to rest.

Whether Sarah’s marker was moved from Seabeck, or created later as a memorial tribute, remains unknown. As for the infant girl Moran, her life left no records beyond that single tragic day in July 1882—her story preserved only through the circumstances of her birth, death, and shared grave beside her mother.