An Interesting (and Sentimental) Find

While puttering around in the basement earlier taking the gun photos, I came across something from my childhood I didn't know I had.

My mother's side of the family lived in a house built in 1886 in Chicopee Falls, MA. It was a typical house built for the population that all worked in the mills. My great-grandparents, that emigrated from Auschwitz, Poland in the early 1900's and bought it for $1 from the owner that was desperate to unload it. It was a 3 story single family home and my grandmother was one of 15 children. Three rooms on the 3rd floor, 4 rooms and a water closet on the 2nd floor, and one bedroom and the common areas on the 1st. Heat was by coal stoves and later gas stoves on the first and second floors, with a heat register to get heat up to the third floor. Back in the early 2000's, they asked me to put in a motion sensor light on the front porch. The easiest way to do that was to tie into the front hall light circuit. That was when I made an interesting discovery. The wires were in a conduit? Oh no... my grandfather told me. Those weren't conduits, they were the old gaslight pipes. When the house was electrified, the easiest way to run the wiring was to use the pipes as conduits.

Anyway, in the 1940's the second floor was converted to an apartment where my grandparents and my mother lived. This is the key to their apartment front door.

The skeleton key to Nana and Papa's house

They never took the key out of the house when they locked the door to leave for fear of losing it. They had a wardrobe in the corner of the large landing at the top of the stairs. In the wardrobe was an old dark green woman's winter coat with a fur collar on a hanger. The key went in the left pocket of that coat. They had a key to the lock on the front door of the house on their car key ring.

They have all since passed on. The house was a probate nightmare, because it was still in my great-grandmother's name. She died in 1942, and there were countless descendants that had a claim to the house. Nobody wanted it, but if one person did, it would cost a fortune in attorneys fees to get it. When my grandmother (the last one living there) left to move in with my parents, my mother ceased paying the property taxes on it, and told the city to just take it. They did and it finally went to auction after a few years sitting vacant. A woman that buys houses to fix up and rent as an investment bought it. I stopped in to visit with her workers when they were working on it. They completely gutted it and rebuilt it to be a real nice 2 story duplex. I was able to answer some questions they had about things they didn't understand about the house. It came out real nice. I have decades of memories of that old place.