Virginia DeVine Fitzpatrick was a charter member of WSGS way back at the 1982 meeting in Olympia. When I asked her “”why did you join WSGS?” She answered she’d been active in the Clallam County Genealogical Society and Historical Society and she, along with like-minded others, felt a state society would be a good thing. Virginia was one of the first Regional Reps and she remembers “driving all over this half of the state.”

Virginia has a most interesting genealogical history and most of it in Clallam County, Washington. Her widowed great-grandmother, Willie Ann (McCormick) Stewart, came to Port Angeles in 1896 along with her son, George, and daughter, Kate. “They came from the Midwest and I’ve never been able to learn why they came way out west to Port Angeles…that was a very long and very hard trip, no doubt. Mr. Stewart was a Civil War veteran so perhaps that had something to do with the facts,” Virginia recited to me. That daughter, Kate, married Horace White in 1901; he was the first mayor of Port Angeles. Their daughter was Willie Virginia White, born in 1903 in Port Angeles, who married Harry Edward Devine in 1926 in Port Angeles. Their daughter was Virginia Devine, born in 1930 in Port  Angeles, who married Michael Fitzpatrick.

I salute Virginia DeVine Fitzpatrick as a 4th-generation “pioneer” in Clallam County and as a Charter Member of the Washington State Genealogical Society.