Time for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. This week's theme: Home Sweet Home.
My parents' "home, sweet home" was rented as long as my father, Arden Packard (1911-1954) was alive. When I got serious about genealogy, more than 30 years ago, I read about how wonderful land and property records can be. I tried to apply that evaluation to my parents, and came up baffled. I couldn't find one property record in their names. I remember Mom talking about a particular house in Jacksonville, Florida, where I grew up, that she and Dad had rented during World War II. Rented. Oh, boy.
The 1940 census does have them living in a rented house in Coronado, California. I do remember that one of the houses we occupied in Pensacola in the early 1950s -- about 1951 -- was rented; then we moved into another rented house. My father did not stay in one place very long, even within the same county. That could explain why he and Mom never owned a house. The first purchased house my mother lived in after marrying Dad was the house she bought after he died in 1954, when she took me and my brother and sister -- and my brother's bird -- back to Florida.
To find where my mother and father were in any particular year before my own recollections begin, I depended on censuses and city directories. City directories can be marvels, and for me, they helped to solve a mystery. For years, I had heard my mom and dad and my grandma talk about a certain gentlemen that I never met. At least, I don't remember ever having met him. In one city directory for Jacksonville, from about 1953, there is a full page ad for an insurance company my father worked for. And there, in the list of agents of the company, was this man's name.
My husband and I rented in the first years of our marriage. He was in the Coast Guard on active duty, stationed in St. Petersburg, Florida, and we actually tried to buy a house, but the mortgage company made a blatant error. We told them they were wrong, but they were unable, unwilling, or both, to correct the error. I hold grudges like my mother did, and that mortgage company and the owner thereof landed on my permanent excrement list. So we ended up renting. We ended up living next door to the unfortunate real estate agent we had worked with in trying to buy a house in St. Petersburg. Mind you, she was as baffled and disgusted at that mortgage company as we were, and had done a terrific but, alas, fruitless job of trying to get the company to admit their error. She was a wonderful neighbor and friend, and gave us free run of her citrus trees, which were bearing enough fruit to have fed our entire block. When we returned to Jacksonville, where my husband was born and raised, we rented until we could find a house to buy.
Well, home sweet home is just that, whether owned or rented. Each location generates memories and stories.
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