My husband and I love old houses. Before we moved to Fort
Wayne, we lived in a 100-year old home in Kearney NE near what had been in my
childhood the junior high school’s football field and prior to that the high
school’s stadium. That stadium is long gone, replaced by new housing, but the
neighborhood that was built just to the west of downtown remains with an active
neighborhood association working to keep the area in tip top shape. Here in
Fort Wayne, we live in Wildwood Park, a neighborhood begun in 1916 at the end
of the streetcar line. While our house is one of the newer ones in the Park,
the oldest is just across the street and it’s nice to live in an area where
every house is different in appearance.
As we’ve lost parents, aunts and uncles to death, we’ve
started to inherit family memorabilia and furniture. Tom’s family is from
upstate New York, and by virtue of being an area that was settled long before
my native Nebraska, family objects from his parents tend to be older and have
more history. That’s not to say those objects have more value because it’s the
history of an object that gives it value. Witness a 1930’s era blue cream
pitcher I own that had once been my grandmother’s. According to my mother,
those pitchers were premiums given away by a company when she was a child. The
company logo is long gone but the creamer is on our coffee table as a
penholder. It was on the table for every meal we ate at my grandparent’s house
and I don’t intend to ever part with it.
Old houses and family items are an excellent way to teach
history to your children. You can research objects via your local library or
antique stores. If you know some of the history of an item, such as when it
came to the States from Europe, write this information down and keep it with
the item or in a spot where it won’t get lost. I have the history of a cake
plate that came to Nebraska from England…I hope. But I haven’t seen the history
in awhile so I can’t be positive I still have it. That’s why taking care of the
information is so important.
You can research the history of your home, in part, through
public records. Old newspaper articles and books of photographs can also be
helpful. Along the way you may learn something about architecture. We are
fortunate here in Fort Wayne to have the Genealogy Center at the downtown
public library. What a phenomenal resource!
Once you know how old something is, you can then do some
research about the world in that time. Ken Burns’ recent work on the Dust Bowl,
for example, can give you a glimpse into the time in which many of our parents
and grandparents lived. Novels about a certain time period, biographies of key
persons (one of the best ways to study history in my opinion), old movies, etc.
give you a feel for a time period that is more than you get from memorizing
facts, dates and dead presidents. Right now, I’m reading Madeleine Albright’s
book “Prague Winter”, a look at pre-World War II Europe that is almost as good
as Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts”.
If you want your kids to love history, you need to love it
too and be creative about how you share that love. It will rub off to a certain
extent…trust me on that one!
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