What Can Happen to the Place You Call Home in a Detroit Century
It all started as we were dumping bags and bags of garbage out the windows of our newly purchased 1927 Tudor home in Detroit’s University District. Most of the things we were throwing out were from the home’s last owner, a former DPS teacher who had filled her attic to the brim with boxes of vintage chalk, carbon paper, 1960s Catholic sex-ed books, no longer accurate atlases, class room decorations, and just mountains and mountains of paper. The home had been vacant for about 4 years before we bought it, and had suffered a lot of water damage, theft, and critter invasions in the process.
We spent 2 solid weeks clearing out the home and filled 4-30ft. dumpsters in the process. As we were throwing most of these items out our 3rd story window, we began to see hints of owners past. Boxes of old books that were much older than the books we’d found elsewhere. 1903, 1906, and even 1895 were some of the copyright dates we were seeing on the inside of these books. We saw remnants of servants in the house. Call bells on the floors and doors that would ring various rooms in the house to call the live-in maid the home would have had back in the day.
After looking through census records, we found our answer. Ward F. Seeley and his wife, Marion D. Seeley lived in our home from when it was built in 1927 till at the very least 1940. A few Google searches later brought more info. Ward worked as an OBGYN at Harper Hospital and taught at Wayne State University in Detroit from the 1920s into the 50s. Information on Marion was a little harder to find, although I did see a few articles featuring her name in the Detroit Free Press Archives. We found a photo of Ward, but none of Marion, unfortunately, and we had very little information about their children Martha Ann and John Seeley.
Digging Deeper
We visited the Burton Historical Collection, an archive of historical Detroit Artifacts and found more information about Marion. She was President and member of several women-only feminist clubs in Detroit. These clubs would be very important in establishing the US’s first child labor laws, public parks, traffic laws and more during Detroit’s biggest period of growth.
My partner, Brandon began to get more involved in the search and discovered that the Seeley Family had been buried not far from our new home. Just a couple miles West, he took a quick drive to Grand Lawn Cemetery, where we found the site of Ward and Marion, along with Ward’s parents there. We aren’t people who are obsessed with ancestry, especially our own, but we’d become captivated by the thought of learning more about the Seeleys, the people who called our place home for over 40 years.
A few weeks later and Brandon sent me a message. “I think I found them,” the text read. “Who?” I asked. “Marion Seeley’s granddaughter! She lives in Minnesota. She has her grandmother’s exact name!”
Marion Seeley Jr.
Sure enough, a woman named Marion in Minnesota had chosen to hyphenate her last name in order to keep her maiden name, Seeley. Given her approximate age being somewhere in her 70s, it was clear that this very well could be Marion Dickinson Seeley’s granddaughter. I quickly typed up a message to send her through email. It felt very strange reaching out to someone who truly had no earthly connection to us besides a house we bought. I didn’t know how a stranger would take being prospected about her long gone grandmother and the home her grandparents lived in. Would she even have seen the home I was asking about? I decided to preface my email with an apology for being a creepy internet stranger asking personal questions.
Miranda,
Greetings to you from Minnesota!
Yes, contacting me is okay … more than okay; your adventure with my grandparent’s old home sounds like a true labor of love. Thank you for breathing new life into their house! I was there a couple times a year as a young child, as I grew up in Minnesota. I remember the apartment on East Jefferson more than the house I think you’re in. I’m not even sure I remember that address — want to refresh my memory?
We received Marion’s response a few days later. She told us she’d been named after her “Gram”, just as we’d thought, and said she remembered visiting the home as a child before they moved out into a smaller home in Detroit later in life. At this point we truly became excited, and scheduled a later date to chat with Marion on the phone.
Marion told us all about her family. How her grandmother used to travel all over the world by herself, including one trip to Egypt in the 1940s. Ward, who preferred working, spent his time delivering babies at Harper Hospital. She told us about his love of smoking his pipe, and drinking cocktails everyday at 5pm. She also told us about her grandparent’s lake house in East Tawas Michigan, where Ward would escape from work. Ward would eventually have a heart attack while on vacation there and passed away in the 1950s. She told us about a canary that lived in the breakfast nook and the Hungarian maid, Rosie who lived on the 3rd floor who took care of her when they visited. Marion remembered one story in-particular about Rosie:
One Thanksgiving Day, the Seeley Family was gathered around the dining room table with friends and other community members. Ward used his foot to press the floor bell under the dining table to call in Rosie, who he asked to retrieve the turkey from the kitchen. Rosie returned a few moments later with the Thanksgiving turkey on a beautiful silver platter. As she entered the dining room, Rosie tripped. The turkey flew into the air and landed on the floor in front of all the dining guests and silence fell across the room. Without missing a beat, Gram stood up, looked at the spilled turkey and said to Rosie, “Oh, that’s okay Rosie, just go and fetch the other turkey.” Rosie quickly scooped the fallen turkey off the floor and rushed back to the kitchen. She knew what to do. She wiped it clean, reset it on the platter, arranged the plate again, and returned to the room as if nothing had happened.
We stood in the house while we spoke to Marion. The empty rooms, excessive damage and construction equipment had made it hard for us to imagine all of the stories and memories that must’ve once been made there. Marion’s stories suddenly brought our home to life. She was so kind to us on the phone, answering all of our questions and giving us an extra ordinary amount of stories and personal info about her family’s history. She told us that she’d been leery to talk to us at first, but after reading our blog, she realized that we’d found some information about her parents and grandparents that even she didn’t know! “That’s how I knew you were serious.”
Lorna
In the meantime, unbeknownst to us, Marion had forwarded our info, along with our site to her brother and cousins. I received a message from a woman named Lorna, Marion’s cousin and another grandchild of Ward and Marion Sr. She began telling us stories about the house, how the bedroom she would sleep in always smelled like soap, and how her Grandpa Ward always liked to keep that room clear in case he got a call from the hospital in the middle of the night and had to dress. “He didn’t want to wake up Gram while he got ready. He delivered many of the Ford Family babies,” she explained.
Lorna then told us about Rosie, the maid, “Rosie was so so important to me. I loved her and she took such good care of me… The last time I saw her was in 1969 when she took a bus from her nephews house in Elyria to come to my wedding. She was near 80 then.” Lorna then sent us a couple photos and another message, “My sister is coming for a few days in June — I’m sensing a road trip!”
59 years away
A few weeks later we’d planned a date for Lorna, her older sister Dinah, and Marion Jr.’s brother, John Seeley to come see us and their grandparent’s old home. The last time they’d seen it was in 1958, when Ward and Marion moved out and into a smaller Detroit home on the South East side. We anxiously waited for them on the front porch. Our rehab wasn’t finished yet. While we’d finished with electrical, plumbing, and drywall, the home was still very much an unlivable construction zone. We worried that the grandchildren would be upset at its current condition from the years of neglect the home had incurred. Would they like us? Do we need to plan an exit strategy if they’re too weird?
A car pulled up and immediately all three shouted “Hello!” from the Prius. Hugs immediately followed and we quickly were put at ease. The three grandchildren immediately headed to the yard, where our side lot used to hold a wonderful Japanese rock garden that their grandmother had maintained. We’d discovered the rocks several weeks prior under inches of grass and dirt and were in the process of excavating them like dinosaur bones in our yard. “I still have roses in my garden now that I grew from starters in Gram’s garden” John mused. He pointed out across the garden to where she used to keep them in the yard.
Dinah pulled out a couple more photos and handed them to us. An old photo of the house, from about 1945 showed the changes to the landscaping over the years, a small tree in the side yard was now a massive Maple in our yard, old enough that now tree rot had began to form inside its base. A three-generation photo of her mother, grandmother, and herself in the yard sitting on part of the stone path we’d just discovered was another picture she handed to us. “We used to come here every major holiday,” Dinah said, “John grew up with his mother one block over from where we’re standing!”
Inside the home, the three grandchildren were stunned. We’d changed some of the layout of the house after damage gave us a clean conscience to make some changes. They began to disagree over half-remembered events. What Ward’s study used to look like, how the rooms used to be decorated, if there was always a small porch on the 2nd floor. They recalled the way Grandpa would look at you over his glasses while he was in the middle of reading a book or the paper while he sat in his study. They all remembered Ward reaching up to the chandelier and, as grandfathers do, “magically” producing candy in his hands claiming he’d plucked it from the light. Dinah and John admitted that they hadn’t thought of that memory in 60 years, not until they were standing in the room with the chandelier once more.
I was humbled to see just how fragile these stories were. They were intimate and faded, but full of life and charm. I felt that had we not purchased the house when we did, and hadn’t become as obsessed with its history as we had, many of these stories might’ve been lost in time. I thought about how much I could remember about the home I‘d grown up in. It was only 15 or so years ago when my family moved out, and I couldn’t tell you much more than they were relaying to me some 59 years later.
We spent the rest of the night at a bar in Downtown Detroit swapping more stories about their and our lives. Brandon and I would randomly send glances to one another from across the table. How the hell did we get here? When the night ended and we went to walk out of the bar, the manager stopped us. “What made you guys decide to stop here?”
I responded, “We’ve never been here before, but it seemed like a nice place close to their hotel to take them to dinner.” — I pointed at the grandchildren.
“Oh, that’s nice, a family reunion! You looked like you were having a great time catching up.”
Between 6 & 7 documents the search, discovery, purchase, purge, and rebirth of a vacant 1927 Detroit Home, and life South of 8 Mile.
