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How can i Find History on a House that i’m interesing in buying?
Question by mom11212003: How can i Find History on a House that i’m interesing in buying?
I am looking to buy an old victorian home and i would just like to know where i can find a web site that shows the history of the house…like deaths..break-ins…haungtings(lol) stuff like that!!!
Best answer:
Answer by Jay
Best bet, not sure about the web, would be to go to the court house and pull up any info on the property. I believe court houses have any information pertaining to the property.
What do you think? Answer below!
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Published in: Victorian Articles and QA
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You are searching for something that is almost impossible to ascertain – unless it is of historic value.
Your best bet is to visit your County Recorder to get the info you want. Because of the age of the house, the info may not be complete.
very ambitous – no where as far as I know. You can ask to see the building permit info stored at the town hall. Beyond that, you would have to go to the local library and research old local news clippings and stuff like that
Tough to find that on the web. Not every house is listed. Go to the tax office and they will have recent transfers of title on the Tax card. Then go to the county property registry and do a title search as far back as you can. Take those owners names to the library and search the newspaper archives.
Talk to the neighbors.
Good Luck
Check the counties central appraisal district. An example would be wwwdallascad.org if the property is in dallas country or http://www.tad.org for tarrant county. If it is a vey small town or location, contact the country records building or county tax office.
Finding the history of a house is a time consuming, but very fun project. As several other people have indicated, you need to start with the county recorders office. You will need to find out the names of all of the previous owners of the property as the first step.
Once you’ve found the owners, then you can start with other resources. Some of them are online, such as genealogy. Others sources are thelocal families that are descendents of the families that owned/rented the house. If your house is a Victorian and then you’re fortunate that the US census records will help you identity family members so you can trace the families through marriages.
Don’t forget to look for telephone directories that should be in your main library. These may be time consuming to look through, but you can often find who lived in the house when it was rented (most Victorians were after World War II as there was a housing shortage).
Next comes newspapers. If you know who lived in the house and from what years, now you can scan the newspapers looking for the real fun – stories about who lived in the house, things that happened there, etc.
Update: I just found a really nice check list from Denver for finding the history of your house. As I said, I’m doing the same thing you are!
http://www.coloradohistory-oahp.org/publications/pubs/1522.pdf