How Do I Research the Property History of My Home?

Illustration: Julia Abbonizio/Getty Images

Our homes are such intimate spaces that it may be hard to imagine anyone else living there before us. But unless it’s a new build or it has always been inhabited by members of your family, strangers have, in fact, been in your space. There’s also a decent chance that your home and property haven’t always looked the way they do right now. Yes, the decor has probably changed, but perhaps the layout and room configuration have as well.

Why research the property history of your home?

The real question is why wouldn’t you want to know about your home’s secrets and past life Indeed, in her experience, Ann Senefeld, a Cincinnati-based architectural historian and author of Finding Your Home’s Ancestors: A Guide to Researching Properties in Hamilton County, Ohio, has found that most people “want to learn more about the previous owners to connect to the past.” Or, if someone thinks their property may be haunted, she insists that learning about its history can at least provide them with a few potential names of their otherworldly visitors.

Other than sheer curiosity, there are several reasons why people either research the history of their home themselves or hire someone like Senefeld (who is also the founder of Digging Cincinnati History, a historical consulting business and architectural history blog) to do it for them. For example, she has prepared home history reports for real estate agents who use them as a marketing tool. “[Home history] reports are also given as gifts for all occasions, and they make a great housewarming gift,” she adds.

Researching the history of your home may also come with financial benefits, says Elizabeth Finkelstein, a historic preservationist, architectural historian, and, along with her husband Ethan Finkelstein, the co-author of Cheap Old Houses: An Unconventional Guide to Loving and Restoring a Forgotten Home, as well as cohost of HGTV’s Who’s Afraid of a Cheap Old House?.

More specifically, homes listed on the National Register of Historic Places—which generally have to be at least 50 years old—are eligible for tax credits for restoration work. “If your house is not on the National Register of Historic Places, you can apply to be on it, but you have to research the history of your house, put a report together, and talk to your State Historic Preservation Office,” she explains. Plus knowing the history of your home—and especially having photos of it at different periods—is valuable when restoring your home, Finkelstein says.

How to research the property history of your home

Whether you’ve been exploring your home’s history for years or you’re just getting started, here are some tips, strategies, and resources to help you along the way:

Before you begin

Start with what you know

At the very least, you have to know something about your home—whether it’s the year it was built or even the name of the street it’s on, write it down. Also keep track of anything you heard about the house, perhaps from a realtor or neighbor, but have yet to confirm. Anything you know or even think you know might come in handy later.

Identify your goals

Next, you’ll want to figure out what you want to learn about your home. “There’s researching the architecture of your house—the actual changes to the fabric of your home—and then there’s researching the people who lived in your house,” Finkelstein says. Of course, you should look into both, but your research will likely go in several different directions, so it can help to narrow your focus in the beginning.

Make a list of questions

Making a list of questions will help guide your research. For example, what would you like to know about the previous residents of the home—the people responsible for the drawings on the attic walls or height chart on the kitchen door frame—or the community where it’s located? That could include questions like:

• Who previously lived (and maybe died) in the home? When did they live there?

• Was the house/building formerly home to a business, school, church, other public building?

• Is there anything noteworthy about the neighborhood? (e.g. former workers’ housing, a planned suburb, formerly home to a particular ethnic group, etc.)

Or perhaps you’re more curious about the structure itself and have questions like:

• When was the home built?

• What did it look like originally?

• Did it ever have a name?

• When did any major renovations or restorations take place? What kinds of changes were made?

• Was it designed by an architect or firm?

• Was it a standard model from a developer or a kit?

Knowing what kinds of information you want to find will help you determine which resources will be the most useful.

Don’t worry about going in order

When researching something like the history of your home, take any information you can get, regardless of where it falls on a timeline. As long as you’re finding clues and leads, there’s no need to work chronologically. That said, if you don’t have any kind of starting point, Senefeld recommends working backwards, starting with researching the most recent owners of the house and going from there. Also, be sure to keep track of any new questions or potential leads that pop up along the way so you don’t forget them. That way, you’ll be ready to go when you take your research on the road.

Dating your home

Look for hidden clues

Trying to figure out your home’s age? Start looking inside, outside, and around your home for clues. Does your home have its original furnace? Find the manufacturer’s plate and check for dates (hint: they may be in Roman numerals) or serial numbers or the model, then look up when it was made.

Toilets are another helpful tool for dating a home and piecing together its history. Carefully lift the lid off the tank and look for a stamp with the manufacture date either on the back wall of the tank or the underside of the lid. Even if the toilet isn’t as old as your home itself, the date may offer clues about when indoor plumbing was installed or when the bathroom was last renovated.

Additionally, details like the shape of the nails used in your home’s frame, wallpaper patterns, original door knobs, and other hardware can also help date your home and its renovations.

Figure out your home’s era and architectural style

Things as simple as when a home was constructed and its architectural style aren’t always straightforward. Even real estate listings can be deceiving: When documentation isn’t available for older homes, its year of construction is typically estimated. (This is why you find so many listings for homes built in 1900, 1920, and 1945.)

Fortunately, your home’s architectural style can help you figure out when it was built. “Start by looking at your house to see what you can narrow down in terms of the era that your house was built in based on its style,” Finkelstein says. For this, she recommends The Field Guide to American Houses: The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America’s Domestic Architecture by Virginia Savage McAlester.

Because certain architectural styles were incredibly popular during specific periods, figuring out the style will give you a starting point for dating your home. “So if your house is a Craftsman bungalow, there’s a pretty good chance that it was built sometime in the early 20th century, maybe the 1910s through the 1930s,” Finkelstein explains. “If your house is Queen Anne Victorian, it may have been built anytime from the 1880s to 1910s.”

That said, these dates aren’t entirely rigid, and when it comes to vernacular architecture—homes people built for themselves without a trained architect—it’s not uncommon to see a combination of styles (think a Craftsman bungalow with Greek Revival elements or a folk Victorian with Italianate flourishes).

Research from the outside in

Once you’ve pinned down the architectural style of your home’s exterior, it’s time to move indoors. “If you’re looking at the actual built history of the house, there’s a lot you can do by eye to figure out what may or may not have been added on at specific times,” Finkelstein says.

For example, a home’s original porch may have been enclosed or removed altogether, the kitchen may have moved, part of an entryway may have been used to create a powder room, or an entire section of the house may have been added years after it was constructed.

“You can start to understand what a traditional interior layout of your house may have been, and if it doesn’t really match that anymore,” Finkelstein explains. “You can piece a lot of it together based on delving deep into the style of your home—and that’s just Google searching to death ‘traditional layouts of Craftsman bungalows,’ or that kind of thing.”

Online research

Check local government land records

When Senefeld researches a home, she always starts with local government land records. In Ohio, where she’s based, that’s the county auditor’s office, but if that’s not the case in your area, contact your city, town, or county government’s office and ask which department “tracks your land value and taxes,” as she advises. At this point, many of these records are publicly available online.

“The information I look for is [the] current owners, previous owners, the date the structure was built, and the legal description of the property,” Senefeld says. “I take that information to explore deed records at our local recorder’s office. Depending on where you live, these can seem overwhelming, but I have found those who work there are willing to help guide you to the right resources.”

You can also check with your local building department, city planning office, or the equivalent in your area to see if your home’s original blueprints and any subsequent building permits are available.

Find your home on a Sanborn map

From 1867 to the present, the Sanborn Map Company has created large-scale maps depicting the residential, commercial, and industrial sections of roughly 12,000 cities and towns in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The maps were made to help fire insurance agents determine a building’s fire-related risk and provide a range of information including its size, shape, construction materials, window and door locations, and type of roof.

While that’s all interesting, what’s often the most useful when researching the history of a home is that the maps also list the names and widths of streets, property boundaries, building use, and house and block numbers. “Bear in mind that addresses often changed, so it’s more important to look at the placement of the house on the street versus the [numerical] address,” Finkelstein explains.

In addition to the Library of Congress, which has a searchable database of more than 35,000 Sanborn maps available online, some institutions in states like Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Maine, and Ohio have digitized the maps available for public use. At first, the maps might look like a confusing array of colors, numbers, abbreviations, and symbols, but their key, as well as this resource from the Library of Congress, can help you decode them. For example, different colors correspond to various construction materials: pink is brick, yellow is wood, dark gray is adobe, light gray is metal or iron, and blue is concrete or cinder block.

Sanborn maps can also help you date your home. For instance, if it doesn’t appear on an 1884 map but it’s on an 1890 map, you’ll know it was built sometime during that period. Similarly, you can compare maps from different years to see how the structure may have been altered over time, Finkelstein says. “If you think your house had a story or addition added on at some point, that’s an interesting way to find out, because you can compare the footprints map-to-map,” she notes.

Check out census records

To find out who was living in a home during a particular census, enter the address and cross streets on the Unified Census Enumeration District Finder, then use FamilySearch.org or Ancestry.com to access and scroll through the record until you find the household and its occupants. This resource from the New York Public Library walks you through the process in greater detail. “I like to look at census records in conjunction with Sanborn maps,” Finkelstein says. “It’ll tell you not only when the house first appeared, but who lived in it, and their jobs—which can be interesting because it could help you understand the sort of wealth that may have been poured into the building of your house.”

Make use of the Building Heritage Technology Library

The Building Heritage Technology Library is a free online resource containing nearly 15,000 American and Canadian architectural building and trade catalogs, house plan books, and technical building guides from 1964 and earlier. According to Finelkstein, you can do everything from dating linoleum patterns using old Armstrong flooring catalogs to looking up newel posts, mantels, and other building parts that were once mass produced and purchased out of mail-order catalogs. It also includes catalogs for ready-to-built kit homes from companies like Sears, Roebuck & Co., Bennett Homes, and Aladdin Homes.

See if your city has WPA tax photos

Some larger cities had photos taken of every residence between 1939 and 1941 as part of a Works Progress Administration (WPA) property tax assessment project. For example, you can find digitized versions of these images for all five boroughs of New York City, as well as Kansas City, Missouri, and Seattle. “Getting your hands on your tax photo can reveal a lot about the house, especially if it’s been heavily altered since,” Finkelstein adds.

Post in a local Facebook group

Chances are your town, neighborhood, community, or historical society has its own Facebook page, and Finkelstein says these can be a great source of information and images of your home. “Put out a public call on your local Facebook page and ask people to submit photos or memories [of your home],” she says. “It’s amazing how far it can go.”

Look for old postcards

Today, we think of postcards as mementos from major landmarks or vacation destinations, but in the first part of the 20th century—when photography was still a novelty—picture postcards of even the smallest towns were available. Most featured the “main street” downtown area, or specific streets, civic buildings, churches, schools, statues, factories, businesses, and other slices of everyday life. Finkelstein suggests searching for postcards of your town or street on eBay, but be cautious about the colors. “A lot of times old postcards didn’t have color, so they were often colored in, and the colors aren’t always accurate,” she notes.

Other key online resources:

• National Register of Historic Places Database: If you live in an historic home or district, start with the information that’s already available.

• State Historic Preservation Offices: In addition to the national register, check the one in your state.

• Bureau of Land Management General Land Office Records: Federal land conveyance records and information on land patents going back to 1788.

• FamilySearch.org: Senefeld recommends the site for access to census records, city directories, church records, local government land records, and more—all available when you sign up for a free account.

• Ancestry.com: “Ancestry is something that I use to find the census records, understand how the street changed, who lived on the street and what the original address was—which is going to help you a lot,” Finkelstein says. If you don’t have a paid subscription, you may be able to access the site for free through your local library.

• Chronicling America: A resource from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress providing access to more than 21 million newspaper pages from 1756–1963.

• Newspapers.com: A large, searchable collection of digitized newspapers—including those from small towns. Senefeld usually searches for a home’s address and any residents that she has information about. A paid subscription is required, but the site is often accessible through the public library.

• Google Books: Because so many books, periodicals and other written materials are now digitized, Finkelstein recommends doing a search for your home’s address and/or the names of people who lived there. “I’ve searched random people who live in random houses, and they’ve come up in a roster of some committee from 1880 or the annual minutes from the Masonic Temple,” she says.

• Library of Congress Catalog: Searchable historical records for researching houses, neighborhoods, towns, families, or other aspects of life in the past. Plus “oodles of historical photos, digitized and searchable online,” Finkelstein says.

• US Telephone Directory Collection: More than 3,500 telephone directories from Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and the city of Chicago from the 20th century.

• New York Real Estate Brochure Collection: This free online resource from Columbia University contains more than 9,200 advertising brochures, floor plans, price lists, and related real estate materials for buildings in the five boroughs of New York and outlying vicinities from the 1920s to the 1970s.

In-person research

Visit your local library

Your local library can be a treasure trove of information. Some may even have entire sections or rooms dedicated to local history with maps, documents, reference-only books, newspapers, photographs, brochures, and more. While some libraries—like the New York Public Library and the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library—have digitized large portions of their collections, other resources may only be accessible in person. Give yourself plenty of time to page through old books and newspapers: this type of research is much slower than a control-F search, but you’ll probably come across fascinating tidbits you would have otherwise missed. Whether you’re doing your research online or in the stacks, don’t be shy about asking for assistance. “Librarians are a great source of information,” Senefeld says. “They know their resources best and can guide you to what you need.”

Consult your local historical or genealogical societies

Members of historical and genealogical societies aren’t only experts in local history—they’re also experts at how and where to research local history. Depending on your home’s location and whether it had any previous residents of local prominence, you may encounter people with firsthand knowledge of your property who may be able to share some info you wouldn’t find in a book or newspaper.

If you find someone willing to answer some questions, ask them about your neighborhood in general: when it was built, who initially settled there, why it’s located in that particular area, and so on. You may find out that it was once predominantly home to a particular ethnic group or employees of a local company; the types of clues that can help shed light on your home’s former residents. You may also want to ask about major events in the town that occurred after your home was built and may have affected it, like floods, earthquakes, large fires, or other natural disasters.

Talk to people in your neighborhood

Get out and meet your neighbors. Find people who have lived in the area all or most of their lives and can speak to how the neighborhood—and possibly your home, specifically—has evolved over time. In addition to the library and historical society, visit local house museums, antique shops, and architectural salvage stores and ask the staff who you should talk to about the area’s past and the history of your home. Chances are there’s at least one local history buff who will be more than willing to share their knowledge with you.

Don’t expect others to do the work for you

Yes, the public library and local historical society are invaluable resources, and have staff that can point you in the direction of the information you’re seeking, but don’t expect them to actually do the research for you. Some, like the Sullivan County Historical Society in New York, do have researchers for hire, who, for a nominal fee (in this case, $40 for up to two hours), will comb through their archives for you. And, of course, “be kind to those who share their knowledge with you,” Senefeld says.

Be patient

There will be unanswered questions. We’re used to having all the answers at our fingertips, but researching the history of your home typically takes some time and effort. Expect—and embrace—rabbit holes. The most interesting things about your home often aren’t revealed until your research is underway.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest