Researching the history of house.

[Anonymous]

The listing description of our house calls it mid 17th century but our house deeds only start in 1886 when it was sold off from the local estate.It is on the 1841 cencus.I have just read in the local paper that the desendents of the original estate owners have recently given a lot of their papers to the county record office.
Would the original estate deeds mention our house. Or do deeds only start at the first sale.Is there any other way of finding out the history prior to 1841 if we find these papers don't mention our house
Thanks Stella.

 

[Anonymous]

The estate deeds may or may not, but I would be on the phone and making an appointment. With any luck you will find original accounts and/or bills for building and/or repair to your property, plus other incidental info about who lived in it, leased it or wherever.

 

[Anonymous]

Funnily enough I was going to post a very similar message to this! We are buying a Grade II listed building and the survey report estimates it was built in approx 1650. We would love to find out more about the history of the building but don’t know where to start! Please can someone advise! Many thanks.

 

[Anonymous]

Yep, public records office. But be prepared for disappointment. Our place goes back to at least 1550 but the oldest reference i could find was the 1842 tithe map. This was quite fun cos it gave all the field names, crops etc. However Exeter was badly bombed during the last war and many records were lost - maybe including ours.
Mike.

 

[Anonymous]

Hi,

The House History is very difficult to trace and unless you are lucky pretty difficult pre census days.

One route is through tracing the owners as tracking people through time is far easier than a house. (Although tracing people is not easy in itself.)

Go to the records office and start thumbing through the papers for the estate you might strike lucky.

Also bear in mind that stone houses pre 1700 are rare and you had to be someone with wealth to have a house that has survived to today.

The Majority of the people were living in hovels and stone houses were the grand designs of the 1600's.

This might help if you are in a village only certain named individuals will be the likely owners of property, so approach it via the people in the location and their trades and wealth.

Look for wills of these people (records office) and again you might hit gold with descriptions of what they have left for their children etc..

MJ

 

[Anonymous]

Manorial records can be useful too for very old properties. Probably they are deposited with the County Records Office. Even if not, they should (in theory and law) be preserved somewhere and available for view by homeowners (although not just by anyone who fancies looking at them). They may still be retained by the manor itself.

Inclosure Award maps are useful, as are tithe maps and the accompanying documentation.

Many houses (and land) were part of a manor, and only sold off in the 19th century when laws were changed to allow this.

You may find also that a later house is actually on the site of an older one, demolished and rebuilt as an 'improved' worker's dwelling.

There are useful books on researching a house history which it is worth reading before diving in at the RO - see books part of this site.

 

[Anonymous]

Hi Stella,
we've been doing similar research, so I'd thought I'd share a couple of things.
On the 1840 tithe map and apportionments each plot is numbered, and leasee/owner/occupier recorded. These might be slightly different to the 1841 Census, since the tithes were carried out from the mid-1830s. The plot numbers are often the same as those used by estate records, so you can tie the two together.
Estates give their properties lease numbers, and these rarely change, so if you find an estate lease that is definitley your place post-1840, you should be able to go back and find the same lease number for much earlier records of your house.
Another pre-1840 record is the 1801 Ordnance Survey map; either your local record office or library should have a copy.
I hope this is of some help,

Emma.

 

[Anonymous]

Hiya
wondered if I can add anything? You could try looking it up on oldmaps.co.uk which is OS maps from the Victorian era onwards. Thebenefit of this is (as I have often found) that the house might have previously had another name, which when you come to search computerised indexes might be a useful thing to know.
Otherwise you could try approaching the local history library or records office where archivists, bred specially with an extra copy of the 'helpful gene' are your best ally, especially if the deposit of old records was a recent one and therefore not likely yet to have been catalogued either electronically for a searchable index or possibly at all! They will also know where relevant records, other than the deposit you mention, might be. Even the old rates books are a source of names of leaseholders/occupants etc and that might start you out in another direction.
Otherwise, there's no subsitute for old fashioned 'fossicking' amongst the papers to see what clues turn up. Happy hunting!
Caro

 

[Anonymous]

It's often serendipity which gives you concrete info - I have managed to pin down when our house wasn't built (Inclosure Award map) and when it was by sheer chance. On a visit to the Records Office, someone else was doing reserach on the local railway line. They had a very, very long coloured map which was a watercolour of the proposed route, dated 1828. As a railway enthusiast I started looking too, and realised our house was on it - a tiny dot, but all houses within about 100 yards each side of the proposed line were marked.

Other information has come with bundles of things - letters and so forth - which weren't really catalogued, but sideways searches and hunches lead to to things once you gets started.

 

[Anonymous]

Serendipity, now there's a good word for a wet Thursday. Yes indeed, and there's a surprising lot of it about. That old saw about 'the harder you work the luckier you get' kinda thing.
I hadn't thought of railway construction, but of course there was a lot of THAT about in the 1840s. How about local road maps of the right sort of vintage or perhaps Trade Directories with the names and addresses of 'notable persons', tradesmen and professionals (inevitably not computer indexed) but a very entertaining read all the same. THe advantage of a Trade Directory (Pigot's is one, Kelly another) is that they are annual publications so you could start at 1841 and work backwards. I've also had a certain amount of luck with reading collected correspondences (published in book form). Was the family that built your house on their estate sufficiently noteworthy in some field that a Correspondence has been compiled? Clutching at straws but all these avenues have paid off for me in the past.
Good to read you, Evelyn.

 

[Anonymous]

Concrete info is not to be recommended. Limecrete info is much better.

 

[Anonymous]

"Fossicking"?!

What a great word! What part of the country are you from?

 

[Anonymous]

Aussie in the early years but now living Surrey-ish. 'fossicking' is a mining term, to pick over or sort spoil from mines. Works just as well down the local records office too.