• Title deeds can tell you about who owned the building as well as when the building changed hands and any special covenants (such as building restrictions). If the deeds go back far enough they may tell you when the house was built.
• Maps can help you pinpoint when the house was built. It’s also very useful to compare different types of maps, as well as maps from different dates, to help you see if the building was extended (or if outbuildings were knocked down). Tithe and enclosure maps usually come with extra written evidence (the ‘award’ or ‘apportionment’), which may tell you who owned or occupied the building and also the land or buildings on the boundaries of the property. They may also tell you if the land belonged to a manor at one point, in which case you’ll be able to check through the manorial records for more evidence.
• Trade directories (particularly ones towards the end of the nineteenth century) can help you find out if your house was used as a shop, pub, beerhouse, factory or chapel during a certain time period, and may also tell you who lived or worked there.
• Census returns can show who lived in the property and their occupations. You may be able to confirm the details and even learn extra information by cross-referencing the information you find in the census returns with that from the trade directories.

Types Of Sources

The types of information you’ll use fall into four categories:

• Primary – usually written (though sometimes printed) original records, such as title deeds, manorial rolls, assize records, wills, census returns, taxations lists and electoral rolls.
• Secondary – may be transcriptions of records, monographs on a village written by an antiquarian, standard local histories, contemporary or retrospective articles on people or places or trades, websites, or architectural surveys such as Pevsner’s Building of England series.
• Oral – recollections of neighbours or other people who’ve lived in the local area for a long time.
• Physical – the place itself, old photographs or drawings, aerial photographs, architectural plans and maps.

Although you won’t necessarily need an in-depth knowledge of Latin and palaeography (old handwriting) for documents after about 1750, researching the history of your house means that you will be dealing with a real variety of documents, including title deeds (or abstracts of title), census returns, wills, maps and apportionments, tax assessments and poll books.

You’ll be able to do some of the research from the physical structure of the building, but to do other parts you will need to visit local libraries and record offices, or even the National Archives at Kew. You’ll also need to consult registers (such as the electoral roll), trade directories and possibly back issues of local newspapers.

In the record office and library archives you may be able to see the originals of some documents. For documents that are heavily used (such as census returns, parish registers and old copies of newspapers), or ones which are ‘unfit for production’ (i.e. very fragile or damaged), you are more likely to use versions on ‘microform’ – that is, microfiche or microfilm. These need special readers, which magnify the documents so they’re easier to read; though do bear in mind that even so the type size of early nineteenth-century newspapers is tiny, and some of the documents (particularly the handwritten ones) are filmed in negative (i.e. white writing on a black background).

Together with the fact that early handwriting can be a bit indistinct and the ink on the documents is sometimes faded, this means that microfiche and microfilm records can be very wearing to read for long periods.

Working Backwards

• The further back you go, the harder handwriting is to read; you may also find that abbreviations are more difficult to work out. As the format of legal documents tends to be the same down the years, you’ll be in a better position to work out difficult words and abbreviations in earlier documents if you’re already familiar with the same phrases used in later documents.
• Particularly with census returns, the further back you go the less likely it is that the property will have a street number or house name. It’s easier to trace back through the records from occupant details that you know as definite, and take into account records of neighbouring properties to help you pinpoint yours.

Using This Book