If you live in an older home, chances are that you may wonder who built it and when, and who has lived there in the years since it was built. Old houses have a lot of character and many have very interesting stories to tell. There are a few ways that you can set about to discover the history of your old house.
Of course, the first thing that my inner attorney would do is to go straight to the land records to look at the chain of title for the property. Depending upon where you live, the deeds that you would be looking at may be at the town offices or at some other type of office where land records are kept. I have done title searches and while I usually only do what I need to do in my jurisdiction and go back forty years, it is often tempting to go back further in time to when the property was originally developed. Deeds tell you a few things about a property, including who owned the property when, who they bought it from, the size of the property and whether it was all the land that the previous owner had or just a portion of it. You can also tell whether the land had a house on it or not at the time that it was transferred to each subsequent owner. Did I mention that in some places you can still handle the old deed books and some of the very old deeds are even hand written? The record books are fascinating in and of themselves.
There are other ways that you can learn about the history of your old house in addition to land records research. Of course, the most fun is poking around to see whether there are any tunnels, cubbyholes, secret rooms, or other such mysterious things. You can also gather facts about when your home may have been built by looking at the architectural style of the structure and the materials that were used in the construction of your home. Look at books that discuss the time periods during which each style was popular and what materials were commonly used to get a rough estimate of when the house was built.
Photo by acrylicartist on morguefile.com.