Seymour St Poor Tax

Apparently homeowners in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia where I grew up in paid an annual poor tax. My great grandparents Thomas and Bridget Keegan paid $1.50 per year in 1911 and it jumped to $2.18 in 1918 for their home on Seymour Street. I bought the house from my great aunt’s estate in 1973 when I moved back to the neighborhood after getting out of the Navy. These papers were in a metal box full of paid bills that I apparently have been moving around with me for the past 40 years without ever looking at it until the other day. Every bill receipt from 1909 to the early seventies were rolled up and saved in the box. Lots of interesting stuff including receipts of household project purchases from Kane & Brown hardware store. I would later spend a lot of time shopping for stuff at Kane & Brown. 

There were also some poor tax bills from my great grandparents previous home on Queen Lane before they moved to Seymour St in 1909. They raised a family there on Seymour Street. Later my grandmother and my infant mother moved into that house after my grandfather died from pneumonia in 1930. So my mother was raised there by her mother and two maiden aunts. We grew up around the corner on Greene Street and spent a lot of time in that house with our great aunts. It was weird in the 70's when I came back and made it into a college student party house.

I paid about $8,000 for the house and lived there until mid 1979 when I moved out of town after attending Temple U. A friend stayed there a few more years but things got bad with a crack house next door that eventually got torn down. The church across the street bought the house along with a few more on the street and nicely renovated them in the 90's. I live in an old 1907 Victorian home in Buffalo NY and recently retired from working at a Jesuit college in the neighborhood. I like old houses.