Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Google Maps of Ancestral Homes

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

It's Saturday Night again -

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing: 

1) Identify an ancestral home address ( preferably one with a street address...) for one of your ancestral families (You do know where they lived, don't you? If not, consult the 1900 to 1940 US Census records, or City Directories).

2) Go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) and enter the street address (and city/town if necessary - usually you can pick from a list) for your selected ancestral home.

3) Look at the street map, the satellite map, and the street view. Zoom in or out, or manipulate the image as you wish.

4) Tell us or show us your map images in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status post. Please leave a link in a comment to this post.

5) Do you have maps and street view pictures for all of your known ancestral homes?

Here’s mine:

I don’t have many addresses that still have ancestral homes on them. Either they lived on farms with no addresses or lived in cities where skyscrapers are now.

I decided to show the house my father lived in with his mother and sisters when they lived in Napa, California after moving from southern California in the summer of 1940. They first lived with Anna’s brother-in-law, Vir Quigley and then lived at 1259 Eggleston. This house is still there! It was located downtown, close to the high school where my dad’s sisters attended and the parochial school where he attended. His mother worked at a coffee shop right downtown until she got her California teacher’s certificate and then taught at a one-room schoolhouse on the Silverado Trail.

Here is the map with spot marked.

 Here is the house at 1259 Eggleston Street.

Here is the satellite map showing how much Napa has grown since 1940. It was pretty much a small town where everyone knew each other. My dad’s three sisters were the hit of the town that summer and probably were very popular in high school.

We visited Vir’s son, John Quigley, once and drove by the house. I know I took photos but can’t put my hands on them now. My grandmother and father moved to Concord, California in the late 40s because she got a new teaching job teaching at Williams School in the Mt Diablo School District. I’m hoping to discover where they lived when the 1950 census comes out!

Copyright © 2021 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.