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Thanks!  I think I'll watch a couple o videos this evening.

Keep up the good work.  If the information doesn't reach the OP, it might come to the attention of someone else and prove to be useful.  I've had helpful replies come in years after I first posted.

I am looking for two obituaries in Seattle:

1. Bernice E. Johnston who died 15 November 2007 [age 107!]

2. her daughter, Jean J. Roberts who died 17 February 2006.

I'm still having some trouble putting together the story of Zoe McDonald Prouty Boult's birth family.  Of course, the identity and circumstances of the siblings of gg-aunt Jennie's adopted daughter are hardly crucial to my family tree.  But I'm insatiably curious.

According to the 90th birthday article, there were five McDonald children, but only three of them are named in the article:  Reuben, Dick and Zoe.  At least one of the unnamed siblings was a girl - she was living with her brother Dick in Medina (Ohio) when Reuben went to stay with Zoe and her adoptive family, the Proutys, in about 1890.

The children's father, Capt. James McDonald, allegedly died in 1876 and their mother, Ellen, in 1881, after which four of the children went into the custody of the Cleveland Children's Aid Society and one (Dick) was taken in by relatives.  Some fundamental parts of this story, as reported in the Glenn Falls Times in 1964, are incorrect, however.  Perhaps the details had blurred over the course of ~80 years.

In the first place, Ellen did not die in 1881; she died in 1883.  Moreover, after the death of the Captain, Ellen had remarried in 1880 to a man named Benjamin F. Roach, and they had a daughter, Helen "Daisy" Roach, born in 1882, a half-sister to the McDonald kids.

Ellen and Benjamin were married on 16 September - after the 1880 census was conducted in June.  At the time of the census, though, the McDonald children had already entered the adoption system.  Zoe (age 13) was recorded as an adopted daughter of the Proutys in 1880.  Her brothers Arthur (7; =Dick?) and Reuben (6) were among the inmates of the Saint Vincent's Male Orphan Asylum in Cleveland.  I note, also, that there were two inmates of the Convent of the Good Shepherd School of Reform in Cincinnati named Maggie (12) and Kate (9) McDonald.  Were they the other two McDonald siblings?

It looks like the McDonald children were put up for adoption in 1880 or perhaps earlier even though they were not orphaned at that time.