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….
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….
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. :{
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Amzi, what’s the URL of the place you look up addresses? Everything seems to be name lookup.
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…