Great Blogger Name

(This is mostly for Erie area readers that perhaps haven't seen the houseblogs.net blogroll.)

I was browsing through the Houseblogs.com blogroll and found one that made me laugh. The name is great. This Old Crack House It's a great blog, with a great name. It says under the headline, From log house to farmhouse. Farmhouse to townhouse. Townhouse to apartment house. Apartment house to crack house. Crack house to our house. Our house to our home.

If you follow her link to "My Web Page" on the right side bar you'll see lots of great pictures of their Dayton,OH home.

I wish the originally beautiful, historic homes turned "multi-family" apartments and frat houses in our area would get taken over by families like this one and restored back to what they were meant to be. I hate seeing the mutilation of Erie's great old houses by greedy landlords just to make a few bucks. There aren't many of the grand houses left. And if you restored one in the city of Erie, they'd tax you right out of it. Thank goodness for the Watson-Curtze Mansion Museum. At least Erie will have that.

Some Library Research, Digging Through History

I spent a few hours at the library recently researching the city directories, obits, yearbooks etc. I'm gathering information for my house's scrapbook that someday I will pass on to new owners. Hopefully, the new people will love this house, too.

I'm trying to be careful with my posts about the family as 3 of the sisters are still alive but we haven't had contact with them. There are a lot of questions, though, I'd love to ask them but for now, I won't bother them. They took it personally when we offered less than the asking price. They lived here all of their lives so they must not have known about negotiating prices. They thought the house was worth much more, but that was understandable with all the memories tied up here. They are up there in their years and they no longer could care for the place. There was and is a lot of labor involved in maintaining an old house. It was getting too much for them. They moved to a modern apartment.

When we bought the house, some of our neighbors told us some about what they knew of the former owners. There were 5 sisters and one brother born to the previous owners. None of the children ever married and all but one of them lived here their whole lives until we bought the house. That struck me odd.

The previous owners were the first family to occupy the house other than the builder. Our house was built in 1917 and the husband and wife moved into the house around 1920. They had a son about 1919. So that was my quest at the library. Find out about the son, first.

I knew the mother had died and found her obit. I found the son's name as having died previously in 1925. I was surprised at the date. I looked up his obit. He was only 6 years old. Somehow I had built a connection to these former owners and seeing that almost made me cry. He died in St Vincent hospital and was going to have a quarantined funeral. When people said he never married I assumed he was much older when he died. I cannot imagine the sorrow of losing someone at such an innocent age and I wonder what he died of.

The library announced they were closing so I had to leave. I'm going to return to look up the newspaper microfilm and see if I can find out what he died of or what kind of diseases happened to be going around at the time.