The memories flood back every time Gerri Cox flicks a light switch in the family home where she grew up from the time she was 3 months old.

"One of the things I love so much about living here is that the light switches still click when you turn them on," said Cox, who is 65. "Newer houses don't have that. I hear that snap, and I think of my parents.

"How many people get to hear the exact same sound in exactly the same house as when they were 2 or 3?"

For her, the family home is a modest post-war bungalow tucked into Sacramento's leafy Tahoe Terrace neighborhood.

For Matt Morse and more than a dozen of his cousins, it's a four-bedroom homestead his grandfather built in 1922 on the southern edge of Elk Grove, where the sprawling fields meet the sky.

And for Eileen Thomas, it's the old farmhouse in Fair Oaks where she is the fifth-generation family owner.

"Even as a little girl, I always dreamed I'd end up living here," she said. "I just loved being here."

Like hundreds of other Sacramento region residents, they have inherited the family home, which has been passed down from one generation to the next, and maybe even the next and the next.

In a difficult era of foreclosure and economic hardship, living in an inherited family home can represent the ultimate cost-saving measure, one that for many people weaves together a family's emotional history with the hope of financial freedom.

Imagine the gift of a mortgage-free life: That's the legacy many elderly relatives have in mind when they leave the family home to the kids. Jobs come and go, depending on the whims of the economy – but real estate is forever, at least if the heirs don't sell it.

It's hard to know exactly how many local residents inherit a home from relatives, then keep it. Using county property records, The Bee found about 1,500 homes with Sacramento addresses that changed ownership between two people with the same last name between 2007 and 2010.

Those figures – a quick measure of Sacramento's hometown character – could be inflated by divorces or other transactions that pass property from one spouse to another. They exclude family properties handed down in earlier years, of course, and they miss properties that passed from a parent to a daughter who now has a different last name through marriage.

Still, the figures provide a rough estimate of a lucky few.

"I know neighborhoods where the grown children have moved back, if not into the same house where they were raised, then into the neighborhood," said Thomas, 61, who since 1981 has lived in the Fair Oaks farmhouse her great-great-grandfather built in 1875.

"It's like salmon. They go back to spawn in the original spot."

Security in real estate

Gerri Cox thinks she knows why. Even now, Sacramento remains a government town with large numbers of residents who stay close to home instead of transferring hither and yon across the map as they move up the ladder in private industry.

"You've got a good job, and you stay here," said Cox, who was in state service for 36 years. "My parents drilled that into me. You need security."

A single mother who had been renting a house in College Greens, she was able to retire from the state at age 56 when she inherited her childhood home, which her parents, LaRue and Kenneth Brown, bought for $9,000 in 1946.

Kenneth had recently returned home from the war, eventually finding work at McClellan Air Force Base. Along with their small son, the Browns were living with his parents in midtown Sacramento.

"When my mother was in the hospital having me, my father came in and said, 'I bought us a house today,' " said Cox. "This area was just being developed. Lots were still being sold. They had to wait three months for the house to be built."

When she inherited the three-bedroom house in 1993, she repainted it and replaced the windows and roof, but it's still the home she knew as a child, a place filled with the old-fashioned magic of memories.

This is the neighborhood where she played kick the can in the street at night, where a generation of baby boom youngsters walked together to school, where long-ago dads up and down the block spent Saturdays sawing and hammering in their garages as they added onto their tract homes.

Her neighbor across the street, Don Wentz, moved back into the family home in the late 1990s after his mother, Alberta, died.

"It's a lot of memories here," said Wentz, 67. "Oh, heavens, yes. The widow ladies were happy I moved back. I was a youngster coming back home who could mow their lawns again."

Wentz was an only child, his parents' only heir. Cox's mother left the house to her daughter only after scrupulously clearing the idea with her son, who has long lived in the Bay Area.

Similarly, Eileen Thomas said her brother understood why she inherited the family home from their grandmother: The siblings grew up in another house on the same property, but it was Thomas who spent countless hours with their grandparents in the old farmhouse. She also helped care for her grandmother in her old age.

"I don't know that he ever had the same bond with this house that I did," said Thomas, executive director of the River City Food Bank.

Legacy not always clear

Legal and financial experts warn that leaving a family house to multiple heirs – siblings, typically – can present a minefield of problems, both practical and emotional.

Gold River estate attorney Heather Chubb said elderly parents rarely map out exactly what will happen with the house: Who will live in it? Do they live there rent-free? Who's responsible for taxes and utility bills? Who pays to maintain the house?

Too often, in the absence of a plan, the heirs squabble.

"Parents dream this will be a legacy for their children," said Sacramento certified financial planner Gregory Lucas, "and instead, it becomes an unmanageable situation.

"It exposes the oldest of issues for everyone about their relationships with their parents and one another. It makes kids out of them all."

For the extended family of Morse cousins in Elk Grove, said Barbara Morse Wackford, settling minor disagreements about the farmhouse their grandfather built has so far come down to a simple question: What would Aunt Avie say?

Their aunt – the never-married family matriarch, Barbara Evelyn Morse, known to them as Avie – lived there all her life.

"For us, the house has always been the cornerstone of the family," said Wackford, 61. "I've never known a Christmas not in this home."

When Aunt Avie died in 2009, she left the house and 12 surrounding acres to her brothers Archie and David Morse, who since have died, as well as a large group of nieces and nephews, including Wackford and her cousin Matt Morse.

The heirs regularly gather at the homestead for their family meetings, and they're setting up a limited liability corporation to handle the property, Wackford said.

Now Matt Morse, 55, an Elk Grove teacher, lives in the house with his 15-year-old son. In exchange for maintaining the property and paying the utility bills, he rents the house for a small amount. The heirs voted to allow it.

"I wanted my son to experience the country life I experienced as a boy," said Morse. "We sit on the back porch, and there's nothing between us and the sun but field."

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Call The Bee's Anita Creamer, (916) 321-1136. Staff writer Phillip Reese contributed to this report.

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