User:DragonflySixtyseven/A mystery

The mystery of William Boyd

For the past few years, I've been going through an OCR'd-and-wikified version of the 1901-1902 edition of Marquis Who's Who, because being in there is a strong indicator of notability. The necrology section lists "William Boyd – gov. Wash. Ty. –96" — in other words, someone who was the governor of Washington Territory and died in 1896. No one by that name ever held that position, so in 2019 I contacted the Washington State Archives. They'd never heard of him in any context. I concluded it was probably a fictitious entry.

In 2023, I remembered this issue, and wondered what different search terms might yield. In the California Digital Newspaper Collection at UC Riverside, I found an 1896 death announcement in the Newcastle News for a man named William Boyd Rankin:

"William Boyd Rankin, at one time a Judge of the Supreme Court of Washington Territory, died at his home in Jersey City. He was born in Philadelphia in 1822. President Buchanan appointed him a Judge in Washington Territory in 1857. Before his appointment Rankin had practiced law in Philadelphia and stumped the State of Pennsylvania for Buchanan. In 1851 President Buchanan appointed him the first Governor of Washington Territory. He quarreled with Gen. Harney and in 1862 resigned his office."

Furthermore, Ancestry.com has an entry on a William Boyd Rankin, who was born in 1821 in Philadelphia, and died in 1896 in Jersey City.

So, clearly, not just someone who was made up as a copyright trap.

I found lists of every member of the Supreme Court of Washington State, but not of the territory. I contacted Washington State Archives again; they pointed me towards the Washington State Law Library, where an employee "searched our entire set of books on the bench and bar of Washington" and did not find William Boyd Rankin: "the closest name I can find is H.B. Rankin. This person was not a judge". They even checked Martindale-Hubbell and got nothing.

Using the datum that Ancestry spelled Rankin's father's surname as "Ranken", the WSLL employee also searched Chronicling America, and found an 1859 announcement that "Col. William B. Ranken" had been appointed Register of the Land Office in Washington Territory, and in the Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate, Volume 35, Issues 2-37, p. 126, there's a notice that Ranken resigned from that position in early 1860.

I'm not entirely comfortable, however, with the conclusion that Col. William B. Ranken was the same person as the William Boyd Rankin whose 1896 death was announced in the Newcastle News: obviously they got their description of him wrong, but could they have gotten it that wrong? If Rankin/Ranken was ever a justice of a supreme court, then he meets notability criteria... but was he?