Floor Plans - The Albea Family

     This is part of an on-going series about the homes of my family and ancestors. Today's house was owned by my maternal grandparents, Roy and Betty (Huyler) Albea.  Located on Larkspur Terrace in Decatur, DeKalb, Georgia, this is the house where I attended weekly Sunday dinners during my childhood.  I believe the family moved to this house in 1963. According to Zillow.com, the house sits on 43,560 feet and was built in 1957.

     The house wasn't quite big enough for a family of eight and, according to my mom, her parents slept on a fold-out couch in the living room for a while. In old photos I can see that the living room used to have plain white walls, but I always knew them to have wood paneling. There also used to be a door on the back wall of the living room that lead directly to the kitchen, but it was walled up at some point, well before I was born. My grandmother began to collect VHS movies for all the grandkids and had perhaps 200. My cousins and I would spend a lot of time in what used to be my mom's bedroom watching movies.  The backyard had a fence around it and we were allowed to play there with the two dogs, Putty and Caesar. My grandmother had a somewhat elaborate garden in the back, righthand side of her yard that included a banana tree; other flowers were arranged throughout the front and back yards. On Easter we had egg hunts in the front yard - adults vs kids. No hiding eggs in the sticky bush (yukka plant)!

     Here's the floor plan that I drew from memory, which mom assures me is very accurate:

Floor Plans - Mom's First Remembered Home

When Mom was born, her family lived on Moreland Ave in Atlanta. By the next year, when her brother Lloyd was born, the family was living in College Park, just south of Atlanta. About two years later, the family moved to an unfinished house on Thompson Circle in Decatur, Georgia. This is the first house that Mom has memories of.

According to the real estate website, Zillow, the house was built in 1959 and is 1,426 square feet with three bedrooms and one bath.

Here's a floor plan that she drew of the house:

Here's the house on Google Maps:

View Larger Map

Visiting Libraries, Pt. 2

Today my mom and I visited the Decatur Library, located in Decatur, DeKalb, Georgia. The Library is a five story building, with the reference section located on the second floor. There is a two level parking deck located behind the library that provides parking for the library and the recreation center next door. The deck does not provide adequate parking and it was pure luck that we found a spot after circling the deck twice - along with about 20 other cars. When going back I might consider taking MARTA or finding a meter spot down the street.

The second floor is the research floor, filled with non-circulating materials. There is a good amount of seating, with electrical plugs for computer chargers. There are two copy machines (15¢ a copy). There are two microfilm machines, though I did not try them today. There are about five rows of books that would be of interest to genealogy researchers. The collection includes a few Atlanta & Atlanta Suburb City Directories for the 1960s, GA County Histories, books of Vital Records for some counties, Census Indices, DAR books and more.

Some records that I found useful were "The Hart of Georgia: A History of Hart County" and the Atlanta Suburban Directories. I was really hoping to find Cobb County, Georgia marriage records, but the ones I found were from too early of a time period. I'm hoping to go back soon to look at the Hart County book again - it was thick and I hardly got started looking at it.