Wednesday, January 15, 2014

(Not So) Wordless Wednesday - Post 290: The Hildreth/Seaver House in Leominster, Mass.

I'm posting family photographs from my collection on Wednesdays, but they aren't Wordless Wednesday posts like others do - I am incapable of having a wordless post.

Here is a photograph of an ancestral home taken on one of our vacation/genealogy trips to Massachusetts:





These photographs are of the house at 149 Lancaster Street in Leominster, Massachusetts.  I took them in 2007 on a visit to Leominster to celebrate the life of my aunt Geraldine (Seaver) Remley.  

My great-great grandparents, Edward and Sophia (Newton) Hildreth, resided in this house from before 1870 until their deaths (Edward in 1899, and Sophia in 1923).  Their daughter, Hattie Hildreth (1857-1920) lived here with her husband, Frank Walton Seaver (1852-1922) until their deaths.  My grandfather, Frederick Walton Seaver (1876-1942) grew up in this house.  

A family story says that the Hildreths lived in the left-hand side of the house, and that the Seavers lived in the "ell" on the right-hand side of the building.  They were likely connected with a door.  

Looking closely at the front of the present house, you can see three different entrance doors and three different mailboxes (one in the front porch of the left-hand side and two on the right-hand side of the building).  So there are at least three residences in this building now, one on the left-hand side, one upstairs and one downstairs on the right-hand side.  

I have not been inside this house, and now wish that I had had the gumption to walk up and ask to see if they would let me in to see the living room, parlor, kitchen, etc.  My great-grandparents and my great-great-grandparents died in this house.  My aunt and uncle recall seeing them laid out in the parlor before their burial.  

Here is the Google Map snippet that shows the location of 149 Lancaster Street in Leominster;



The house is on the southwest side of Lancaster Street, just southeast of the intersection with Cedar Street.  I realized early on that Frank Seaver lived with his parents, Isaac and Lucretia Seaver at 7 Cedar Street, which was just across Lancaster Street from Hattie Hildreth's home.  Frank and Hattie were neighbors and ran off to Keene, New Hampshire in December 1874 to get married.  

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/01/not-so-wordless-wednesday-post-290.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver




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