Thursday, December 3, 2009

Found a Family Home on Google...

I love to Google... and am often surprised by what I find. I Googled my address today, and found the www.realtor.com site which has information about my house and the others on my street - when last purchased, how much, assessed value, size of lot, size of house, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, etc. I Googled other addresses too...

When I put "2130 Fern St" and "San Diego" in the search field, one of the sites that came up was a Vacation Rentals site. It appears that they've turned the little house on Fern Street, that my grandparents built in 1920, and sold in about 1950, into a vacation rental. For $120 a night, anybody can rent the place out and enjoy living in the middle of San Diego. It has only one bedroom and one bathroom, but sleeps four somehow.

Here are some screen shots from the Vacation Rentals site for 2130 Fern Street:


They "lie" a little bit here in claiming that it's only five minutes from the Zoo and downtown, and 10 minutes to the beaches on Coronado. Maybe as a fast crow flies. Driving it takes a bit longer!

The top upper-left photo above is of the entrance to the house, and the other photos show the nicely appointed living areas.



The bottom-right photo on the screen above shows, I think, the back door area. It looks like there is a covered patio in the back yard.

Do you know what the house your ancestors built or lived in looks like now? Have you driven by the old homestead recently? I did several weeks ago, and took some pictures.

My biggest surprise is the size of this house - about 700 square feet. I thought that it was bigger than that. My grandparents had only one daughter, my mother, but they also housed my great-grandmother, Georgianna (Kemp) Auble, for many years. I wonder if my mother and great-grandmother slept in the same room? I seem to recall my mother telling me that, but cannot clearly recall it.

I really want to go take a look inside this house sometime. I have no real memories of it, since I was only seven when it was sold. However, this is probably the house where I learned to walk, talk and go potty, among other things. My grandmother watched me while my mother taught school. We moved to our own apartment (at 2116 Fern Street, next door!) in late 1945 after my father came home from the US Navy. Ah, memories.

4 comments:

Heather Wilkinson Rojo said...

I recently looked at all the census records from 1850-1930 for my family in Boston. If an address had been scribbled in the margins, I noted where it was. I doubled checked most of these with city directories on ancestry.com. Then we headed off to Massachusetts and took digital photos of all the houses we could find. Two had been destroyed (in the name of urban renewal) but the rest were still there and we got some great photos. A wide range of houses, from Boston Brahmins on Beacon Hill, wooden houses in Dorchester, to triple deckers in Cambridge. It was fascinating to see the neighborhoods and the architecture.

Donna said...

Randy,

That's really cool! Is that the house you showed me when you gave me the tour?

Donna

Unknown said...

Thanks for sharing that Randy. I also have visited former houses. It is always nice when the current residents invite you in and encourage you to tell stories about growing up in the house.

Ruth said...

Hey Randy, check out my post at

http://www.mybluebonnetcountrygenealogy.com/blog/2009/12/03/great-idea-randy-2/

I Googled my 2GGF's house!

Thanks!
Ruth Stephens