Neighbor’s video from 1930!

Society pages in old newspapers are so silly and quaint, right? Not to a researcher! As I researched the neighborhood close to what would be our house, I found early references to the house that is next door to us. It was built in 1927 and first owned by a family headed by a commercial photographer, his wife and initially two children. (I will update with their names if I get permission to do so.) Society pages told us who they were and what they did. Census records showed us how long they lived at the house: approximately from 1927 until 1974. Genealogy links enabled me to connect with an ancestor of the original owners and they provided me with an incredible video of their lives from Christmastime in 1930:

It is a heartwarming video of a very young family in their new house, which is about two years old at the time. At one point, you can see a “modern” car drive past. This could be on what is now our street, Esther, or on what is now known as McKinley, the other corner street of their lot.

You can see the plot of what would become our house behind their garage early in the video at about the 34-second mark. It appears to have a barn on what looks like not so much our house’s lot, but rather on the one that now sits across the street from ours, beyond this house. In this video, there is no street between their garage (which now is next to our garage) and the house beyond that (current) street. We do know from newspaper stories that this family had large garden parties during the late 1920s and early 1930s, although their own land was (to the best of our knowledge) not that large. It is quite possible that they used the land that is not on our house, which was vacant.

The other houses in the neighborhood that you can see are unrecogizable to us, but it is also unclear where the mother is bicycling with her 2-year-old daughter; it may be in a nearby neighborhood.

This video is at Christmas, so the end of the video features the family and two sets of grandparents celebrating in 1930. We get a chance to see life then.

We shared the video with some of our neighbors, but regrettably were not able to reach the current residents of the home this family built in 1927. We hope we can soon!