This chapter deals with: As well as personal records such as parish registers, census returns, and will and probate records, and references to owners/occupiers in street directories, there are other records that can help you trace the owners and occupiers. As always, it’s best to work backwards and you may need to work with different sources to keep the trail going.

You may also find that the sources also shed light on the building as well as on the occupiers and owners.This chapter covers the different deeds and taxation records that can help you find out who lived in your house – what they are, where to find them and where to go next. These include: The best place to start is with the deeds and land registry entries.

If you don’t have a complete set of deeds you should still be able to find out information about the occupants through other sources – such as census returns (1841–1901), rate books and taxation lists, electoral rolls and street directories.Mill House was particularly intriguing for me because there was a legend about the house: that the miller had strangled his wife in a fit of jealous rage, thrown her body down the well, and then burned himself on a bread-oven and died from septicaemia. His ghost was supposed to haunt the house. Would there be any documentary evidence?

Title Deeds

Before the Law of Property Act 1925 the only way to prove your good title to the land was to produce all the deeds. Every time the land changed hands a deed was written out and the ‘abstract’ (i.e. details such as the owner’s name and the property involved) were written on the outside of the deed. Because previous owners might need to show that they’d bought the property from Mr A, who in turn had bought it from Mr B and so forth, deeds were often kept in ‘bundles’ so the legal rights could be traced back to the first transaction. Obviously, every time the property was sold the ‘bundle’ of deeds would grow bigger.

Your mortgage provider or solicitor should be able to let you see the deeds, though note that some mortgage providers may charge you to look at them.

Not all the deeds may be available. There are several reasons for this.

• Some deeds may be abstracts of title rather than the original deeds. If the owner of several properties sold off just one cottage, the original title deeds were still relevant to the rest of the estate, so wouldn’t be given to the new owner. In these cases the solicitor’s clerk would write out all the relevant abstracts of title for the new owner. An example of an abstract of title (for Mill House in Attleborough) is in Appendix 2.
• Some deeds may have been kept by previous owners.
• Some deeds may have been deposited in the local record office – note that they’re often not indexed so you may need to search through a lot of documents in the ‘minor collections’ section of the archives.

Working With Deeds

Deeds tend to contain a lot of legal terms, so you need to have some knowledge of property law – and note that they’re often written in Latin until the sixteenth century. Deeds from the early twentieth century or before are likely to be handwritten rather than typewritten.

Earlier deeds are written on parchment, which feels slightly greasy to the touch. They will need very careful handling. They may be hard to unfold without damaging them, and if they haven’t been opened for years you won’t be able to open them completely flat. You’re likely to see a ‘title’ written on the back – that is, on the outside of the folded document – which identifies what’s contained in the document. For example, the conveyance for Mill House in 1912 has written on the outside:


The further back the deeds go, the harder you may find it to read the handwriting of the clerk. It’s best to work backwards, so you get a feel for the format of the documents, which doesn’t change that much over the years, and this means you won’t have to spend quite so long deciphering words in earlier deeds. It’s also worth making yourself an ‘alphabet’ of the script used, by using example letters from words you know as definite, to help you read the more difficult to decipher words.