Last Week's Survey:
Pre-1850s Ancestral Buildings Still Standing Today
Total: 3,698 Responses
- 63%, Yes, a family house built prior to 1850 is still standing.
- 19%, Yes, a commercial building associated with an ancestor or relative built prior to 1850 is still standing.
- 44%, Yes, a church, synagogue, or other house of worship associated with an ancestor or relative built prior to 1850 is still standing.
- 24%, No, I don’t believe that any pre-1850 structures associated with my family are still standing.
Readers Respond:
Janel Tortorice, Houston, Texas: My ancestor, Rev. John Lothrop, was a founder of Barnstable, Massachusetts. The front room of his 1644 house was used for public worship. His descendant William Sturgis willed the house to the town for a library, which opened in 1887. The house forms the original part of the present Sturgis Library. The room where religious services were held is known as the Lothrop Room and displays Rev. Lothrop’s Bible and other belongings. The building is the oldest structure in America in which religious services were regularly held.
Bonnie Larson, Seattle, Washington: My great-grandfather, Torger Sjurson Leland, was born in 1850 at Molster farm in Voss, Norway. At least one of the buildings dates to about 1500. The farm is now a museum that depicts life in about 1850, six years before Torger’s parents, Sjur Torgerson and Brita Oldsdatter, immigrated with their three children to Dane County, Wisconsin. Two of my grandchildren and three of my cousins have visited the Molster Folk Museum.
Nikki Strandskov, Luck, Wisconsin: One of my family homes is still standing, but in a different location—the Smithsonian Museum of American History. My Choate ancestors lived in the Choate-Caldwell House, which was built in 1710 and the 1760s in Ipswich, Massachusetts. The structure was moved to the Smithsonian in the 1960s. And the 1757–1759 Harpswell Meeting House in Harpswell, Maine, where my ancestors worshipped, still stands.
Diane Dellamano Brakeley, Cape Elizabeth, Maine: The house where my grandfather was born is in Gisazio di Perledo in Lombardia, Italy. A plaque outside of the house states that people were living there in 1499! The stairs are made from a famous local stone that was not quarried after 1500, so that is additional evidence for the house’s age.
Barbara Whittlesey, Tucson, Arizona: I have visited two old homes associated with the Jabez Burrell Family, one built about 1820 in Sheffield, Ohio (the Burrell Homestead property is now a park in Lorain County), and the house built by Abraham Burrell, the father of Jabez, perhaps as early as 1745, still standing in Sheffield, Massachusetts.
Starr Mitchell, Little Rock, Arkansas: I discovered that the 1850s home of my great-great-grandfather, Benajah Guernsey Roots, still stands on farmland in southern Illinois. It was a stop on the Underground Railroad. I learned that the house built by Benajah’s grandfather, in Simsbury, Connecticut, also survives, but was long ago adapted to commercial use. One business it holds is a Starbucks. I’ve managed to visit three times to sip lattes with the spirits of my ancestors.
Kate Black, San Francisco, California: As part of a college class, I visited a late 1600s house in Watertown, Massachusetts. It had a huge fireplace, and I stood transfixed in front of it, wondering about all the family members who had gathered there over the years. At that moment I decided to get a graduate degree in architectural history. Fast forward to retirement 35 years later, after I had finally begun my genealogical and ancestral house research. I remembered the fireplace and house in Watertown that had started it all and looked it up on my phone. I nearly fell out of my chair when I realized that the Abraham Browne who built the house was my ancestor, and it was my family who had gathered in front of the fireplace!
