Let's talk about history

Let's talk about you and me ... and the amazing fact that our house will get to celebrate its 100th birthday next year.
Not only that, but in 100 years it has also come full circle in regard to its owners. How so, you wonder?

I'm so excited to share this with you! When our house was ready to move in for the first time in 1914, the first couple to ever live in the Little Old House - when the plaster had just dried and the paint was still fresh - were Henry and Emma Stukenberg. Both, henry and Emma, were half-German, born to immigrant parents from Germany and the Netherlands who had settled in Indiana in the 1800s.
How crazy is that?!
I'm a born and bred German citizen, and immigrated to the US in 2003 (I like telling people I'm a mail-order bride but that's not quite how I met the husband). Little Man was born on German soil, but thanks to the good relationship between the US and Germany, he holds dual citizenship (and has two passports). After 100 years the Little Old House is again home to people with German roots!
Crazy, isn't it?
I mean, what are the odds?

[This is not an actual picture of the Stukenbergs - I wish I had one!]

Henry Stukenburg was born on June 15, 1868, in Aurora, Indiana, to Herman and Margaret Stukenburg (also spelled Studenburg, Stukenburg or Stuckenbirg). He was the second-oldest of six children and had two sisters (Mary and Lena) and three brothers (Fred, Frank and Edward). His father made a living as a cooper and his mother was a homemaker.
His future wife Emma was born  in either 1869 or 1870 as the second-oldest of five children to Fredrick and Katherine "Katie" Wesler in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. She had three sisters (Maggie, Minnie and Carrie) and one brother (Harry). Her father was a local coal dealer.

Henry and Emma tied the knot on November 17, 1890 in Lawrenceburg/Dearborne, Indiana, and sometime between 1910 and 1920 moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where Henry worked as a foreman for Wright, Barrel & Coal Company.

Their union remained childless, and Henry passed away on October 26, 1929, in Jacksonville, Florida. He was buried on October 30, 1929,  at St. Mary's Cemetery. Mrs. Emma must have loved him very much because she followed him only a short time later, passing away on June 19, 1930. She is also buried at St. Mary's. I still need to go and look up their grave site and bring them some flowers.

And in case you are related to our Stukenburg family - please don't hesitate to contact us! I'd love to learn more about the first family at our Little Old House!

All this information I gleaned from census documents and other records through Ancestry.com and Familysearch.org. I really enjoyed Familysearch.org and had the best results through their site. As an added bonus it's free to use but you might run into finding documents that require a paid account through Ancestry.com. I tried their 14 day free trial but can't really get the hang of their interface well enough to make a full account worth my while - for now.

Maybe when I have more time on my hands .... yeaaaah, right. Like that will ever happen!

Glimpse of the past

Guilty as charged: I'm an old house nut. I love the craftsmanship of bygone times, the love for detail and the sense of history you get living in an old home.

While house hunting in 2010, the husband and I also looked at a number of younger houses. Modern houses outside our historic neighborhood. Not only did it feel like cheating but we were baffled at how, well ... empty those houses felt to us. Now, mind you, both the husband and I have lived in newer homes prior to moving to Historic Springfield in Jacksonville just fine. Guess we didn't know what we were missing, right?

Back to the whole history part.

[The Sanborn Map Collection at the Jacksonville Main Library]

Our darling Ugly Duckling of a house has changed hands many times in its almost 100 years of existence and has been home to even more. If you check out the page called "House History" (find the navigation button at the top of the blog or simply click here), you can find out about past tenants and the bit about the builder I was able to dig up.

So far I have

searched the city directories (check out this blog post here)
checked out the Sanborn map (read more about it here)
investigated the Springfield survey

Over the holidays I decided to take the plunge and signed up for a trial membership in Ancestry.com. I also discovered the site Familysearch.com courtesy of the LDS church and tend to get the better results using their search engine.

What better way to dig through an old US Census than from the cozy comfort of your couch, socks and tea and a cookie nearby?

Best. time. drain. ever!
Well, at least for somebody like me. It excites me to learn more about the men and women who called our house their home and to tease their story from old records.
I have managed to unearth a few more details about the people who shared the Ugly Duckling with us and I just have to figure out a good way to share these story bits.

Every old house owner's dream is it to find an old picture of their house. You know, from the time when the varnish was still fresh and the plaster not quite dry. So far, no luck, but I'm hanging in there. Who knows I might just find that one shoe box with the family pictures taken our street in 1915.

Wouldn't that be cool?

Green Thumb Dreams

Since Little Man and I will be camping out in the boonies with our cub scout pack tonight before tomorrow's big final push to get the moving done, I thought that I'd leave you with a little post about the outdoors at the Ugly Duckling to tide you over the weekend.

We'll be crashing and sleeping at our darling little old house tomorrow for the first time, testing our brand new kitchen (Note to self: Must get kiddie pool to contain husband's coffee making experiments) and sifting through and shifting boxes all weekend, that I doubt I'll find the time to properly update every day. Plus, there's the hint of a cold creeping up on me and I'm feeling slightly drained. Joy! Meh ...

From the start we had a fairly good idea of what we wanted for our back yard: a slightly tropical retreat with lots of color and cozy touches. And room for a splash pool for the Little Man and friends. Poking around on the 'net I discovered several garden planners and although none really blew me away, I did dabble with the one I found on BHG.com a little longer than with the others. Also, it's pretty colorful which always pleases a visually inclined person like myself :o)

Here's a screen shot:

[source: bhg.com]

If anybody figured out a way to adjust the working window size or 'move' around your lot without moving structures, let me know. It was giving me a hard time, my patience was wearing out slowly so I threw my hands in the air, let measurements be measurements and simply went for the look without it being 100% to scale. I mean it's just a concept sketch anyhow, right?

So here we go:

We really want to have a small deck off of the backdoor: just big enough to fit our patio set and gas grill so we're looking at a deck that's about 12ft deep and wide with a cut out to accommodate one of our two a/c compressors . Behind that is the best corner for Little Man's splash pool (It's funny: I had to use their bird bath icon to simulate the pool since their other pool icon is kidney-bean shaped).

Across from the pool via a stepping stone path from the deck is a little bench tucked between flowers and covered by a little arbor for added coziness. I'd really love an orange tree and some other tropical plants tossed together with butterfly and hummingbird plants to add to that colorful Florida feel. I mean, c'mon, we -are- in Florida - we might as well flaunt it!

We're not aiming for a grassy-green lawn. Our climate doesn't really allow for a soft grassy green expanse in your yard unless you want to go broke which we can't afford. Plus, grass capable of surviving Florida weather tends to be rather harsh and spikey. Right now I'm brushing up on alternative ground covers and so far the groundcovering thymes look very promising!

Thanks to code we had to stuff both of our ac compressors into our back yard. They are located on either side of the kitchen window leaving a 4ft opening between them - perfect for a miniature kitchen garden in a raised bed! I have my eyes on a small curly-cue iron trellis for the back of it so pole beans and/or sugar snap peas have a place to climb.

I did order a butterfly garden kit and a few other plants from Michigan Bulb Co. Mind you, this company gets a bag of badly mixed reviews which I discovered after I ordered so right now I'm basically assuming the worst so that I might end up pleasantly surprised. According to the reviews you either hit jackpot or rock-bottom so wish me luck! Thanks to a rather generous coupon this won't be a too expensive lesson to learn ...

Hitting the nail on the head

I want a house that has got over all its troubles. I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.
- Jerome K. Jerome

Right now we're poly-ed out of most of our house. The remaining wood floors at the Darling Duckling have been stained and today the first coat of polyurethane went on - that means the downstairs hallway and library and stairs and upstairs hall are off limits right now. More time for packing up stuff, I guess, even though we fell funny after not swinging a paint brush for several days now.

If you could see the stack of boxes that is our current library you would have no doubt that we are avid readers. All three of us. 40-something liquor store boxes are pretty much a dead give-away. No, really. Good thing we have a great public library system here in Jacksonville - that way we don't run out of reading material what with all of our books packed up. One of the books I picked up and enjoyed greatly was/is

Renovating old houses - bringing new life to vintage homes
George Nash
The Taunton Press
ISBN 1-56158-535-1

It is jam-packed with great information and DIY advice including instructions on how to repair old windows, terminology and and and. And best of all, it comes with a number of really neat old house quotes and an introduction that I feel best manages to capture why we feel about old houses the way we do and what makes people come together and fight for their preservation like "SOS Preservation".

Excerpt from "Renovating old houses - bringing new life to vintage homes" by George Nash

"People who work with and live in old houses use fuzzy words like feel, aura and essence to justify their obsession. These are aesthetic categories that attempt to describe the perception of beauty, the way so many old houses almost seem to live a life of their own, breathing in slow, subtle rhythms of shifting lines and weathering wood.
As do all living things, a house achieves a delicate equilibrium, a precariously maintained and constantly changing relationship to time, the seasons and its people. It responds to the care (or neglect) given it - growing, changing, adding windows and doors, sprouting porches and sheds as the years progress.
And when its people depart, a house begins to die. The process occurs with a grace, beauty and terrible simplicity. The tilt and sag of the walls, the weathered shades of clapboard and peeling paint, the tired angles of the roof, all give mute expression to the ebb and flow of the lives once harbored within..."

Just a few more pages

... till the end of the chapter!

And just a few more pages until we start - finally ! - a brandnew chapter in our book going from "The long arduous annoying exasperating tiring frustrating exciting hunt for and purchase of a home" to "1001 exciting and not so exciting moments of rehabbing a historic home" followed closely by "The great mystery of paint colors, window treatments and decorative touches" - short and sweet, in a mere 17 hours we are going to become homeowners!
Squeeee!
Today I ducked again into the library to learn more about our Ugly Duckling's history. Researching the more recent history isn't nearly as fun - the books are newer and cleaner lacking the charm and mystery of the rumpled pages of old books gilded with age and sadly, the entries aren't nearly as exciting. Professions aren't listed as regularly anymore, and the names in their contemporary familiarity ring less intriguing.

It's also kind of sad to learn that in its long history, the Ugly Duckling has never really been a long-term family home. Except for the Parnells who lived in the Ugly Duckling between 1941 and 1966 and Mrs Bertha Babcock who lived here from 1971 until 1984, the house passed from tenant to tenant with few of them staying much longer than 2 or 3 years at a time.

Hopefully we will be able to break that spell and give the Ugly Duckling its if not forever family at least a long-term family that will take care of it (funny, I think of the Ugly Duckling as 'her' most of the time even though she's not one of the Grand old ladies of Historic Springfield) and cherish it. And no, we have no plans on renaming the Ugly Duckling "George"!

Enough sappy babbling - more tomorrow!

Something bigger than google maps

Much much bigger, in fact. And much more fun, although I must confess I love google maps street view feature.So we enjoyed another Thursday at the library downtown. This time I trekked out with the munchkin and three of his neighborhood buddies and while they enjoyed the afternoon kids program, I ducked into the Florida collections for some quality time with a few maps I'd wanted to check out ever since I heard of them.
The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
Then created as a tool used by insurance companies and fire departments to assess the risk of fire for neighborhoods and properties, they are now a great tool in your research of your property's history. You can find out whether your house changed shape (a porch added or enclosed, an addition built, etc.), if it had outdoor buildings at some point (a garage, a shed, a carriage house, etc.) and what the surrounding neighborhood looked like.
Our library has actually digitalized a great deal of the Sanborn maps (check it out here) but unfortunately not enough to show the street with the Ugly Duckling. So off I went to wrestle the maps in person.
And wrestle them, I did. Boy, they look nothing they today's AAA maps! Nothing at all.

(Meet the Sanborn Map Collection - yes, they are that tall)


(Loooove those rumpled looking yellowed pages)

(Yep, that's my hand. You need two of these to carry one of the maps)

The librarians working the special collections upstairs are always incredibly helpful and nice and I feel quite at home up there. So while they put out the call to find the librarian who could answer my question on how these maps are set up, I decided to simply try my luck.
I'm a very visual person and a hands-on approach usually works much better for me than listening to or reading instructions of any sort. 3 misses later, I scored my first map with the right street. Woot! Granted, waiting for the librarian to point me to the right map would have been a little easier on my back and kept me from toting 3 heavy (40-50lbs is my guess) maps back and forth between their shelf and the table that's big enough to hold them.

(Our neighborhood in 2924 - the different colors indicate building material (pink is brick, yellow is wood frame, etc.)

So, there you go. That's how you find out if and how your house changed shape. We were able to go back to 1924 and confirm that the utility room with outside-access only had been a porch in the early years (the drywalled-over window was a dead give-away too, heh) . I was surprised that that was pretty much the only area that was enclosed and added to the structure at some point, even though I still think that the upstairs kitchen/future master bathroom was an open porch. I'm sure future demo will help us solve that riddle.
Way back there was a tiny garage in the Ugly Duckling's backyard but other than that, it has stayed in a rather unaltered state. And if we have any say in it, it'll remain on the map for a number of years to come :o)

Don't know much about history

What a wonderful world this could be ... if everybody had a rocking main library like ours :o)

Like every Thursday we trekked out to our main library downtown right after school yesterday, and while the munchkin enjoyed the awesome afternoon program in the children's department I sneaked ...snuck ... well, hurried upstairs into the Florida collection for some geeky house history research fun. And this time I brought my point and shoot camera along!

So here's the lovely view of the shelves that hold the city directories (think "phone directory/ white pages" even if in the beginning there weren't any or many phone numbers) - your first stop for quick and easy research of the who is who in your house's past:


Their covers might look different (ranging from green Naga hide to faded red hardcover and everything in between) and their individual parts can be arranged slightly different but it all boils down to

1. street directory (usually found in the front in the early publications and in the back of the more recent ones and printed on colored paper)
2. name directory
3. glossary, etc.

Meet city directory 1967

(Don't be fooled - this book weighs almost as much as your firstborn)

So, armed with your address you want to look up you find those colored pages with the street directory. Note that if your street doesn't have a name but is an actual number like say, 3rd St, you will discover that at the beginning of the 19th century these were spelled out so you'll have to look under "T" for Third St. In more recent years, numbered streets are listed by number in order before "A".

Word to the wise: You don't want to start nilly-willy looking up years. Tracking past owners/occupants of the Ugly Duckling was very straightforward and easy and the biggest 'problem' are simply missing years of city directories. When I tried the same for the Triplex (remember this one here), picking a random date sometime between the year it was built and today I couldn't find the house number in the street directory anymore! It had vanished! When I finally backtracked year by year I discovered that at some point the entire street had been re-numbered and that what is today house number 1832 was house number 2032 50 years earlier. So while sometimes you might be able to look up the first occupant/owner right off the bat, if you can't, start at the beginning and track back year by year toward the year it was built to solve the mystery :o)

Anyways, back to our city directory. Find the colored pages for the street directory and hunt down your address

(Don't forget to enjoy the ads in the margins!)

Woot! You found a name! Easy, peasy! Before running off to run it through the Census, however, you can squeeze just a teeny tiny bit more information from those city directories. Go into reverse and look up the name in the name directory part of the book.

(A glimpse into life in 1967: a clerk, a retiree, a saleswoman, a waitress at
Lee's & Eddie;s Restaurant, a clerk at Blue Cross-Blue Shield, a maid, a widow ...)

If you're lucky you'll find the name of the spouse or whether the spouse passed away (and what his name was). You can also occasionally find information about the profession or even the place of work - little bits of information that help you piece together the history of just who your house was home to in past years.

There you have it! That wasn't so bad, was it? I have to admit I was sneaky. I spent all of 10 minutes with the city directories this time because I was busy with some humongous maps - I'll tell you all about it in my next blog entry!

If walls could talk ...

Ever since discovering the first Young Reader book about the history of Egypt I've been hooked on history. I'm a history nut geeking out over archeology, old books, books about old stuff, barely legible documents and ancient tomes, recipes and patterns, and more. I'm even a member of a group that recreates the Middle Ages and dabble in calligraphy and illumination, medieval cooking and other assorted medieval crafts.

It wasn't really a long step from that to trying to learn more about the house we're about to make ours in just 19 more days! *keeps fingers crossed*

Fortunately and much to my delight, the main branch of the local library houses a treasure trove of resources for the genealogist and Florida history lover. Up underneath the roof in the Grand Map room is where I can be found when the munchkin participates in one of the awesome kids' programs. For about an hour I get to browse the old city directories for glimpses into our house's past. I have yet to swing by the property appraiser's office to track down the actual past owners but so far I've had too much fun digging around in the old city directories for information on who lived in the Ugly Duckling over the past 95 years.

From what I've gathered so far, our house appears to have been a kind of modest starter home: Few occupants stayed longer than 2 years at a time and most held rather modest Middle-Class jobs. Hubby, of course, is tickled pink that the first ever occupant's name is "Mead". How befitting for a hobby brewer to soon be living in "The Mead House" ... heh.

I've added the Ugly Duckling's genealogy as a separate page to the top navi bar - I'll update it as my research comes along. We're planning on ducking into the library again this afternoon so I might have more to post tomorrow or Friday!
Enjoy!

Update:
Well, so I couldn't wait :o) I added a few more years to our house's genealogy of occupants. I also got the library clerk to show me to the Sanford maps and the prospect of finding a map with our house has me giddy with geeky excitement. Next time I'll bring the camera. Promise!