My grandparents’ house is perched on the side of a steep hill, and standing in the middle of the street you can just about see the old steam railway weaving through the valley below. The stone façade of their Victorian terraced cottage is black from the smoke that used to hang over the former mining village. It’s tiny inside, a typical two-up two-down, and venturing into the outdoor loo (unusually still serving its original purpose!) is like stepping back in time. It’s intriguing to think how many families have called this place home over the decades.

Unraveling the history of a house, whether it’s a humble cottage or plush mansion, has been made much easier recently with the digitisation of numerous records, not least the national collection of 1830s–1850s tithe maps and apportionment books and the Valuation Office maps and field books of c1910–1915 at TheGenealogist.co.uk, are crucial to researching a house history accurately, because very often house numbers and sometimes even street names have changed. Pinpointing the property on the tithe and Valuation Office maps provides a plot number that corresponds with associated books containing the names of those who owned and were living in the house at that time. Then you’re off and away, as you can start to search for these people in other records.

House history research is much like building a family tree – it’s best to work your way back through time, starting with the most recent piece of information you know, and if you can find more than one document to corroborate each fact then all the better. The Valuation Office maps and field books are fairly close in date to the 1911 census, so once the correct address and chief occupant’s name have been identified in the field book you can find out more about the household in the census. Field books often give a detailed written description of the building and its state of repair, and may provide the date that the house was last sold and the amount of rent being paid. These records have a detailed research guide at Thhe National Archives .

TheGenealogist.co.uk allows you to quickly search all the censuses by address (simply select ‘An Address’ rather than ‘A Person’ on the Master Search page). Handily the 1911 census tells us how many rooms the property had, so you can assess whether major alterations have taken place in the interim. The 1881–1901 censuses also ask for the number of rooms that were occupied if less than five, confirming that it was common for families of six to be crammed into the tiny houses on my grandparents’ street.

Lives and deaths
Birth and death certificates reveal some of the joys and sorrows that have been experienced inside our homes. Sanitary conditions for many people were generally poor prior to the improvement of mains sewerage systems in the late Victorian period, and it’s an eye opener investigating some of the causes of deaths in the home. The Illustrated London News tracked outbreaks of cholera epidemics throughout the mid-19th century when people were at risk from contaminated water supplies, though children were frequently the victims of burns from open fires and candles.

Most families could not afford to buy a property, and so the occupancy of your house might have changed frequently with short-term tenants coming and going. The changes between census returns can be tracked with the help of street directories, electoral registers and poll books. A good range of these records is available at TheGenealogist.co.uk. They were increasingly arranged by address towards the early 20th century as more people were enfranchised, and directories describe the chief resident’s occupation if they ran a business from home. Poll books were published showing which candidate a householder had voted for until the secret ballot was introduced in 1872, so you can get a flavour of their political persuasions. Many of these people could also appear in the 1873 survey of landowners who held more than one acre, since property ownership was still one of the qualifications for the vote at this time. This national survey can also be searched at TheGenealogist.co.uk – see pages 24-25 of this issue for more details.

Records are sparser prior to the 19th century, but if your house formed part of a manorial estate then you are in luck. Manorial documents often survive in abundance, and include rental rolls, accounts of repairs, leases and sales particulars from when estate properties were sold off. The occupants of former copyhold land (held by feudal tenure up to the 19th century) were recorded in manorial court records every time the property changed hands, often passing through successive generations of the same family.

The Manorial Documents Register at The National Archives is a good starting place to locate archival holdings, but TheGenealogist.co.uk also has a handy digital selection of court roll transcripts with translations from the Latin. Using these it’s possible to trace the occupancy of manorial property right back through the centuries. For example the Tooting Bec(k) court roll of 1421 records that William Lentok, a saddler, “surrendered into the lord’s hands a tenement with a garden and 17 acres of ‘native’ land in Totynge, formerly belonging to William Bryght, for the use of William Seyntpaulle and Alice Mordone… and they shall preserve the said tenement without neglect and injury”. We therefore have three generations of occupants mentioned in one entry.

Wills are another informative source, sometimes describing the rooms and material belongings stored in a house and often stating who was to inherit the property or how it was to be disposed of. TheGenealogist.co.uk has a large collection of wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury from 1858 back to the 14th century, alongside calendars of wills proved in other ecclesiastical courts across England. Inventories itemising the deceased’s possessions room-by-room are also useful for interpreting how each room was once used, and many survive in local archives.

A range of other records can be located in the archives, where you may find deeds (though these are a rare survival), and search for occupants using rate books from around the 17th century to the 20th century, fire insurance records and taxation lists from the land tax (1692–1963), hearth tax (1662–1669) and window tax (1697–1851). Local archives hold surprisingly rich collections of pictures and paintings of buildings and street views, and if your property is situated in the centre of a town or village you may find it appears in TheGenealogist’s Image Archive.

In the print edition
Read more about tithe records, and Laura’s research into Daniel Craig’s roots in Issue 4 of Discover Your Ancestors, out now in newsagents around the world or available online at discoveryourancestors.co.uk .