A possible answer to the never answered question: Why?

We took a mini vacation to Montana recently drove up Friday morning and came home Saturday afternoon. Since we moved to Idaho two years ago, I've been really looking forward to taking my kids to Butte, showing them some of the sights that are familiar to me, like the Berkeley Pit, the home of my grandpa Unc (Clarence Morris, my great-grandma Rosie's second husband), and others. While we were there, my dad showed us some of the sites related to mining, the industry that basically brought Butte into existence and provided labor for many of its residents, including some of my ancestors. That got me wondering if I could get some details on my ancestors' work in the mines there, maybe even identifying which mine they worked in. 

Fortunately, Butte city directories helped me find exactly that! The 1939 and 1942 directories included the names of the mines that miners worked in. My maternal great-grandfather Jim Harris is listed in both directories as a miner in the Belmont Mine. 

Belmon Mine, Butte, Montana in 1927, from StoryOfButte.org.

While going through the directories, I found that Jim and Edna Harris, my great-grandparents, lived for a few years at 610 1/2 S Montana, but around 1942, they moved to 609 Silver Bow Homes. I've never heard of Silver Bow Homes, and thought it might be a housing development or maybe an apartment complex or something. I went to Newspapers.com, and found something very interesting! 

There was an article from September 1942 about how Silver Bow Homes, apparently an outfit that rented homes to customers, approved a rent schedule with a reduced rent payment for men working in industries related to the war effort. The rent included light, heat, water, cooking fuel, and electrical refrigeration. Since mining definitely qualified as war-related, this may have been what induced him and his family to move there. I've documented dozens of moves in my family history, but this is the first time I've come close to identifying a specific "why" for someone in my family tree that I never got to meet in person. I tell my clients all the time that we may never really understand the why behind what they did, so this was a fun little gold nugget to find, and a great reminder that sometimes we do get at least a possible answer to the one question that almost never gets answered.