What can I learn about my old house?

October 29, 2022 4:23 PM

My house is 100+ years old. I would love to learn more about, e.g., who has lived here, what kind of work has been done over time, etc.

I want to learn as much as I can about my house and its previous owners. What is even possible to learn, and how?

posted by pear to Home & Garden (22 answers total)

Where are you in the world?

In NYC we have lots of great resources for this but it will vary heavily from location to location. Here, you can search digitized newspaper archives back to 1841, get deeds through the 1920s, and title records back to the original colonial grants. We also have building permit info for the last few decades. But this is all through city-specific sites. Another good resource is old fire insurance maps which tend to show individual buildings.
posted by goingonit at 4:28 PM on October 29, 2022

Response by poster: I'm in a city in the rust belt.
posted by pear at 4:30 PM on October 29, 2022

I’ve gotten good stuff from the city archive of building permits, and also the city had copies of photos taken during the Depression by the WPA (in Seattle).

Old phone books sometimes had a surprising amount of information about an address. Your library might have a set.

And just… hang out in your yard! We’ve found out stuff when previous residents and neighbor residents came by to look at the old place.
posted by clew at 4:36 PM on October 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Idk what the deal is in your state, but in mine, the county clerk has deed records going back pretty much forever.

When we bought our house, we got copies of the deed going back to the original parcel in 1820 or so: we have names of all the subsequent owners. From there it's just basic research. Libraries, archives, etc etc.
posted by nothing.especially.clever at 4:48 PM on October 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

Any friend that is an amateur genealogist can likely help.
If you memail your address I can do it. We often have to trace an address to trace a family.
posted by beccaj at 4:52 PM on October 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Land title registry, historical property tax assessments, city hall archives.

I too live in a 110+ year old interesting house, it's clearly built as a mansion but I found out was never lived in as such by anyone worth noting (unlike the other nearby heritage homes) and was divided into units shortly after the first world war to serve as a home for four veterans.
posted by lookoutbelow at 4:55 PM on October 29, 2022

Start by googling your county's registry of deeds. That's what it's called here in MA, it might be something different in your state. You might be able to search for your address on the website. My county has on-line paperwork going back to the 1970s.

If nothing turns up, or you want more, you should be able to go visit the registry. It's been a while since I've visited mine but they have all sorts of old records in big giant books. If you have your current deed it may say in which book and page the last deed is. Go find that book. Now find the record. That record will mention what book the previous deed is in, etc. You just kind of work backwards. It's really, really fun but it can take a few hours. It's a nice thing to do on a day off.

That's how it works for here. YMMV.

The deeds will have, among other things, names of previous owners and they'll also mention any rights of ways on your property.

You can also google for old USGS maps of your area, or search for some real ones on eBay. Those are fun because you can often see old farm or wooded areas that existed before neighborhoods were built.

Check your town's board of assessors. They might have some information on-line or at the town hall.

I've never done it but you might be able to check to see what previous permits were taken out for your house. The town planning board would be the place to start.

If there are any older folks in your neighborhood who have lived there a long time, ask them. Don't take anything they say as fact though. Memory is weird. I've had people in my neighborhood tell me things that I found out were impossible once I started doing some research.

Your local library might have a searchable newspaper index. Search for your street, address, or the names of any previous owners.

Have fun!
posted by bondcliff at 5:17 PM on October 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Does your city or region have a historical society? If so they might have records, or at least be able to point you in the direction of where those records might exist.
posted by pdb at 5:17 PM on October 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

In my city (Ann Arbor) there's an online system that lets you search permits by address. That gets you permits for any work done since they started using that system--the last 15 years or so. A few years ago they added a separate digitized archive of permits going back to about 1930. That can be a way to find out about work done on your house. (Though of course it's always possible someone did unpermitted work.)

Anyway, you might have better luck on a forum specific to your town, this is all very location-specific.
posted by bfields at 6:15 PM on October 29, 2022

I’ve done something similar to what bondcliff describes and then followed up by searching census records to find out a little more about the residents.
posted by mskyle at 6:16 PM on October 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Census records prior to 70 years are available in full detail: names, ages, even presence of radios when that was an interesting question. Ancestry is one paid place to access those; they may also be available free from public sources.
posted by migurski at 6:24 PM on October 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yes, as above there are many things you can learn, and they're in a bunch of different places.

1. state or local government records related to the property will include:
- deeds and the history of who bought and sold your house (exactly how you find this will vary by location)
- plats and subdivision maps - will help to figure out when the parcel of land was platted in the first place, before the house was there (often it will have been part of a much bigger parcel of land that was subdivided and you can track back the history of that land parcel too); subsequent re-surveys or adjustments to the boundaries for things like easements, rights of way, disputes with neighbors
- permits - building changes might show up in building permits, permits for utilities etc
- tax records and changes to the tax valuation might give a clue about building work

2. records relating to the people, once you have some names to work with
- census records (on Ancestry and for free in various places)
- city directories like phone books (many are on Ancestry and for free at Internet Archive and other places)
- vital records (birth-marriage-divorce-death) from state/local governments and from local graveyards (findagrave is a free place to search)
- old local history books that have been digitized, sometimes you can find these on the Internet Archive or google books.

3. newspaper records
there are online databases of old newspapers, can search with the street address and with names once you have the names of former residents; also can search with neighborhood name (eg if you live in a well defined historic area), or names of nearby landmarks. If you're lucky this will sometimes turn up photos of the house at earlier stages or in the background of photos of local events. (I've even found local newspaper reports of a house being built and who was building it - but that's the exception. )

4. local historical society
Especially if you're in a historic area they may have a folder of info about your house or the former residents; but in general they have useful resources like local directories etc that online sources may not have, old photo albums, etc -- and they have people who are experienced in doing this kind of search targeted to your local area's records.
posted by LobsterMitten at 6:44 PM on October 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Another fun resource are the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps.
posted by sciencegeek at 6:45 PM on October 29, 2022 [9 favorites]

Seconding checking with the library to see if there's a local historical society. When I did this back in Pennsylvania, the historical society already had a whole file about my particular block and who had lived there and when.

Also: After I moved to my current home, I managed to find some information by googling my own address! The results pulled up an old newspaper clipping from 1910: an engagement announcement of a young teacher in Iowa set to marry a man who lived in my very house.

From there, googling the bride by her married name revealed that the couple adopted a son and then abruptly divorced, and the husband fully dropped out of the picture (quite frankly I am afraid to dig too deep in the back yard lest Harold finally turn up at last), and the bright young teacher eventually became school superintendent of the county next door. The Find A Grave website shows she's buried at a cemetery a few miles from here, her maiden name restored on her gravestone.
posted by mochapickle at 6:46 PM on October 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

Yes, if you are in Seattle, what clew said.

Our current house was built in 1960, and we were able to get a photo of it right after it was built, (nothing but bare dirt around the house). Which is a pretty cool thing to have. Wish I had checked out our other houses. A very cool pursuit, go for it!

But check with your city. Records do tend to be kept.
posted by Windopaene at 10:07 PM on October 29, 2022

In Minneapolis, the library has building permit cards for much of the 20th century. They run from early on up to (if I remember right?) the 1970s. During that time, a record of the building permit was typed on a form printed on an index card. I found the one for my house, which was originally the "old farmhouse" in the neighborhood. You could see when all variety of things were done, at a glance: electric, water, gas, and when the house was moved from its original position onto a newly poured concrete basement in the 1920s, when the city street grid finally reached my neighborhood.

Anyway, the short version is: your library is a great place to check with.
posted by gimonca at 10:44 PM on October 29, 2022

One of my neighbours has been really good for this. They know four owners back and used to be an house minder for one of them, and like to talk about how the guest bathroom used to look and a whole bunch about the way it's been refurbished. It's actually been quite helpful to figure out things like what that random electrical cable in the crawlspace might once have been and why it isn't doing anything now.
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 1:57 AM on October 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

A 100 year -old house may speak for itself to some extent. Old wiring, old plumbing, framing that doesn't make sense, etc. Sometimes there is writing on board that are not in public view.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:01 AM on October 30, 2022

Sometimes there is writing on board that are not in public view.

This. We pulled up vinyl (asbestos, probably) flooring from our (nearly) centenarian house and they’d used newspaper underlayment over the wood subfloor during construction. One paper was left fully intact on top of all the scraps, headline: “All Russia Mourns Lenin Today” from the day after his funeral.
posted by hwyengr at 7:27 AM on October 30, 2022

A 100 year -old house may speak for itself to some extent. Old wiring, old plumbing, framing that doesn't make sense, etc. Sometimes there is writing on board that are not in public view.

Oh that's so true! There's a room on the back of my 1903 house that we're positive was an addition -- the floors are a different wood from the rest of the house, the roofline diverges from the main house, the heating vent is in the wall instead of the typical registers. The windows are missing the wide trim used elsewhere through the house (windows tell you a lot!). The kitchen's clearly been redone within the last 30 years but hidden behind the new cabinets? BEADBOARD. And a few doors still have elaborate hinges and hardware we've cleared out from under several layers of paint.

Also, are there other houses like yours nearby? We're pretty sure our house may have been built from a kit because there are random twin houses dotted all over the neighborhood, including immediately next door, and within a short stroll you can very quickly compare the frames to see where additions and changes may have been made to the original plan. (They used to sell entire house kits by catalogue, package everything up down to the last shingle and nail, and send it to you on the train! We're literally two blocks from the old Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe line, so it's fun to imagine the train stopping on the line and people unloading and marching up the hill with stacks of framing boards and hardware.)

Thinking more: Do you have a neighborhood association? Mine is quite active and there's usually some lively historian who can tell you all sorts of things about the neighborhood's history. We had a canal system! In Colorado! Imagine.
posted by mochapickle at 8:16 AM on October 30, 2022

I googled local street names + the word "archive", and found a ton of old photos - both in my city's archive and on Pinterest. I even found a photo of the house I was then living in, over 100 years old, when the major street it was on wasn't even paved.

The house numbers often aren't included in the photo captions, but if you look on modern-day google maps, you can look for sequences of identifiable rooflines or window shapes that persist to this day, and identify a specific house that way.

I found my house because the house a few doors up from me had an unusual detail of 3 small windows in the second storey, and the house beside it had a curved area of roof. From those two architectural details, I was able to count back and find my lot.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 11:16 AM on October 30, 2022

Another great resource is the Old Fulton Newspaper archive.

Note: do not be alarmed by the appearance of the site. It is a huge searchable newspaper archive and incredibly helpful when doing research on people/places/things in the US.

When I lived in an apartment building in NY outside of NYC, I put the address in and found out all about an exciting and unsolved murder involving unions/mafia etc. My current address only generates a long list of advertisements for a nearby business that was always hiring drivers.
posted by sciencegeek at 5:10 PM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]