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February 13, 2009
Researching a House's History?
I know its possible to check the records of everyone who lived in a house...I want to do mine - how do I do this? Thanks for your help....
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Search the archives on brownstoner because this has been asked before. There is an excellent summary of the process by Christopher Gray (who writes the Streetscapes column for the NY Times real estate section) here:
http://www.nysoclib.org/articles/gray_1995.html
To elaborate with a little Brooklyn flavor (Chris Gray's summary is somewhat Manhattan-centric):
It's relatively easy to find out everyone who OWNED your house. Start with your deed and the name of the prior owner, and work backward from that owner's deed, and so on. You can find deeds for the last 40 years or so online at nyc.gov. Earlier than that, and you have to look in the hard copy libers (or microfilm) that are kept at the City Register's office at 210 Joralemon Street in the Municipal Building. If you're lucky, each deed will reference the prior deed's liber/page number, but if not, you can go to the block-lot index books and start scanning for a prior transfer that includes the name you're looking for.
(This is the basics of title searching.)
To find out who LIVED in your house requires more detective work. Starting with the owner's name for a particular time, you can search old city directories (online at various sources) that will often reveal occupation, or old newspaper archives like NY Times (online back to approx 1850) or Brooklyn Daily Eagle (online from 1840s until 1902). Certain directories have been indexed so you can search by street number to find out who lived there. Keep in mind the address scheme for much of Brooklyn changed around 1871, so you need to find out the old street number if you want to search before then.
The other big resource is census records. The easiest way to search is through ancestry.com, which you can pay for online, or access for free on-site at many libraries (e.g. Brooklyn Public Library). These are generally searchable by name and reveal a lot more info than the city directories if you know who you're looking for. However, the source material is organized geographically so it is possible to zero in on your house through some searching if you don't already know who you're looking for.
Posted by: NorthHeights at February 12, 2009 7:10 PM
Assuming that you are in Brooklyn, you can pull the actual deeds on microfiche as far back as they have them at the City Clerk's office on Joralemon Street. You can also look up the owners on ACRIS but this search doesn't really go back that far. If your house was built in the 1890's you can check the 1900, 1910, 1920 and 1930 U.S. Census records for Kings County. This will give you the names of the people who lived in your house their ages, occupations and states/countries of origin. There are a number of free search engines that will allow you to do this. The 1940 census will be released next year.
Posted by: Just Wondering at February 12, 2009 7:13 PM
I can help you look find the old owners of your house. I usually look at the census records and sometimes the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Please let me know...
Posted by: Amzi Hill at February 12, 2009 7:50 PM
Amzi, what's the URL of the place you look up addresses? Everything seems to be name lookup.
Posted by: mopar at February 12, 2009 11:13 PM
Hi,
I registered to answer your question, since I'm involved in producing indexes to streets and their use in finding EDs (enumeration districts) on the US Censuses.
At stevemorse.org (note: NOT stevemorse.com) we have search tools using addresses to get ED #s. You should find all the large cities there, for the 1900 through 1940 census years. Yes, we already have tools ready for the 1940 opening, which will **not** be next year but the beginning of April 2012. Look at the Census section. Read the essay on how to use the various tools we have put together, and also the FAQ section.
We also have a utility that brings together online sites and our own database transcriptions for street name changes, and for some cities, renumberings of houses on the Morse "One-Step" site. The website is open to the public without any charges.
Enjoy
Joel Weintraub
Dana Point, CA
Posted by: jweintraub at February 13, 2009 12:09 AM
Some additional points. Title search will show who owned the property, and you can trace all the way back to whenever your area was subdivided from whatever farm it was part of. But title history will not tell you when the house was built. Brooklyn Historical Society has registers (pre-phone equivalent of phone books) so you may be able to look up who was living at the address back into the 1800s if your house is that old. I've done my title history, but haven't done the registers yet.
Posted by: slopefarm at February 13, 2009 9:18 AM
Mopar,
Go to:
http://www.bklyn-genealogy-info.com/Directory
There are lots of Brooklyn city directories that have been scanned there, but as you point out, that only helps if you know the name. However, the 1879 and 1897 have been digitized so you can search by address (or anything else).
Ancestry.com has all of the 1830 & earlier village directories digitized so you can search by address, but of course this is only useful for the older houses in Brooklyn Heights.
The Brooklyn Public Library has every year of city directory on microfilm. (plus most years in hard copy in the Brooklyn Collection room.)
http://www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/pdf/directories.pdf
The Brooklyn Historical Society also has these directories in hard copy.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle until 1902 has been digitized and you can search by address.
http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary.org
And don't forget to just google your address. :-) You might be surprised at how often the address gets mentioned in old newspaper articles, books and directories that have been digitized on Google Books, etc.
Posted by: NorthHeights at February 13, 2009 9:50 AM
The 'conveyances' books at the brooklyn hall of records will allow you to look at the sales of your lot through the ages as far back as the 16-1700s. It takes a while to pour through them. Note that the block/lot system was only used in the recording with any frequency only recently. As you get back into the 50s-60s and before, you will see that they use distances from major avenues to your lot line. If you go back far enought, you will find your lot disappear into some English or Dutch colonist's farm.
It's a pretty good clue that something got built when the farm gets subdivided and sold as lots to one person, and then a year later, those lots get sold to many different people. You can use those conveyance records to look up the actual sales and deeds.
You might find some neat surprises if you do this research.
We did this recently for our greenwood/south slope house. The city lists it as a 1910 build (although I have hand cut nails, tongue and groove beam construction, and newspapers in the walls from the late 1800s...)
It looks like our place was actually subdivided from a large holding that Lewis Tappan owned in the 1860s and it was actually built circa 1865 (which makes more sense with what we've found in the walls...) Lewis Tappan was the Brooklyn Heights/Massachussets wealthy merchant and abolitionist. Looks like he acquired a large tract of land in the 'high teens' at some point from the original dutch owners.
Posted by: Park Place at February 13, 2009 10:45 AM
Park Place says:
"It's a pretty good clue that something got built when the farm gets subdivided and sold as lots to one person, and then a year later, those lots get sold to many different people. You can use those conveyance records to look up the actual sales and deeds."
I'm not so sure. Following subdivision creating our lot (from Richard Berry and Rachel Bergen's farm) in the late 1840s, it looks like there may have been a lot of speculative activity, with the lot passing back and forth between several different owners for a decade or so. Not sure the house got built and bought at the beginning. Perhaps there were some boom and bust cycles back then, or spme specualtion and flipping, or eprhaps there was a house and it was a rental property. That's why I am not drawing conclusions from title until I look at the registers.
Incidentally, the Bergens owned a lot of land and married into a lot of other prominent Brooklyn families, and there is a published book of Bergen geneology on googlebooks.
Posted by: slopefarm at February 13, 2009 11:06 AM
BTW, the other thing is checking out the old real estate maps (available online at nypl.org) to see if/how your street address has changed over the centuries.
i had been doing google searches on my address for a while, then realized the 1855 address was about 30 digits lower, and when i googled that address, bam! lots of interesting hits came up and i found out a completely fascinating history.
Posted by: chuck at February 13, 2009 11:18 AM
Great Q and great ideas and resources. I've done some of this stuff but not all, and managed to find the original Dutch farm names (on the conveyances) without nailing down the actual construction date of the house (yet). Block and lot research at the Brooklyn Historical Society library just deepened the mystery, but there are several routes mentioned above that I haven't chased down yet, so now I'm inspired to dig further. (My personal theory: The house was built by evil monkeys, who were so inept that they finished construction in stages and never filed some of the proper paperwork.) I did find out some cool stuff by doing, not just Google, but the NYTimes archive search; turns out a guy who used to run the government printing office died in our house! Since I love printing, this is pretty cool. No ghosts, though. :{
Posted by: Brenda from Flatbush at February 13, 2009 11:54 AM
Slopefarm- yes good point- the registers will definitley show if someone lived there. Like I said- it's just a clue.
In our case, we found out that a carpenter took up residence not long after we think it was build- and that the same family owned it for quite a while after the original purchase of the broken up lot- (and that all the house from the original lot break up are constructed in the same way, with the same frame, footprint, ceiling medallions, etc...
It's not an exact science, and no one place seesm to have any definitive record- but when we found the papers in the wall, that helped narrow the margin of error quite a bit into the mid-to-late 1800s.
By the way- where did you find the mapping to convert your current address to the pre-1870s address?
Posted by: Park Place at February 13, 2009 12:15 PM
Brenda, my most interesting story comes from the Bergen geneology. Apparently Richard Berry's father, who owned the farm in the late 1700s-early 1800s was killed when he was gored by a bull. Poor soul. Also, some punk who lived in the house in 1904 robbed a grocery store with four friends. His name is not one that appears on the deed from that time. That's about all I got, but I haven't tried the NYT archives.
Posted by: slopefarm at February 13, 2009 12:15 PM
Park Place:
If your house was around in 1855, the easiest way to find out the pre-1870 address is to look at the 1855 Perris map that's online at the NYPL.org Digital Collection (as Chuck mentioned).
Posted by: NorthHeights at February 13, 2009 12:24 PM
PP,
It does not appear the address changed in our case. Mainly, I just followed the title history back to the subdivision in the late 1840s. It gets pretty messy at that point. I agree with you about putting the clues together -- it is like solving a mystery. I kind of like the notion that there may have been some serious flipping and speculation going on in our lot's early days because we bought from a fairly unscrupulous flipper ourselves. Here's hoping we have improved the property's karma.
Holy grail is figuring out when the house was built. People ask us all the time how old the house is, and there is a theory going around (that I have tentatively debunked) that we actually live in the old farmhouse. We've also been told that a replica of the house exists in miniature in the Brooklyn Museum, but whenever I go, that little section is closed. Again, I will believe it when I see it. So far, I have it down to between 1849-79, with the likelihood that it predates 1870.
Posted by: slopefarm at February 13, 2009 12:26 PM
Sloepfarm- Do are remember from your other comments- are you also in the greenwood area?
If so- it seems like there is a much bigger history to this area than is commonly grasped, and many of the houses around here are as old, or older than many of the brownstones- and if that's the case, the area starts to seem more easy to protect from the kinds of developments that are marching through.
There was a theory that our house, too, was the original on the plot- it's the only house that detached on both sides, and it has a different kind of footprint than the others. I think, however, that we are actually just one of the first built during one or two developers march to populate the block with workingclass woodframe homes.
Posted by: Park Place at February 13, 2009 12:57 PM
NortHeights- thanks so much- Figure the house wasn't built before the 1860s, but that will at least help prove it-
Posted by: Park Place at February 13, 2009 1:00 PM
Park,
We are north of the highway by about 3 blocks. Not quite Greenwood, but close. A large scale frame with a front porch. Semi-attached. I know the Berry farm ran b/w 12th & 15th from either the water or Gowanus Road (3rd Ave) all the way up the slope, but one source (either the Eagle or the Bergen geneology) places the farmhouse about a half a block to a block north of our block (and not sure how far east or west, but definitely not at the foot of the hill).
Posted by: slopefarm at February 13, 2009 1:19 PM
I searched for the 1846 Old Brooklyn Farm Lands map and think my house on 17th St between 5th and 6th Ave could be part of one of 3 farm strips, which all start at the Gowanus and reach up to 10th Ave. Peter Wyckoff, The Heirs of Rachel Berry or John Dimon are all candidates. My house was created sometime between 1873 (patent date on a unique door knob used throughout the house) and 1888, when the entire block appears filled in with houses on the 1888 Sanford Fire Insurance Maps (located in the map room at Brooklyn Borough Hall 3rd floor). Prior to 1895, records of deeds are by block only. I can follow the deed trail from 1694 to 1841, when the trail begins to split. With about 80 lots in the block, reading individual handwritten deeds at the Brooklyn Municipal Building microfilm collection is tedious and nearly impossible, since locations refer to maps not available and directional measurements in feet from 5th or 6th Ave. OY, my aching head! So I have to ask, has anyone been able to find their house details on the remnant of my street left by the curve in the Prospect Expressway across from Prospect Hall?
slopefarm...you look like your house is within the Richard Berry farm, that ran from the Gowanus Canal all the way up and over the slope to the border of Flatbush at Parkside Ave. It is next to and north of the much narrower John Dimon property, followed by the Heirs of Rachel Berry, Peter Wyckoff, John Wyckoff, Henry Story properties which end at the 20th Street edge of Greenwood Cemetery. If your farm was between 12th and 15th streets, then the rest of these parallel properties cover 16th, Prospect Ave.(formerly Middle St.), 17th, 18th and 19th Streets. Hope this helps others place their properties.
Fun, isn't it?
Posted by: 17th Street at September 19, 2009 12:05 AM
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