In Calgary, where I was born, there is a website where you can look at air photos of the city from 1924 to 2022. That date range covers a great deal of the expansion of the city and certainly my own family’s lifetime residences there.
With the
mapping tool you can set up side-by-side views from different years to see how
the locations of your old house changed. Or look at individual maps for almost
every year there were aerial photos taken. The maps are all georeferenced so the
views are exactly the same as you flick through the years without changing the
screen view.
Our first house on Hunterburn Crescent NW from 1970 to 1980
We designed and built our first house in northwest Calgary in a brand-new subdivision. The montage above shows the bare lands in 1969 before roads were graded, in 1972 when the home was finished and we had moved in, and today with planted trees now mature. The 14th street extension was not begun until 1976.
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Our house on Superior Avenue SW from 1980 to 1990
Our house on Superior Avenue was built in 1929 for the William Thomas and Anna Esdale family. He was a local druggist. Anna was involved in the Calgary Women’s Musical Club which was founded in 1906. The living room of their custom home featured a raised stage at one end which we believe was used for choral presentations and rehearsals.
The house
was greatly in need of renovation when we bought it and I spent hundreds of
hours doing the work to bring it back to its original state, with some modern
improvements of course. As can be seen on the montage, the location was still a
vacant lot in 1926, as was most of the area.
Anyway, the
point of this post is that old maps and especially old aerial photos are great
ways to source information about past family residences and businesses. I found
the site for Calgary aerial photos with a simple Google search for “Calgary
1920 map” when I was looking for information about our old neighbourhood. Two
blog posts came up: Daily Hive and Everyday Tourist. They led me
to the Calgary Imagery webpages.
Try a
search for your own location and see what comes up. You may be pleasantly
surprised.
I am
certainly going to have more fun with this website in looking at all our family
homes and businesses over the years.
Websites
for Calgary:
Dayhive.com
blog: https://dailyhive.com/calgary/calgary-changed-past-century-maps
Imagery
website https://maps.calgary.ca/CalgaryImagery/
