I used to live out in the country, in a tiny fishing village, about 30 minutes drive from the big smoke, a town of around 60,000. I will often call that town my “hometown” partly because it was the nearest town to my home, where we’d travel for most shopping and things like cinema trips or restaurants, and partly because I moved to live there through my 20s so it was my actual home town for a decade.
But my childhood home is the fishing village, and so most times when people talk about home towns in reference to childhood, I have to choose whichever is the most appropriate to the discussion, and I usually don’t go into detail about which I refer to.
Since age 30* I have lived elsewhere, in a different country entirely, and though it’s where I’ll probably live for the rest of my life, it’s not my hometown.
My family all still live in said hometown. I’m the only one who moved away.
On what basis do you consider it your hometown (if you have one)? I’ve lived in or around Kansas city since the 3rd grade.
Do/did you have family there? Define family any way you like. No, not anymore.
When did you live there and for how long (assuming you did live there at some point)? Been here for around 40 years.
Do/did you love it or hate it? **I like it meaning its “comfortable”. Its got good employment, good schools, low crime rate (at least where I live), and has big city vibe like when the Royals won the world series this year. But if you ask me to defend it or if I had “KC Pride” I’d have to say no. Nor do I feel connected to Kansas.
Thing is I’ve actually always wanted to live someplace else. Someplace either with mountains like in Colorado or by the oceanside (really fell in love with Hawaii). Then part of me at times wanted to live in a foreign country or a “big” city like New York. Sadly those didnt ever work out. It didnt work out because of a combination I was just to scared to mkae such a leap and partly because I knew that economically I had a good thing going here and knew economically I wouldnt have it as good in other areas. I mean in NYC could I have afforded my own home at age 24?**
Finally yes, I would recommend living here. Transplants from New York and Los Angeles who move here are surprised by the slower pace but impressed by how much they can afford.
I have neighborhood. I was born in Manhattan, and no one really considers “New York” their hometown. You home turf in NYC is the neighborhood where you grew up, which for me was Morningside Heights in Manhattan until I was eight. I spent some time in Brooklyn, because my aunt and uncle moved there when I was four, and I spent a lot of time with them, even spending nights there.
We moved to Rego Park, Queens, to one of the newer subdivisions, with renovated houses-- very middle-middle class. That was never much of a home to me. My aunt and uncle had moved to Indiana so he could teach at IU in Bloomington.
I went to live with them when I was in high school, so I’m a graduate of a high school and a college in Indiana, and even though I feel like a New Yorker deep down, I have actually spent more time in Indiana than I have in NY.
My aunt and uncle still live there, so I have a soft spot for Bloomington. Also, in the Deaf community, when people ask where you are from, they want to know where you went to school, and particularly where you graduated from high school. This is significant in a community where almost everyone goes to the state school for the Deaf. Anyway, I got used to saying “I was born in New York City, but graduated high school in Indiana.” That pretty much sums me up. No one in Morningside Heights recognizes me, but people in Bloomington, Indiana do. My father is deceased, and my mother now lives in Maine with her second husband. My grandparents are all dead (my grandmother in Westchester county died just five weeks ago at age 98), and most of my cousins have left the area, while the older people are gone. We still all stay in touch, but NYC is no longer the family hub. That kinda makes me sad.
This, with the sad exception that, for me, the years in my home-town were the worst of my life. I only began to live when I left home and came to “the big city.”
I do have a home-town…my sister lives there…I love to visit… But you couldn’t pay me to live in that hell-hole. Every square inch of it has an ugly, ugly memory for me.
In my country, if you don’t have a home province and your family has been living in the capital city since time immemorial, there are three possibilities:
you are descended from the Muslim ruling house before colonization,
**On what basis do you consider it your hometown (if you have one)?**I was born and raised in Baltimore, MD. My ancestors moved there from Germany, Ireland and Poland before the Civil War. Do/did you have family there? Define family any way you like.
My brothers and cousins still live there. My parents are buried there. When did you live there and for how long (assuming you did live there at some point)?
I lived there from birth in 1954 until age 46, with brief (about a year each) stays in New Jersey, Ohio and Florida while I was in my twenties. Do/did you love it or hate it?
I loved it and still do.
On what basis do you consider it your hometown (if you have one)? I lived there my entire life until last year.
Do/did you have family there? Define family any way you like. I have an uncle who still lives in the area, in terms of blood relatives. But the vast majority of my friends are there, of course.
When did you live there and for how long (assuming you did live there at some point)? Born and raised there. Coming up on only six months having been gone.
**Do/did you love it or hate it? **I bitched about the traffic and bad drivers and whatnot. But I love the city. I’m very happy where I am now, but LA will always be my home.
ETA: to address Kimballkid’s add-on question, I’m not looking to leave my new home. But if circumstances were to dictate that I had to move back to LA, I would be perfectly happy to be there again. I stay connected to my friends there, I continue to follow local news stories, and I think it would be an easy transition if it became necessary. We’ll see if that feeling remains true the longer I’m on the opposite coast.
On what basis do you consider it your hometown (if you have one)? I lived there from ages 0-8 (I’m 62 now). Do/did you have family there? Define family any way you like. My parents and most of my family on both sides are buried there or within 10 miles of it. My will requests that my ashes be scattered over my parents burial plot.
When did you live there and for how long (assuming you did live there at some point)? Born and lived there through 3rd grade.
**Do/did you love it or hate it? **They are still, to my admittedly fallable and perhaps romantic memory, the best years of my life.
I have thought, being that I will retire in a few months, about moving back and finishing my life where I started. The town has grown some, but it is still quite recognizable and many of the buildings and schools I grew up around are still there. Don’t know that I will, moving like that and finding a new house and home at this stage of life is problematic, but I’m still considering it. Time will tell.
I grew up as an Air Force brat and the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere through my childhood was 2 1/2 years. From birth to graduation from high school I lived:
Chatham, NB
Moose Jaw, SK
Cold Lake, AB
Calgary, AB
Portage La Prairie, MB
Canberra, Australia
Colorado Springs, CO
back to Cold Lake, AB (interestingly I graduated high school with the same class I started Kindergarten with).
Chatham, NB - for a summer before I started university
I don’t remember anything of Chatham the first time round and have only vague memories of Moose Jaw. Always moving and getting a whole new group of friends was not really conducive to developing a feeling of “home” in any particular spot.
As an adult I’ve been in the same city since '98 but it is not “home”. I have no real ties here and could pick up and leave with no feelings of regret if necessary. My friends are spread across Canada, literally from Vancouver to a little village on the east coast of Nova Scotia.
On what basis do you consider it your hometown (if you have one)? In between Monterey and Carmel is a small town called Pacific Grove. Back in the '70’s, my dad got a few-thousand-dollar bonus which was used to put a down payment on a very small house. I believe the house was listed for about $25,000 :eek:. Ah, those were the days. We began going there at least twice a month from the Bay Area to work on it and spend time in the Monterey Bay Area.
**Do/did you have family there? Define family any way you like. ** My parents retired there and my mom still lives there.
**When did you live there and for how long (assuming you did live there at some point)? ** I have been spending time there every year for about 45 years.
Do/did you love it or hate it? It is in my blood. My life makes better sense when I am in PG and I am actively figuring out moves to get there in a few years. We’ll see how realistic that is.
I was born in Philadelphia and lived there till I was 18 when I was in college at Penn (as a commuter) and my parents moved to the 'burbs. But then I spent the next 7 years living partly with my parents and partly back in the city till I finished grad school and left. I have not lived there since, but consider it my home town. The only relatives still there that I have any contact with are my sister, but she lives in a distant suburb.
No, I don’t have a hometown. Closest I have is “the place where I mostly grew up”, which is the LA area where I lived from age 8 until I went away for college. My family moved away from LA while I was in college and I don’t really feel any connection to it anymore.
I’ve lived in my current city for 12 years, which is the longest I’ve lived anywhere. But I don’t consider it my hometown. I’d actually like to move, since I love living in different places. The “problem” is that our area is practically perfect in every way so I don’t think we will ever leave.
I don’t mind not having a hometown. Only problem is that it makes answering the question “So where are you from?” a bit difficult.
Yeah, I have a home town. I have lived within 10 miles of where I was raised for all 52 of my years. My family on both sides have lived (and except for one sibling, still live) within 30 miles for the last 150 years or so. I can drive to a cemetery a few miles from my house and count back ancestors to the 1800’s. I love it, though it is not nearly as rural as it once was. I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather live.
OP here. Me, too. We moved to the city where I live now when my father retired (I was in high school). My parents moved on, and I stayed. Eventually this became home. But I have no relatives here. I’m an only child, no kids.
I’m loving these posts. I envy the people who have a real hometown with family.
On what basis do you consider it your hometown (if you have one)?
Born there in 1950, lived there until 2005.
Do/did you have family there? Define family any way you like.
Elderly mother, two sisters.
Do/did you love it or hate it?
Loved it, but the relentless influx of people, and the sprawling development became more and more irritating. By the late 90’s the insane crowding, traffic, sprawl, and ridiculous cost of living had effectively turned SD into another Los Angeles. My wife and I were both burning out in our respective 30-years+ careers, as a DINK couple we could afford to retire early provided we relocated, so we did.
Aside from several close friends, we don’t miss it at all. It was already gone before we left.
We’ve been up here in Idaho for 10 years now, and have felt “at home” here for nearly all that time. So although San Diego is my hometown which I’ll always remember fondly, it’s no longer where my home is, and I would never move back.
On what basis do you consider it your hometown (if you have one)?
I wasn’t born there, but was moved there with my parents at 6 months of age. Grew up there during my formative years until I moved at age 13 to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Do/did you have family there? Define family any way you like.
I have a sister there but we are estranged, so no reason to go back.
Do/did you love it or hate it?
Both. I loved the surrounding country, the mountains, deserts, canyons and all the rest, but it was difficult growing up in the culture. I was not of the ‘in’ crowd and never will be. Still, I had wonderful friends and I will always think of it as where I’m “from.” I went back briefly in my early 20s and learned the true meaning of the phrase, “You can’t go home again.” You really can’t.
Mostly my family is spread far and wide, and I’ve lived many places, two of them far longer than I ever lived where I grew up. If we’re going by where we lived the longest, then San Luis Obispo, California (actually a much smaller town nearby). If we’re going by where we love the best, then Eugene, Oregon.
It’s where I was born; my family’s ancestral house is a few km away but we had a second house “in town” for a long time (actually, nowadays it’s “in town”, back then it was “across the river”), as we used to need to do business there often enough to justify one. People from where I grew up consider me to be from Pamplona; people from Pamplona or its neighboring towns exclaim “oh, you’re Pamplona old blood!” just upon hearing my lastname. But the main reason I consider it my home town is that it feels like home; any other place that feels like home feels like there. Even the air favors me: my permanent sinusitis goes way down or even disappears.
I’ve got a bunch of relatives there, yes, including two very well-known families. Those families are considered “old blood”, and their members who live elsewhere are seen as a sort of diaspora… “yeah, he lives in X but he’s from here”. My closest relatives live where I grew up - a place that never felt like home (I was one of the people in my class who couldn’t wait to leave town).
We moved 100km away when I was 4yo (and 8 months and 25 days) but we went back every weekend for the next 4 years.
The place to which I just moved feels like home, too: similar accents, similar sense of humor, similar architecture, similar food, similar weather… I’m in despair because I can’t find canned beans (the glass jars are too large) and I find less varieties than back home - if I can’t find a source I’ll have to “import” cans when I go see my family. Oh, the horror! :smack:<— “I need a fainting couch” smiley.