The Forgotten Safety Practice of 1885
A century and a half before GPS trackers, a Snohomish County editor offered a simple, low-tech solution for the perennial heartbreak of a lost child: use indelible ink.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The anxiety so often caused by the wandering away of a little child from his usual familiar surroundings, or his being separated from his parents in a crowd, is made unnecessarily distressing by the fact that usually he carries with him no certain means of identification. To label him with his full name and address would be so simple a precaution that it is surprising that it is not a universal practice. We brand our cattle, pound elaborate characters in the web-feet of our fowls, engrave dog-collars, and scrupulously tag umbrellas and bunches of keys, while giving hardly a passing thought to what would happen to our little speechless toddlers and ourselves should they stray into unknown streets, or meet with some accident in the domains of strangers. In the matter of marking of under-garments with indelible ink it is but little more trouble to use the full name instead of initials, and on outer garments a convenient tag could be sewed by the inside of the collar band or of the end of the sleeves—where the full address could be placed. If every reader would adopt such a plan and recommend it to others, there would be at once a beginning which might go far towards establishing uniform customs, the usefulness of which would seem to be beyond question.
“We brand our cattle... while giving hardly a passing thought to what would happen to our little speechless toddlers and ourselves should they stray into unknown streets.”
In an era of hyper-surveillance and smart-tags, the 1885 suggestion to stitch an address into a child's collar feels strikingly poignant. It speaks to a universal, timeless parental anxiety about the vulnerability of children in the shifting, anonymous spaces of a growing city—a sentiment that resonates just as strongly in modern Seattle.
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