Notes for my biographers

December 27. 

Recalled this evening, with the aid of Mother, the various houses (and towns) in which I have lived and some events of my life.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 27, 1855

See December 26, 1855 ("In a true history or biography, of how little consequence those events of which so much is commonly made! For example, how difficult for a man to remember in what towns or houses he has lived, or when! Yet one of the first steps of his biographer will be to establish these facts, and he will thus give an undue importance to many of them.”)

the various houses (and towns) in which I have lived ... Henry's mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau (1787–1872), was born in Keene, New Hampshire. Her mother was widowed, and married Captain Jonas Minott — who owned the farm where Thoreau was later born — in 1798. The Thoreau family moved several times, from Concord to Chelmsford, (in 1818), from Chelmsford back to Concord briefly (in 1821), then to Boston (in 1821), and finally back to Concord permanently (in 1823). After returning to Concord, John Thoreau rented a succession of houses before he could afford to build a home of his own (on Texas Street, now Belknap Street) in 1844. In 1849, John Thoreau bought and renovated a larger home on Main Street (the "Yellow House"), into which the family moved in 1850 and where Henry died in 1862. ~ CliffsNotes