Buildings for Our Families

Kilsby United Reformed Church - the chapel was opened in 1784 in honour of Rev. Thomas Strange

One of the joys of looking into family history is to visit the places where your ancestors once lived. Perhaps little has changed and you will be able to feel like you have walked a mile in their shoes, finding the places where they worked and worshiped. If you are lucky, you may even find the building where your family lived in the past.

 Whether or not these buildings are still there depends very much on where they were located. I went looking for my grandparent's pub in East London but it had been torn down and there was a new business in its place. (The wall of the cable business that replaced the pub is in the foreground of the picture of Dock Street on the right.) They had the pub in the recent past but in a city real estate is worth lots and progress is constant. It was a different story when I looked for traces of my 5 x great grandfather who was a nonconformist minister. What is now the United Reformed Church in Kilsby, Northamptonshire was erected in his memory and bears an inscription that indicates this. It was amazing to find an ancestor who made an impression on the landscape that still exists today.

But that is probably true of many well-heeled ancestors in the upper crust of society who left their mansions, castles and country homes as permanent markers of where they once lived. Those with humbler ancestors have to hope that dwellings that were prominent in their family history have, by some fluke, survived. Sometimes they do as an example of something, as in an historic village or as a commemoration of another kind. 

House at Fanshawe Historic Village in Ontario

But you won't know what is there until you go looking in the places where they lived. Happy hunting!