Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Google Maps of Ancestral Homes

 From Randy (a cousin discovery!!) over at Genea-Musings:

it's Saturday Night - 

time for more Genealogy Fun!!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

(1)  Identify an ancestral home address (preferably one with a street address...) for one of your ancestral families.  (You DO know where they lived, don't you?  If not, consult the 1900-1940 U.S. Census Records or City Directories.)

(2)  Go to Google Maps (https://maps.google.com/) and enter the street address (and city/town if necessary - usually you can pick from a list) for your selected ancestral home.  

(3)  Look at the street map, the satellite map, and the street view.  Zoom in or out or manipulate the image as you wish.

(4)  Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a post on Facebook.  

(5)  Do you have maps and street view pictures for all of your known ancestral homes?

Here's mine:

I picked one of the homes where my great-grandparents lived at 313 S. Sierra Way, San Bernardino, California.  Luther Boardman Ranney lived here from about 1938-1943, when he passed away.  His wife, Bessie Carter Ranney, lived there with him and then moved to Redlands in 1944.  Their eldest daughter, Alice, lived there with them the entire time.  Their youngest daughter, Ethel (my grandmother) moved there with them in 1938, but she married my grandfather the following year and moved out.  

Here is the Map View:

Here is the Satellite View:

A zoomed in view of the house on the Satellite View shows that it now sits on a very busy 4 lane road:

The Street View shows the front of the house:

I am sure the house looks very different now than it did in 1938-1944!  I could have sworn my mother and I visited this location in 2010 when we visited, but the place we saw was an empty lot.  This is definitely not.  

I do not have Google Map images for any of  my ancestral homes.  I will now add the project to save the ones that I have the street address.  However, so many of my ancestors were farmers and lived out of town on a rural route.  It will be almost impossible to pinpoint those places.  

That was a lot of work (I couldn't remember how to do a screenshot!), but it was fun!  I looked at several locations in California before choosing this one, however, most are no longer there.  When I found one, it was neat!