When Senefeld researches a home, she always starts with local government land records. In Ohio, where she’s based, that’s the county auditor’s office, but if that’s not the case in your area, contact your city, town, or county government’s office and ask which department “tracks your land value and taxes,” as she advises. At this point, many of these records are publicly available online.
“The information I look for is [the] current owners, previous owners, the date the structure was built, and the legal description of the property,” Senefeld says. “I take that information to explore deed records at our local recorder’s office. Depending on where you live, these can seem overwhelming, but I have found those who work there are willing to help guide you to the right resources.”
You can also check with your local building department, city planning office, or the equivalent in your area to see if your home’s original blueprints and any subsequent building permits are available.
Find your home on a Sanborn map
From 1867 to the present, the Sanborn Map Company has created large-scale maps depicting the residential, commercial, and industrial sections of roughly 12,000 cities and towns in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The maps were made to help fire insurance agents determine a building’s fire-related risk and provide a range of information including its size, shape, construction materials, window and door locations, and type of roof.
While that’s all interesting, what’s often the most useful when researching the history of a home is that the maps also list the names and widths of streets, property boundaries, building use, and house and block numbers. “Bear in mind that addresses often changed, so it’s more important to look at the placement of the house on the street versus the [numerical] address,” Finkelstein explains.
In addition to the Library of Congress, which has a searchable database of more than 35,000 Sanborn maps available online, some institutions in states like Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Maine, and Ohio have digitized the maps available for public use. At first, the maps might look like a confusing array of colors, numbers, abbreviations, and symbols, but their key, as well as this resource from the Library of Congress, can help you decode them. For example, different colors correspond to various construction materials: pink is brick, yellow is wood, dark gray is adobe, light gray is metal or iron, and blue is concrete or cinder block.
Sanborn maps can also help you date your home. For instance, if it doesn’t appear on an 1884 map but it’s on an 1890 map, you’ll know it was built sometime during that period. Similarly, you can compare maps from different years to see how the structure may have been altered over time, Finkelstein says. “If you think your house had a story or addition added on at some point, that’s an interesting way to find out, because you can compare the footprints map-to-map,” she notes.