Joseph Seth Selby, (1889-1958)

Headstone GPS Coordinates: 

Birth: 3 April 1889, Byesville or Cambridge,Guernsey County,  Ohio   

Death: 26 April 1958, Portland, Multnomah County, Oregon

Relatives in Seabeck Cemetery: Margaret C. (nee Wilson) Selby, Dempsey Wilson, Margaret Wilson née Woodruff, Mary Bell Selby,  Sarah C. née Wilson Stillwell, Margaret W. (nee Stillwell) Stout , Alice Hite née Wilson, Lloyd Selby

American Revolutionary War Patriots*: Mordecai Selby (Maryland) DAR# A101655, Nicholas Selby (Maryland) DAR# A101659, William Rogers (Maryland)

Disclaimer: These lines have not been officially proven by NSDAR standards

 

Joseph Seth Selby was born on April 3, 1889, in either Byesville or Cambridge, Guernsey County, Ohio, to Stanton Selby and Margaret (Wilson) Selby. He was the fourth of seven children in a working-class family navigating the hardships of America’s industrial heartland at the turn of the century. His father, Stanton, first labored on farms before taking up work as a coal miner—a dangerous yet common occupation in southeastern Ohio, where mining towns dotted the landscape during the late 1800s.

Tragedy struck early in Joseph’s life. In 1899, when he was just ten years old, his father was killed in a mining accident. The rope or cable of the cage that was lowering him into a coal shaft snapped, sending him plunging 120 feet to his death. 

Following Stanton’s death, Joseph’s widowed mother remained in Ohio for a few years before moving her family west around 1906. Like many Americans during this period, the Selbys sought opportunity and kinship in the expanding cities of the Pacific Northwest. They settled in Seattle, Washington, near Joseph’s grandmother Wilson and several of his mother’s relatives. Sadly, shortly after their arrival, Joseph’s fourteen-year-old sister Mary Bell died of diphtheria and heart complications—an all-too-common fate in the era before antibiotics and widespread vaccination.

The surviving family lived in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood, a growing working-class area. Joseph began working as a building laborer, contributing to the city’s rapid urban expansion. Around 1914, as the timber industry thrived along the Pacific coast, Joseph moved south to Boulder Creek, Santa Cruz County, California, to work as a woodsman. His mother and brothers George and Lloyd followed to the San Francisco Bay Area, where Joseph continued to help support his mother financially.

By 1917, Joseph was employed by the Hilton Lumber Company as a woodsman. That same year, the United States entered World War I, and Joseph registered for the draft. Though he was not immediately called to serve, records show he registered again in July 1918, likely reporting for basic training before the war’s end in November. 

After the war, Joseph remained in California before returning north to Washington in 1919. The 1920 census lists him living in a timber camp near Clear Lake in Skagit County—still working the forests that fueled the region’s growth. That same year, lured by the enduring allure of the North, he headed to Alaska. In May 1920, he boarded a ship for Skagway and crossed into Canada at White Pass, declaring his intent to prospect for gold. Although the great Klondike Gold Rush had peaked two decades earlier, smaller operations and individual prospectors like Joseph continued to seek fortune in the Yukon wilderness.

By 1921, Joseph was living in Fort Selkirk and along the Yukon River, working as a woodchopper and likely supplementing his income through fur trapping and gold prospecting during the long, harsh winters. For the next two decades, he made his home in remote settlements such as Champagne, enduring the isolation and rugged conditions that defined life in the Yukon wilderness.

In 1942, Joseph returned to the United States through Blaine, Washington, and settled in Crosby, where he lived with his brother Lloyd. With World War II underway, the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton was operating at full capacity to meet wartime demands, creating a surge of employment opportunities. Joseph secured a position there as a sailmaker and continued in that role until his retirement in 1954.

Joseph’s younger brother Lloyd moved to Port Gamble to work at the local sawmill, and Joseph went to live with their sister Olive. Following Olive’s passing in 1957, Joseph moved in with his niece before eventually relocating to Portland, Oregon, where he found work as a painter’s helper.

In his final years, Joseph battled lung cancer and was treated intermittently at the veterans’ hospital in Portland. He died on April 26, 1958, at the age of sixty-nine, from bronchopneumonia that had ravaged his already cancerous lungs. His body was taken to Miller-Reynolds Chapel and cremated, and his ashes were placed near his grandparents, Dempsey and Margaret Wilson. Joseph never married and had no children.

Although his obituary did not specify the exact location of his interment, historian Fred Just’s plot map indicates that his remains were placed at his grandmother Margaret Wilson’s grave in Seabeck Cemetery, where no marker was erected.