True Story of Researching Individuals from Over 100 Years Ago

Doing family history research can be fascinating, you never know what you might find. Here is a very instigating recent true story of research where a woman finds details about the man who built her old San Francisco home.

This true story began when writer Christina Lalanne and her husband Max bought an old house in San Francisco, she was sure it had a story to tell. What she didn’t expect was that the story would come to her in actual words. As Lalanne details in an article, she wrote of researching Hans Hansen who built the house, titled “Castles in the Sky” for The Atavist Magazine. The actual words were written in a diary and in letters by Hans that fell from the ceiling of the house’s basement while she and her husband were renovating it. The documents had been hidden for more than a century, stashed away by the man who built the house in 1910. His full name, Hans Jorgen Hansen, was inscribed in the diary, which was mostly composed in Danish, but he wasn’t the only person to write in it. So did a woman named Anna—a fact Lalanne found odd, given that Lalanne learned Hans’s wife was named Christine.

Christina Lalanne even does some special retracing of her late father’s life. All this is covered in the article “Castles in the Sky”. Allow yourself some time to read this, you will find it truly captivating.

Here is the link to the magazine article by Lalanne.

“Castles in the Sky”

You will really appreciate the links a person can go to discover a life lived and it may give you the inspiration to work more on your ancestors.

Photo: Danish passages from the diary.

Related FamilyTree.com Blogs:

Old Letters or Diary

A Future Letter

Ledgers and Journals