Lazy Day

This picture of my grandmother's shawl haphazardly thrown on a dining chair in the shadowy, barely there light of an autumn afternoon is the perfect image for this day. Raspberry leaf infusion warmed my child-bearing belly first thing this nippy morning and was replaced with hot chocolate in the afternoon as I filed away bit of paperwork after bit of paperwork. If you could see our bedroom floor... But that's exactly why you haven't. :)

Because my attention is shifting more and more to the home part of the homestead as colder weather comes on, I decided to try my hand at researching previous owners of our house. Though I'm extremely interested in the people who lived here before us simply because they shared this bit of life with me, I'll admit that I'd almost rather not know anything about them beyond their names. My imagination is full of romantic notions about things that might have taken place in this cozy little house, and I'd rather like to keep it that way! I know, it's silly. But it's true.

I'm researching these past owners anyway in the hopes that I'll be able to track down a living descendant and perhaps convince them to find a couple old pictures taken in this house that they may have tucked away somewhere. I'm still not sure how I'll approach them if I ever do manage to track them down, but the worst thing they could do is say no, right? And if my endeavor gets me a little closer to actual restoration instead of random estimations of what might have been, then I'm willing to risk an odd look or two. I'm a sucker for history.

I won't mention the name of the woman who owned this house just before us because, as far as I can ascertain, she's still living. However, I did manage to find another owner just by looking through the details of our title. We have a shared drive with our neighbors (well, we did, but that's a whole other story), so the deed detailed the implementation of the drive, agreed upon by both the previous owners of our home and the previous owners of the home next door. It was 1976 that the drive was put in, and at that time, the owners of our little bungalow were William K. Hamor and Lucile H. Hamor. A quick internet search didn't turn up anything for either of them, but I checked Tributes.com for obituaries and found that both of them had passed.

Lucile died first at the age of 83 in 1992, and William didn't follow until 2003 when he was 94. Interestingly, they both had June 1909 birthdays. It seems they were still living somewhere in Marion when they died. I may have located William in the 1910 census in Northumberland, PA, but I'll need other information to verify that this is in fact my William K. Hamor. I also need to track down a marriage certificate so that I can discern Lucile's maiden name and get more information on her. I'll be looking up Hamors in the phonebook before you know it! ;)