One of my other hobbies is collecting old home movies on film.
Back in 2009 I found --->
some films dating from 1946 to about 1952, <---they were all from one family who lived somewhere in Southern California, there were very few clues as to exactly where they were made however.
I searched with Google Maps for years trying to locate the Spanish style house with the address of 1508 seen in the films, I could tell it was near the foothills somewhere but pretty much every city from Los Angeles to San Bernardino has similar looking foothills.
Last week I decided to get out the actual film again and watch it again looking for a clue to the location, the only thing I found was a sign on a building for "Hennigers School of Music". A Google search for that name turned up nothing but I did notice the can the film was stored in was from a Camera Store in Glendale California, Finally a clue! they must have been from Glendale.
I started searching near the camera store location but couldn't find any residential streets that went up to the 1500 block. I finally decided to broaden the search and started searching the area near the mountains, I picked a street at random and entered the Street View in the 1400 block, I started going up the street, figuring I'd run out of block before I hit the 1500 block, but then I passed a house that had the address on the curb blurred out, but the numbers on the front of the house were clearly visible, 1508, and the style of the house was right as well, but surely it couldn't be that easy?
I opened up the video I made of the film and started comparing the house to the one on Google and it was a match, but was it just a house with the same blueprint?
Luckily the camera operator had panned around the street showing the neighboring houses and they matched exactly, in fact they have changed very little in 70 years! (other than it's valued at about a million bucks now) even a huge Palm Tree in front of the house is still there, and even taller.
Now that I had an address I started trying to find out who lived there at that time, I found out the name of the High School for that area and started searching the yearbooks for a boy seen in the films, he goes from about 11 to a Teenager and is featured in the films a lot so it was pretty easy to find his senior picture on Classmates.com, that also gave me a name.
I joined ancestry.com and found out a whole lot more about them, mother, father, location of the school, other relatives so now I know quite a lot about these films that have been haunting me for the last six years.
Now possibly the best part, a search shows someone of exactly the right age (81) with the same name still living in the L.A. area, I even found a possible picture of him at age 78 and I think it's a match, so I guess I need to get up the nerve to give him a call and see if it's him.
The house in the film circa 2014.