"AT HOME WITH HISTORY" ARTICLES

HOME HISTORIES
NUVO MAGAZINE
Eve Lazarus

When Bill Richardson bought his dilapidated east Vancouver home three years ago, he knew he was in for years of renovations. What the CBC broadcaster didn't know was he would also become part of the story of the house. Friends hired a researcher to detail the social history of the former worker's cottage, and through it Richardson learned about the inhabitants who had lived there since 1895.

"In my altruistic moments I've said to myself that this house is like a little gift to the city because there aren't many left that are like it," he says. "I'm glad to have given it another 50 or 60 years with these repairs and taken my place in the ongoing narrative of the house."

James Johnstone, a Vancouver house genealogist who traces the lives of past owners, found that the house had a rich history. Combing through census records, tax assessment rolls, city directories and oral histories, he found that Richardson's house told the story of early immigration to Vancouver
Johnstone found that his own 1908 east Vancouver row house had been home to waves of Japanese, Jewish, Russian and Chinese immigrants. Research revealed that Nora Hendrix, the grandmother of rocker Jimi Hendrix, lived around the corner from his house in the 1940s and Phil Palmer, (aka Felice DiPalma) a well-known prize fighter, had lived across the street.

"When you move into an older heritage house you see scratches on the walls and initials carved in the basement walls or floors and you begin to think about who lived there," says Johnstone. "The more work I put into it, the richer and deeper and the more interesting the picture becomes."

When Bruce Elliott, a history professor, researched the Ottawa home he bought in 1999, he made a number of discoveries. An architect's drafting tool hidden in the rafters of the work shop, a toy howitzer, a 1936 American penny and a scrap of original wallpaper all hinted at the lives of earlier generations.

A trip to the Land Registry Office revealed that Hugh Richards an architect had built the house in 1916. As Elliott continued the search he found that the son of Hugh Richards, an engineer in his 70's still lived nearby and that Maplelawn, the Georgian House where he proposed to his wife several years ago, was the same house where Richards married in 1915.

Su Murdoch, a Barrie, Ontario-based historical consultant, has uncovered hundreds of social histories. Her own 1849 house is the former Barrie Grammar School. Sir William Osler, a man described as the "most influential physician in history," was once a boarder who left his name scratched in her window.

"Although I might own it, I think of myself as the temporary custodian of this house," she says.
Another occupant was Benjamin Walker Smith, the first Sheriff of the county of Simcoe. He regularly entertained cabinet ministers and Murdoch says Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald was a guest in her house.

"It's things like that that I really find intriguing. You can pass a house on a street and just not think twice about it, but when you learn its history, it's such important evidence," she says. "All the people are gone and the stories are over, but the house is still sitting there, it's the only tangible evidence that we have."

Murdoch researched the history for Woodlands, a 20,000 square-foot home on the shoreline of Kempenfelt Bay. Built in 1870, the house had few owners. The most notorious was Arthur Peuchen who bought the property in 1907. Peuchen, the president of the Standard Chemical Company of Toronto, was on the Titanic five years later and managed to commandeer the same rowboat that brought the infamous Molly Brown to safety. He was one of the few to survive the tragedy. Briefly a hero, he eventually sold his home as people crossed the street rather than speak to a man who "lived when women and children died."

Mark and Cathy Porter now own the home. Cathy is convinced that a nine-year-old girl, who died in the early 1900s, still inhabits the house. Toys move, closed doors are found open and her daughter has heard singing in the nursery. "When people walk into the back part of the house-the nursery-they fell a real cold sort of presence," she says. "I think there was a lot of unhappiness in the house."

Murdoch, says she's "neutral" on the subject of ghosts.

"I can't deny that there is a strong spirituality to some houses--you feel it right away."
Johnstone would agree.

"When I do this work I sometimes feel that I have ghosts hanging over my shoulder," he says.

"There is an almost religious aspect, a spooky aspect to this house genealogy that sustains me. I've got to do it. If I don't people will forget who lived here before us."