Happy Canada Day to Canadian readers!

While working on my book, I accidentally found this house listing. For $199,900 CAD, you can buy 261 Dorothy Street (duplex) in Winnipeg, where my great-grandfather, Julius (John) Kelm lived with his first wife, Serafina, and their two children, William and Olga. The house, built in 1905, was mentioned in Serafina’s obituary when she died in 1907 (see Finding Serafina Kelm). When Julius and Martha married in 1910, they moved back to Dorothy Street, though the address is not mentioned (see Stories from the Past: To Marry or Not to Marry) and I could not find them living on Dorothy Street in the 1911 Census of Canada. Dorothy Street is just south of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) yards and, historically, seemed to have been comprised of rooming houses. In the 1911 census, for example, 261 Dorothy Street housed 26 people.

In 2011, the City of Winnipeg’s Board of Adjustment reviewed (view PDF here) the proposed “redevelopment of the boarded up, burnt out, former rooming house into a two family dwelling unit.” According to the report, a fire on August 11, 2008, damaged the exterior walls, floors, and roof (you can see footage of the house in this video of fire crews extinguishing a fire at 257 Dorothy Street in 2015) and the building was placed on the Vacant Building Registry. While the interior might look very different than it did 118 years ago (the interior was apparently gutted in 2011), I think the opportunity to glimpse at the inside of the house now can still offer clues as to what it was like when our ancestors lived there (for example, see the little rooms off the hallway in the top right corner of the first image).