With my love of family history, it's really of no surprise to me that I should love older homes. My current home, when we purchased it, we were told it dated to somewhere in the early 20th century - likely 1910-1920.
After pouring through city directories yearly online, I found it - 1905. I managed to find some information on previous owners, including their births and deaths, and via the census of Canada for both 1911 and 1921, but also was able to trace the history of the area via some lovely maps from the 1880s through to the early 1900s.
Many original features of my current home were torn out over the years, but what attracted me and my husband to this house in need of some TLC was that the staircase and banister had never been painted. Simple as that. We have slowly been making changes to the home to try and both honour and update the space, and subsequent posts will be dedicated to that as a way of keeping it all in one space, and not scattered in file folders and photo albums across several platforms.
One of the earliest owners of this house died from falling off the caboose of a train, and his young wife and several children took in boarders, seemingly to survive financially. She had remarried by the 1921 census, and found her death record several decades later that showed she died here.
A few of those original features that remained intact:
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| front porch detail |
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| the "doorbell" on the front door |
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| the stairs and the wear of hands over the generations who lived here |
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