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| Hilltop Drive Street Sign, 2014, collection of the author |
Street Signs are located on telephone poles in many neighborhoods. This street sign outside my parent's home looks newer than I remember and it is not on the pole that is directly at the base of our driveway. I imagine it was moved to be on the next pole a long time ago where it should be at the intersection of Ledgewood Drive and Hilltop Drive in "the Plat" in Cranston, Rhode Island.
Living now in a neighborhood where there are NO telephone poles inside our complex, the builder had to put up poles for the signs. One sign has already been lost as it fell off some months ago. I am amused at how hard that street is to find for delivery people looking for it.
It is quite a surprise that I should feel sentimental about the street sign here. When I was a little girl, people were not sure how to write our street name. That's the danger of all uppercase letters. Is it Hill Top Drive or Hilltop Drive? I observed it spelled both ways on mail that came to our house.
While researching "The Plat" last winter and using city directories and plot cards to look at the neighborhood in a different way, I was thinking how important the name of the street is to genealogy research. If you weren't alive, it may be hard to find out where your ancestors lived. Census records, phone books and city directories can help.
I take today's post as a sign that I am moving in the right direction.
1 comment:
That's a very interesting viewpoint on street signs. Like everything else around us, a street sign can be part of our family history. After all, how many times do we see that coming home, out our window, while playing in the yard, etc.?
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