Past Homes

 

Was that how the street looked when my family lived there in the 1800s? Was that even the building they lived in or had it been replaced sometime back in history? Finding numbers close to street doors was difficult but judging the era of the street fronts they were attached to was even harder. It was obvious that some ancestral places had been razed and new places put in their stead. Goodmans Fields was not an upscale area of office blocks when my family lived there and, while there was a building at 82 Wentworth Street, it was doubtful that it was the one my Cavanagh family lived in for decades. It seems that even the street use had changed as surely Petticoat Lane Market was more than a few blocks away in their day.

 Visiting old family addresses is de rigueur for family historians. If you are lucky the places where your ancestors lived may still be standing and there might even be a chance that you could get inside. If not, just being in the area where their home once stood can give you a better idea of the lay of the land, which can help with the understanding of family stories or written accounts. It can also help you to picture their everyday lives. 

But there is nothing as sure in life as constant change. It happens in our lives all the time and it did in our ancestors lives as well. Many of them moved up and down the social scale as time and age changed their circumstances. Some of them moved from village to village, or village to town then city or even to different countries.

Did they keep fond memories of home in their minds as they pursued new lives in distant lands? But maybe the vision of home they held dear was no longer a reality. This came to mind after a conversation I had with someone who had lived in Halifax in his youth. It was a place we shared in common. Our memories stumbled over the street names but we recalled some of the geography, like the cemetery on the main street and the Public Gardens across the street from the Lord Nelson hotel. One of his fond memories was of sitting on the lawn in front of the library with chips from the food truck parked nearby. I told him things had change, that the city was proud of its new library but it was on the opposite side of the street and there was no lawn in front. He was sad he can only sit on the library's lawn in his memory and not look forward to doing that in person again one day. 

Did our ancestors have dreams of walking down the streets of their old homes one distant day in the future or did they embrace their lives in new lands and forget about what they had left?