THUNDER BAY – If only the walls of our homes could speak.
The tales they could tell of the people who lived inside them might provide a pretty insightful glimpse at the history of Thunder Bay and its residents.
While many of those secrets are designed to stay locked up forever in the city’s past, there are plenty of interesting facts one can learn about their home if they’re willing to do a little digging.
Beverly Soloway, an associate professor of history at Lakehead University, wants to show the public how on March 30, when she hosts Once Upon a Time: Finding the Story of Your House, a 90-minute seminar being staged at the Mary J.L. Black Library starting at 7 p.m.
The session will provide attendees with the tools they need to explore the origins of their homes, who lived there and how the surrounding neighbourhood developed.
“It’s sort of like doing a genealogy of your house,” Soloway said.
“I’ve always done my own house genealogies wherever I’ve lived, just because I’m curious and I am a professor of history. I like history. I like to know about Thunder Bay history and I like to know about my house history.”
It doesn’t take long for her friends, once they learn her specialty, to start asking for information – or how to go about finding it – about their own homes.
Speaking with someone at the Thunder Bay Public Library, she was told members of the public often come in seeking the same type of information.
Thus the workshop was hatched.
Over the years she’s come across some interesting tales, including tracking down the Ambrose Street location of the region’s first Children’s Aid Society, a basement beauty salon that the home’s new owners had no idea had once existed and another residence where women once went to give birth, unbeknownst to its current occupants.
It’s really not all that difficult to start lifting those tales about your own home, Soloway said.
“You need to have your house address, which is very easy,” she said. “Then you work backward from your present day or the day you moved in. You can go into things like the Henderson directories, which keep a record of who has lived in every property in the city, right up until 1909.”
If those names are available, you can track them further through census records that carry one through 1921.
“People can find out more about the families that lived there,” Soloway said.
To register for the workshop, phone 684-6815.
