Images and stories of family farms and homesteads evoke a sense of warmth and belonging. A few generations ago, most families passed the family home down generation to generation. It is not very common for a modern family to live in the same home that their parents lived in, let alone the same home that their grandparents or other ancestors lived in.
Some families do live in homes that have been in their families for multiple generations. Many of these homes have stories that go along with them. For example, I heard of one large estate in England which was in a family for seven generations before the owners decided to sell it. They had decided that it was simply too large and took too much work to keep up – they wanted a little more freedom. There is another story about a twelve year old boy who raised enough money through a fundraising campaign to save his grandmother’s home, which had been in the family for three generations, from foreclosure. Other families are able to hold on to their historic homes by opening them to the public as inns, bed and breakfasts, farms, or museums.
I recently heard a heartwarming story about a family home. A local home was put up for tax sale. I know that tax sales are not usually the stuff of heartwarming stories, but this one has a happy ending. The person with the winning bid was a woman whose grandfather had built the house years ago. It had been sold out of the family, and now it has returned to the family. It was an emotional victory, and she wept when she learned that she had the winning bid. I can imagine how excited she must have felt, knowing that the house that her grandfather built was now hers.
Photo by gracey on morguefile.com.