Travel Tuesday - Locating Those Old Houses

Travel Tuesday

Locating Those Old Houses

Have you ever taken a parent down a lane, and they tell you that the "old homeplace" was located "over there", and all you see is a field, grown up with weeds, and trees? No longer is a foundation discernible. Nothing that a home ever existed?

Don't dismay. If they can remember that a home used to be there, chances are that someone, somewhere down the line, will have a photograph of the home.

The trick to proving it was actually on the spot first mentioned by your parent is to get a photograph, as best as you can, of the location. Make sure you stand back far enough that you can get a photograph of the site from a few different angles. You can save these to your digital files, and mark them something like "Grandpa Jones Homesite - 1", "Grandpa Jones Homesite-2", etc. Now, someday when that certain photgraph you've been trying to locate comes up, see if you can match the background images with the background images of the house! Watch for hills, mountains, old trees, barns, cliff faces, etc. Chances are, if the photos you took were in the correct place, you will be able to match up something in the background with the old photographs.

Let me show you a few photographs of my family's "old homeplace" and let's see if you can understand better what I mean.

These two photographs, the upper one taken about 1910, the lower one sometime in the 1970's we believe, are the oldest known photographs of the this home.

You can see, that except for the south end chimney being gone, the home is basically the same from the first to the second photograph.

Now look to the right of the photograph, and in the 50 to 60 years difference of the ages of the photograph, you will see the tree line remains basically unchanged. There does appear to be a fence of some kind across the front border of the yard in the upper photograph that is no longer there in the bottom.  Otherwise, there is not much changed.

Now look at this photograph:

This is a photograph of the same home in 2001, about 30 years after the second photograph. While you can no longer see the same view of the trees to the right of the home, you can definitely see the woodlands there. However, the house is essentially, unchanged. Except for a small window change on that south end, where in the top photograph, had once been a chimney. The home has otherwise not changed a great deal. 

So let's move forward a bit.

I think that you can see, some extensive remodeling, and fixing up has been done since the 2001 photograph. (This photograph was taken in 2007.) A fan light was added in the upper eave of the south side. The bottom of the old stone chimney was salvaged, and a window was replaced where the old chimney had once been. New siding and windows have been added to the home. But the structure is intact, and basically remains the same. We can still see those same trees to the right of the home, although not well in this photograph.

Now look at this photograph, and the very first photograph. DO you see it? Look at that tree line to the right of the home? In almost 100 years, that tree line has remained unchanged! The same would be true if the house were still there or not! This is providing documented proof that the home is not only the same home, but sits in the same place it did in 1910.

And here is yet another view. In this one, the north end of the home. Here you can see that original chimney that was noted on the first photograph, and you can see that it is stone, just as the original showed it. You can see the trees to the right of the home, but the tree line view is a bit different from this angle.

And here are two more photographs of the same home. These are taken from a field across the road from the house.

Do you notice that distinctive tree line to the right of the home?

This is a close up of the photograph above.

You can see the trees are essentially unchanged, except more mature.

(The bottom two photographs were taken in 2009.)

I hope that this helps you to understand how you can use photographs from different time eras to determine if a location is the same one or not.

Remember, hills, valleys will remain unchanged. Trees may or may not remain unchanged. Timber gets cut down. Trees are cut down, or grow differently. Creeks or rivers change courses. But the topography basically remains unchanged.

In towns, or cities, houses, or business buildings may remain unchanged. I've often noticed things like church steeples in the distance of an older photograph that are still visible in the later one. Or streets remain unchanged, including names sometimes!

Use the clues around you to determine if the location is correct.

So, while there may not be a house where your old family "homestead" used to be, go ahead and snap a few photos of the site from different angles. You never know when other photographs may come up!  (Incidentally, I started only with the last 2 photographs you see here. The others were added through later research. )

Let us know if this article helps you!

Travel Tuesday

Travel Tuesday

There are a few places in this world I would still like to visit before I give up on traveling altogether. And London is one of those places. The photo above is taken from The Royal Portfolio, and depicts the Queen's Guards standing in front of the palace.

I would love to be able to see the Tower of London, as, believe it or not, I have ancestors who were sent there to await execution by orders of other ancestors! (Try saying that three times without getting tongue tied!)

And, of all things, I'd love to visit some of the homes, or sites of the homes, where some of my ancestors once lived. (We are talking about many hundreds of years ago with those!) However, some of their remains (the buildings and castles) still have old stones from the castles present.

I would hope one day, before I leave this life to be able to go where my great-great-grandfather was really from. Of course, I would first have to discover where that place is actually! And therein lies the rub. It is like he was plopped down on this earth at the age of 12, as there has been no definitive proof of his birth prior to that time! And DNA has not matched us up with a recent (within 500 years) relative. A bit of a conundrum since there really aren't that many families with our ancestral name! Bean. Or its derivative. Well, we are plentiful in the sense that there are many Bean's, and some with very long histories. But our DNA has not matched up with any of them! Not a single one! Except for second cousins. Which, is of course, expected. But it is almost as if the Bean line just magically appeared with great-great-grandfather!

But it is the women that our Bean men married that can give us our long, and varied, histories. Three lines, of which, have led us into royal ancestry. All of the English kind. And so, I would one day like to visit London. Perhaps when England's WDYTYA is taping an episode they might invite a certain American cousin (mwah!) to come and visit the ancestral places of her heritage!  Well, who knows, a gal can dream big can't she?

Where would you travel to if given the option of visiting a location that is tied to your ancestors? And why?

Travel Tuesday - My Favorite US Military Post

Back in 1979, I traveled to Furth, Germany to be with my (then) husband. It was a wonderful 2 year experience that I will never forget!

In the spring of 1980, my husband's unit was transferred and moved to Grafenwoehr. Most Army personnel, or ex-Army personnel, will know the place. This is where Elvis was stationed when he went to Germany! And there wasn't a German town more romantic than Graf.

I traveled about a bit, but this was always my most favorite post. I could've stayed there forever.

Here's a picture that anyone who has ever been there will recognize. The clock tower.

There is a saying among military wives: When you go to Germany you either come back home with a cuckoo clock, or a new baby. I guess I couldn't make up my mind. While stationed here, I gave birth to twins. Out of a post of about 2200 military civilians there were 20 that gave birth to twins that year, and I was one of the lucky ones.

I never have missed getting that cuckoo clock I wanted!

Travel Tuesday

Today's blogging prompt is on traveling. Sit back, and see if you can relate to these!

When I was a young child, my Dad was in the military. He was in the Navy and spent a great deal of time aboard a ship away at sea. When he came home, we often went to my grandparents homes to visit them. His mother, who lived in West Virginia, and my Mom's parents, who lived in Indiana.

Back then there wasn't any interstate. This meant travel was on 2-lane highways for the most part.

We traveled from Norfolk, Virginia, in what back then took about 11-hours on old US Route 60.

We would leave Norfolk, travel through the Hampton Roads Tunnel, and hit US Route 60 on the other side. It was a straight shot through Richmond, and Lexington. We followed the route right into West Virginia, where my Grandma Bean lived just over the state line.

Going to Grandma Bean's was always a treat. Mom and Dad played games with us to keep us occupied during trips in those days. (No fancy electronics to keep the kiddies busy back then!) Dad would tell us we were headed into wild country! He had us watching for wild Indians. We were sure, every now and then, that we had seen one peaking around the tree trunks at us from the forest that lined most of the highway! And when we saw a deer, Dad always said, "It's a shame we didn't get Mom to pack the salt shaker! You'd only have to shake a little salt on its' tail to catch it!" We'd laugh and giggle every time.

There weren't any rest stops, like there are along the interstates now.

We stopped at gas stations. Attendants were usually pretty nice when we told them we stopped by just to use the rest room.

We usually looked for stations that had a sign that said they had clean rest rooms. If they didn't, you ran the risk of going into a nasty rest room whether you wanted to or not! (Hey, when ya gotta go, you gotta go!)

You usually had to ask the attendant for the rest room key, to a clean rest room.

Keys were often on Huge key tags. Sometimes they were put on a large dowel or a stick. This was to deter anyone from accidentally carrying the rest room key home in their purse or pocket! (Okay kids, ask your parents, they will know what I'm talking about!)

Rest rooms were usually accessed by going around the outside of the building. Men's rest rooms were usually inside, or were the furthest toward the back of the building. Sometimes there were signs to point a young lady to the rest room.

But, rain or shine, sleet, snow or hail, you always had to go outside to access the ladies room.

Finding someplace to eat along the way wasn't always easy, either! This was before there was a McDonald's on every street corner! They were few and far between in those days along the east coast.  There were many small diners as you passed through little towns.

These always served good food. You must remember, in those days, eating out was still considered a treat, so we were excited, as kids, to get to eat in a diner!
And sometimes we would stop at a drive-in diner.

Here the waitress would come out to the car, take your order and bring it back. Sometimes they walked. and sometimes...

...they skated! Now here were some talented waitresses! Think about carrying a tray big enough to handle service for four, including their drinks! No rolled up paper bag like you get for a take out today!

Meals were placed on trays that mounted on the car windows. If the diner was open during the cold winter months, these could be turned around and placed on the inside of the window, if you scooched over in the seat.

Meals were simple affairs. A hotdog or a hamburger. French fries (from real potatoes kiddies!) And a soda, served in either a real glass, or a waxed paper cup. Straws were paper, and they didn't come individually wrapped! There wasn't any super-sizing of anything in the meal! And the only condiments were ketchup and mustard. If you were lucky, Dad would order a shake instead of a cola. But if you got a shake, you usually only had a burger, or an order of fries. Seldom both with a shake!

Since the trip took so long, we usually only ate in a diner for one of the meals that day. The other main meal would consist of a picnic lunch at a roadside park.

Meals were simple. Usually a bologna sandwich for us. And a thermos of Kool-Aid for the kiddies, and one of coffee for the grownups.

Mom might throw in some boiled eggs. Or a couple deviled eggs. And just for you folks that might not remember, we didn't have Tupperware back then. Or plastic sandwich/storage bags. Sandwiches were wrapped in waxed paper. We had plastic wrap, but my Mom didn't buy it often, so most of the time our boiled eggs would be wrapped in wax paper, and the ends twisted shut. We used the cup on the thermos to drink from, and my sister and I shared the same cup. As did Mom and Dad with the coffee thermos cup. When you ran out of coffee or Kool-Aid, your thermos would be rinsed from a water pump at a roadside park.

And the thermos would then be refilled with water from the pump. Sodas were considered a treat, and we hardly ever bought them for home, much less for a journey!

The parks were the predecessor to the Rest Stops seen along our Interstate system today. They dotted the landscape in every state, along every major highway that criss-crossed the state.  Some of these had outhouse-style facilities, and others had none. At the latter, there were usually paths into the surrounding woods which somehow you just seemed to follow, men in one direction, ladies in the other. Bushes and trees provided coverage from the opposite sex.

When we arrived at my Grandmother Bean's house, I remember that at night my sister slept on an Army cot in an attic bedroom with my parents. I slept in the bed with my Grandmother, which was in her living room. (The attic bedroom was the only true bedroom in the house.) In the dining room was another bed in a corner where my uncle slept.

This is till a common practice in a lot of old country homes without proper insulation in winter months. These homes are usually heated with wood fired stoves, and the heat has no vents to go to upper floors, which means it gets very, very cold in upper floor bedrooms!

And Grandma didn't have modern electricity. Her light fixtures could only handle a 40-watt light bulb. And she didn't use any lamps, as she didn't have electrical outlets. So, each room was always dark and dim to me. She had a television. But her tv had only one station. (Not that we were used to much more! Cable hadn't been invented yet, so we had 3 public television stations in our area! NBC, CBS, and we even had PBS!) So, Grandmother's single station hardly seemed worth turning the set on. It was run from an extension cord to the light fixture in the ceiling, which had an outlet on it. The light was turned on by a pull string. No wall switches!

We usually stayed here for a couple of days. Dad would go hunting, and try to kill a deer or some rabbits for Grandmother. Her income was almost nothing. Dad never left her without helping her stock up first. And when I was five, she came to live with us.

We'd leave Grandmother Bean's early one morning, and drive another 12-hours to get to my Grandparents in Indiana. These were Mom's parents, Grandma and Grandpa Dreher. The trip was basically the same. and when the visit was complete, we'd return home the same way. Back to Grandmother Bean's. Spend the night. And then on to Norfolk.

It's hard to believe, but with Interstate-64, you can leave Norfolk at 7 a.m., and by 7 p.m. you can be in Corydon, Indiana!  It seems impossible that travel has changed so much in just my life time!

But then, I remember Aunt Audrey talking of traveling to North Carolina when she was a young girl with my Grandpa Bean and the family. My Aunt Pauline had tuberculosis, and the doctor advised that they move her to North Carolina where she could breathe in the air. (About 1920.)

They traveled by Model T roadster. It took days. And they slept on the ground, camping out under the stars! But then, that's another story.