Marilyn Welch is an authority on the history of her town, Mascoutah, Ill. She knows where the only Sears Roebuck house is. She can point out which of the many Victorian homes was designed by the influential American architect George Barber. She even knows how much my parents’ house cost to build ($1,250 in 1895). But there’s one question she gets over and over again from visitors to the town’s museum.
“People come in and say, ‘I live at such and such — do you know if anyone ever died in that house?’” she says.
Her usual response: “Well, yes, they probably did.”
Any house that’s been around long enough has probably hosted at least one death, and potentially a birth.
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In her decades researching and writing, Welch has dug into the history of many houses. She hasn’t found money stashed in the walls (“they always think there’s something hidden,” she says of sleuthing homeowners) but she has found information that adds a different kind of value — not just the knowledge of when a house was built and who lived there, but a sense of how people lived in a place and a time. “The house has seen everything,” she says. “All the secrets of the family. Good times and bad times.”
Uncovering this history is something like a treasure hunt, with twisting trails of documents and countless wrong turns. To keep going means believing there’s something to find, even if it’s not a ghost, a safe full of silver coins or a document that gets your address on the National Register of Historic Places.
“When somebody calls you to have you look up the history of their house, it’s because there’s maybe a famous person associated with it,” says Audrey L. Elder, a former real estate agent who researches local history around her Missouri town. “I let them know that there’s gonna be something wonderful … It might not be that.”
Start with a legal and physical history
You’re probably going to have to leave your home to learn its history. Even in places where documents are digitized, the physical county courthouse can be a trove of information.
Documents may be stored across several offices, so it’s a good idea not to get too specific when you start asking around. “Playing dumb is actually very useful in these situations,” says Michael Allen, a historian and executive director of the National Building Arts Center. “It’s better to be like, ‘Hey, I’m just researching my house and I don’t know anything.’”
A courthouse’s archive of deeds will show who owned a property and when. Depending on the age of the house, this information might be on a computer, paper or microfilm. Certain houses have collections of documents called abstracts that “go all the way back to that land patent when it was purchased from the federal government,” Elder says.
Of course, not all of your home’s past residents were necessarily owners. To find renters and other tenants, you can ask a library for historic phone books or, if they exist, copies of the city directory. “It’ll show you if they owned it or if they rented it and it'll usually also show you where they worked,” Elder says.
If you’ve traced your home back to the dirt, then it’s time to trace its construction and any renovations. Deeds sometimes reveal improvements to a house — what’s bought as a single story in 1900 might be two stories when it’s sold in 1920 — but the specifics of changes beyond that can be “a needle in a haystack hunt,” Allen says. There’s almost certainly not a repository of every blueprint for every house in your county. Often, there aren’t blueprints at all. “If you have a historic 19th-century rowhouse in any American city, chances are there was no architect involved — the contractor designed the building on-site and built it,” Allen says. If you are lucky enough to find an architect’s name associated with your house, you can check if they donated their papers to a library or school.
If your courthouse has an archive of building permits, you might be able to find records of renovations or additions, but it’s not guaranteed; many older records have been thrown out and permits may not have been required for construction in certain places or times.
Another place to check for changes to your property is on historic maps. The Library of Congress has an archive of Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, which show where buildings stood, what they were made of, and reveal how street names and house numbers changed over time.
After a trip (or several) to the courthouse, you’ll probably know roughly when your house was built and who owned it, but this is just the start of the search.
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Go beyond deeds and maps
About 15 years ago, a very special visitor gave Gray Smith a tour of his own home in Louisville. Bessie Cross was in her early 90s, and she’d grown up in the house, which her parents bought in 1921.
“She got a little weepy and she pointed out where the piano used to be when her dad played it and where they put their Christmas tree,” he says. “It was just a thrill to feel that, to have her back in that house, in those walls.”
Smith knew a man named Herman Cross had owned his house for decades, but he learned about Herman’s daughter Bessie through a combination of census and newspaper records. The National Archives hosts a searchable database of every census through 1950, while local libraries and sites such as newspapers.com host hundreds of small local papers.
“It’s like a gold mine of information,” Allen says. “They’re not covering the big national news. They’re covering the new bank building or the house that’s getting built. They’re covering the lives of people in much more depth than a metropolitan paper would.”
A newspaper search doesn’t need to be limited to names. Allen searched for his address in a newspaper archive and learned a past resident had been the owner of one of the first motorcars in St. Louis. “That’s not super thrilling, but I thought it was interesting,” he says. “That helped me figure out the garage was original.”
Another source of information is someone like Bessie Cross. Firsthand interviews with people who lived in and around a house can turn up stories, memories and the occasional glimpse of what a house used to look like. “You find someone who lived in a house 30 years ago and they have an entire photo album with tons of great photos of the house,” Allen says. A local historical society or neighborhood association may have similar artifacts. They are likely to have information on the surrounding community, too.
Smith consulted the archives at the University of Louisville to round out his research. “There was a grade-school teacher in the early ’20s who gave an annual assignment to write about your street,” he learned. “So I found a number of third-grade essays about life on Everett Avenue ... and all the things that were happening in the early life of that neighborhood.”
If you’re totally lost and keep hitting dead ends, asking for help on relevant Facebook pages or Subreddits can be the digital equivalent of sending up a rescue flare. “You’re looking for something on your building and you can’t find it, but somebody who lived there 30 years ago gets a nostalgic hair and goes and looks for the address and they find that you are looking for something and then you start getting little details,” Allen says.
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Leave your own trail of records
Records for new buildings are more cleanly digitized today; new houses will have a long digital document trail for owners to find. Google Street View can show photos of addresses going back years. But this doesn’t necessarily mean the people who live in your house a century from now will have an easier time learning about it.
Your thousands of digital photos are stored in private databases and shared on social media posts that are more likely to be forgotten than passed down like a photo album. Phone books are no longer a useful record of who lived where in between census years. Local newspapers are struggling to survive, let alone support the staff to cover the small comings and goings that give texture to the life outlined on deeds and building permits.
Smith compiled a book of his research — the things he found, the improvements he made. The process gave him a different perspective on the home and something to leave for the next owners. “You don’t really own them,” he says of houses. “You just have them for a while and then pass them along.”
Gabe Bullard is a writer who covers culture and technology.
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