I have spent the last couple of days hunting down the Linnartz Home. Otto Linnartz was a manager/executive/owner lumberman for the PETRICH SAUR Lumber Co. He lived on South Street for a while and relocated to Avant when Highland Park was newly developed. Finding the location of this house was a little more complicated than the other searches I have done. I found the advertisement first while I was looking up a totally different house in Inverness (the neighborhood just south of Steves). As newspapers in 1920's San Antonio had no concept of privacy, I thought it would be easy to pop in Mrs. Otto Linnartz and find the bridge club or singing troupe or temperance society meeting with the address. It turns out that Mrs. Linnartz only showed up at other people's parties ... she never threw her own. So I had to revert to another way to track down Otto and family. I used the Bexar County Clerk's website and searched the historical records for Otto Linnartz as a grantee of a deed of trust in 1924. I found the pdf only after I asked a good friend with Internet Explorer to perform the search. It turns out that the Bexar County Clerk's office used a contractor named Landata and the bid was completely oblivious to the world of browsers, the website only works for Internet Explorer. That piece of crap application crashed three different browsers on my Mac ... Firefox, Safari and Opera all crapped out when I went to get the pdf.
The pdf of the deed of trust listed the neighborhood / block and tract numbers for the property. Here is where I had to get crafty. With the numbers off of the deed I want into the bcad (Bexar County Appraisal) search engine and looked up a property I knew was in the neighborhood. That lookup gave me the neighborhood number. What I wanted was the geographic ID ... so using the neighborhood number I used the map search interface of the BCAD and turned on the GEO-ID layer under the parcels option. I started scanning through the neighborhood looking for a block and tract number that matched the ones on the deed and sure enough ... I found the street and bounding block. I then switched over to google maps street view and walked the street until I found the house that matched the picture of the Highland Park advertisement. I also pumped in the geo-id into the Bexar County Appraisal District search engine and did a sanity check for the street number and name and valuation of the house.
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