It’s Easy to Learn More about Your Own House

Your local historical society or city real estate records can help you discover the history of your house, its past owners, year of construction, and sometimes even the original blueprints, early photographs and, if very old, the size of the original piece of property divided into residential lots. Bottle diggers hope to learn the location of any outhouses or extra buildings. Gardeners like to see the outline of original gardens and want to identify early trees and bushes–many want to restore the original look of the house. We learned that a very large tree on the front lawn of my childhood home was planted by the Shaker community that owned a farm there in the 1800s.