Our friend Irene wrote the other day to share a picture of her grandparents’ home on SE Hawthorne: a beautiful, three-story Crafstman, built in 1910. She had the original street address (797) from before Portland’s Great Renumbering, which took place between 1931-1933. And she had a picture. That’s more than we often get to begin our old house history detective work, so it didn’t take much digging before we were ready to set out in the rain to connect past and present.

Here’s the photo pair:

Kind of hard to line up exactly in the footsteps of the photographer. Hawthorne has definitely been widened over the years and the traffic in that stretch today is not interested in slowing down. Plus, the trees and bushes have pretty much taken over the house. You have to look hard for the graceful lines. The distinctive overhanging eaves, the row of dentals at the top of the second story, the columns and robust brick pedestals, the porch baluster. All are still there, but fading. When we visited recently, we noted a large group of young men exiting the house heading out in the neighborhood, which made us think it might be a group home. Chances are the interior has been divided up into many small apartment rooms.

Irene’s mother Phyllis Jones was born into the house, which at the time was occupied by two generations of the Jones family—both shipbuilders and real estate investors. The elder: Rome Volti Jones and his wife Lulu Bennett Jones; the younger: Robert V. Jones and his wife Luella (this sounds like a researcher’s minefield with multi-generational names so similar). The Jones family moved to Pasadena in 1921, and sold the house to Peter Connacher, a lumberman, from Yacolt, Washington: a Pacific Northwest logging family name we definitely know.

Mystery solved. Next?