History on 419 Union Street
I went to go look at 419 Union Street( Carroll Gardens/Gowanus area) again. I wanted to research the family history of the house dating back to the 1800’s when it was built. Does anyone now how I can go about that???
I went to go look at 419 Union Street( Carroll Gardens/Gowanus area) again. I wanted to research the family history of the house dating back to the 1800’s when it was built. Does anyone now how I can go about that???
Thank you everyone for your comments.
In addition to the wonderful suggestions made above, you should come to the Brooklyn Historical Society’s library — next to genealogy, house research is one of our most popular research topics! In addition to Brooklyn city directories dating back to the 1820s, we have a fantastic Brooklyn atlas collection ranging in years from 1855 to the 1930s — most of these atlases (although not all) were created for fire insurance purposes and detail Brooklyn block-by-block showing what buildings were made out (wood, brick, stone), give dimensions, label bigger industries and churches/schools. Another valuable resource are the land conveyances, which detail property ownership dating from the Dutch to about 1898 — however these can be tedious and confusing, since they do not detail which plots have buildings, etc. Also we have an in-house image database with over 30,000 images!
The library at the Brooklyn Historical Society is open on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and the 1st and 3rd Saturday of each month from 1 to 5 pm. If you have any questions shoot us an e-mail at: reference@brooklynhistory.org or give a call (718) 222-4111…
Hope to see some of you,
Elizabeth
Reference Librarian
Brooklyn Historical Society
If you are looking for information on the owners and residents, your best bet is census and directory records. Both are available in the genealogy section of the public library (5th Avenue branch is NYC is best, but BPL has some of this too).
You can find some directories at http://www.bklyn-genealogy-info.com/. Census records are online at ancestry.com, but it costs money and its harder (for me) to search by address/neighborhood online than it is on microfilm (but very good if you know the name of the person you are looking for).
Title history (slopefarm) is also a good source, and pretty easy once you figure the system out.
And if you are looking to find out when the house was built, you should also look at maps (again, NYPL is the best place). You can bracket dates of construction pretty tightly from maps.
Visit Landmarks Commission link for Guide to Research Resources in New York City:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/html/faqs/research_resource.shtml
You can go to the City Register office in the Brooklyn Municipal Bldg on Joralemon and trace your title history. You can learn who sold to whom when. These records are available going back before 1899. They tell you who owned the property, but not what was on the property. As I understand it, it is building records from before 1899 that went up in smoke. So you can’t find out directly when the house was built. But by putting title information together with directory info as Bob Marvin wrote, and possibly census data at the NYPL, you can infer when the building was built.
From what we can tell about ours, there was a lot of speculation and flipping which may have actually rpedated construction. Just because someone owned the property doesn’t meant here was a building there.
Old Brooklyn City Directories should be available in the library at the Brooklyn Historical Society. These will give you the names of the people living at that address. You could then search through the Brooklyn Eagle archives on line for those names.
We live down the street on Union and when we discussed looking into the same, my understanding is that past those records which are already available on line, most of the records from the turn of the century for houses such as ours went up in flames with the record house where they were all being kept.
Would love to be told that is wrong and there is a place we could look up histories.
The best thing I was able to obtain was, from the tax department, old pictures of our house back in the 1930s.
Again, if someone else knows where alternate records may have been kept for these houses, would be wonderful, but don’t expect too much!