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Let Us Never Speak Of This Again
Feb. 13th, 2011 02:39 pmMy father had a vague idea of a family story in which his uncle David, as a child, burned down the house, or at least set it seriously on fire. Numerous members of the family being notorious packrats (seriously, my father has a detailed order for nursery plants dating to maybe 1865, when a house was rebuilt), he has now turned up the documents that seem to support this:
1. An early-terminated lease, which was paid off in full (for $4000 in 1920, which must have been a lot), only 5 months after having been renewed for a 3-year term.
2. Notes in legalese from my great-grandfather about the limits of liability of a renter under conditions of fire.
So, maybe Great-Uncle David did burn down the house in October of 1920 (when he was 5). But apparently this was never spoken of again; they were that sort of family. (My father once told me he never saw his grandmother out of white gloves; she died in 1974.)
I have a lot of fascinating mixed thoughts about wealth and class and the importance of caring (financially) for spinster ladies that will have to wait until I feel less like the living dead (I spent most of yesterday with a fever and aches and nausea and much of last night actually sick.) One thing that interests me is that my great-grandparents apparently never owned a house, always renting, and at that renting in the swanky part of Pittsburgh (Shadyside) where they had grown up. I wonder why? He was a lawyer and the son of a federal judge; she was the daughter of a judge and her mother had inherited wealth - her grandfather was a banker and invested with James Laughlin, of Laughlin Steel, who was his brother in law, I know for a fact that my father inherited some of that wealth when my grandmother died, so it's not like they'd already spent it all. But they rented, and didn't buy.
1. An early-terminated lease, which was paid off in full (for $4000 in 1920, which must have been a lot), only 5 months after having been renewed for a 3-year term.
2. Notes in legalese from my great-grandfather about the limits of liability of a renter under conditions of fire.
So, maybe Great-Uncle David did burn down the house in October of 1920 (when he was 5). But apparently this was never spoken of again; they were that sort of family. (My father once told me he never saw his grandmother out of white gloves; she died in 1974.)
I have a lot of fascinating mixed thoughts about wealth and class and the importance of caring (financially) for spinster ladies that will have to wait until I feel less like the living dead (I spent most of yesterday with a fever and aches and nausea and much of last night actually sick.) One thing that interests me is that my great-grandparents apparently never owned a house, always renting, and at that renting in the swanky part of Pittsburgh (Shadyside) where they had grown up. I wonder why? He was a lawyer and the son of a federal judge; she was the daughter of a judge and her mother had inherited wealth - her grandfather was a banker and invested with James Laughlin, of Laughlin Steel, who was his brother in law, I know for a fact that my father inherited some of that wealth when my grandmother died, so it's not like they'd already spent it all. But they rented, and didn't buy.