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In 1944, they owned a house around the corner (1282 Upas St.) that has a backyard adjacent to ours.

I found a couple more passport documents, one for a later trip that Glikeria made in 1919 to Sweden, of all places. And yes, there was yet another photo of her, this one less of a mug shot, that revealed her 5-foot, 4-inch frame (as her size was stipulated in the passport description).

More blanks about our house’s original owners were being filled in for me, and now it was time to close the gaps between the census records. That meant gleaning info from city directories on Ancestry. Yes, I could have moseyed back to the History Center archives again, but the pandemic prompted me to do as much online snooping as I could first.

I was excited to see quite a few of Harry and Glikeria’s directory listings pop up in Ancestry, but I also realized quickly that there were years missing. And drilling into the available files, I discovered something really weird. Beginning in the early 1940s, Harry and Glilkeria lived at several different addresses very near our house, not as renters, but as owners.

How near was very near? In 1944, they owned a house around the corner (on Upas) that has a backyard adjacent to ours. In 1947 and 1948, they owned a corner house (on Brookes) that I can see from our roof. What was this all about? The only thing I could think of was house flipping. But because the homes they acquired would have only been 20+ years old, I rejected my own notion.

And were people even flipping houses seven decades ago? I knew the word “flipping” came along a lot later, but what about the concept? Is it possible Harry and Glikeria were the first San Diego flippers, long before house flipping became a thing? According to articles I read online, neither the concept nor the term evolved until the 1980s.

Unfortunately, I was missing six directory records between 1942 (the last year I found evidence of the Rogers’ owning our Richmond St. house) and 1954, the year Harry died. That is, either I didn’t find those city directories on Ancestry, or the couple wasn’t listed in the ones that I could access. But I kept looking beyond 1954 because I wanted to see if I could find what became of Glikeria. I didn’t pick her up again until 1958 when she was the owner of a house on 8th Ave., a little further away, in University Heights.

Then, in 1959, she moved to a North Park residence on Georgia St., but this listing became somewhat inexplicable too. There were only two more Glikeria directory listings I could find between then and 1965, the year she died. All three addresses were on Georgia St., and they were all different. The really strange thing, though, was that they were all within 10 digits of each other. I could understand that maybe there had been a typo in one of the addresses, but in two?

Next week – Part 5: San Diego woman leaves $3,000 apiece to Russian cosmonauts

To read Part 1: Who owned our house on Richmond Street? click here.

To read Part 2: Hillcrest house falls from $12,000 to $5,000 in ten years click here.

To read Part 3: Buried at Ft. Rosecrans with Russian bride click here.