This is an unusual mystery photo in that the location is sometimes easy to identify but the people are often lost to history. In this instance, Mike has successfully identified the people but the location of the house remains a mystery. 

And yet the photo does seem to contain a considerable number of small clues that would give away its location. It is on the start of a 200 block that is relatively flat and part of a straight, continuous street that leads towards one of Duluth’s hills. 

There are surprisingly few blocks on the eastern side of town that would match that as the places that might be flat enough don’t have houses built on the avenues where you would find a 200 number. On the west side, the house could be somewhere just above 2nd Street, a street frequently interrupted by parks, streams, railroad tracks, and industrials sites. There just isn’t a lot of West 2nd Street and old aerial photos show it having been that way for some time. Only a few locations, such as around 38th Avenue West, could even potentially fit.

Given the address Mike found for one of the family members, the Irving neighborhood seems the most likely. While there are a few 200 blocks on the south side of the neighborhood, the hill doesn’t seem that far in the distance. The 200 blocks on the northern side seem like the best possible place for a match. But they are rather hard to check, as they were cleared away in their entirety by the construction of I-35, Spirit Valley Mall and other retail with ample parking, as marked by the red box in the satellite comparison between 1939 and today. 

In this case, the family may have been identified but their neighborhood lost to history.