52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy Home I grew up in

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History by Amy Coffin is a series of weekly blogging prompts (one for each week of 2011) that invite genealogists and others to record memories and insights about their own lives for future descendants. You do not have to be a blogger to participate. If you do not have a genealogy blog, write down your memories on your computer, or simply record them on paper and keep them with your files.

* Week 4: Home. Describe the house in which you grew up. Was it big or small? What made it unique? Is it still there today?



This is the house I grew up in, my parents bought it when I was about 18 months old and both lived there until they died. It is a story and a half with about 2/3 of house having a basement. It set on three lots in north Spokane. You can not see the roof in the picture, but it has a tile roof that is supposed to last as long as the house. When I was young pop bought some old telephone poles and made a swing in the yard they were about 20 feet high and had surplus rope pop bought from the navy surplus store.
When they bought the house it had a small one car garage, pop cut it in two and moved the one wall about 12 feet to the south, filled in with a new wall between where it was cut and added a new roof of the now two car garage.
If you look closely on the left of the picture is the first addition my parents added to the house, an office for mom to work in (she was a bookkeeper) and it was built by the carpenter that lived across the street. Later on they added on the north side about 12 feet, replacing the old porch that had been there with a bedroom and an addition to the kitchen.
It was located pretty good for us during school, it was three blocks to elementary school and four blocks to high school, but the junior high school was 1.4 miles away. When we went to junior high they would bus you if you lived 1.5 miles from the school and we were a block too close for the bus, so I rode my bike when ever there was no snow.