How to Find the History of Your House

Let's go back. Okay, I'm gonna go back music. Columbus was beaten by a good five years by the Norse who found who were in Newfoundland. That's not what we were taught in history. And definitely there's no Norse day. No, No, that'd be awesome. No leaf ericson Day. I don't think there is not in the US. So there you have it, and there is a leaf eric today and we both have a little egg on our faces because we didn't

know that, and it is today, and it's very ironic. Yeah, But people that wrote in said, I'm assuming it was a joke that you were I know, that's how we get away with or I'm going to write the mall back and say you got it, got the joke. Yeah, there was actually one guy, if you love delicious Irony, who said he was making his leaf ericson day Viking hat while he was listening to that podcast. Yea, where the Clothes the first American? So yeah, as you said,

happy leaf ericcs and day to utes. So now for your intro, which I'm sure you had planned before I eviscerated you know you pretty much you eviscerated me. Really, maybe it's okay? Well, Chuck, how old your house? Man? My house was built in nineteen thirty two, I think thirty two. Very nice old house. Yeah, the one I live in from nineteen twenty. I believe you always got to show me up. I know. I'm sorry, buddy, Okay, it wasn't intentional, you own I rant. How about that?

All right? Well that's the ultimate show up exact. Thank you for that, Chuck Um. And I've often wondered, like, what has gone on with this house? There's this mysterious um tarp that goes across the entire property. A tarp like a plastic tarp. It's not plastic, it's woven. It looks like you know what they use for silt fence. It's just like that, except it's not standing up, and it's clearly it was purposefully laid down. And my house is on a hill, so I've often wondered like, did

they build this over an old dump? But did they even have dumps like that? In this is under your found the foundation of your house. It doesn't go into the foundation, but it goes all throughout the yard. And like I said, it's on a hill, so it could be just to prevent erosion or something like I'm too lazy to ask the landlord what the deal is because they won't have erosion in n No, they didn't. That

was that started in the great Erosion Fire of Yeah. Um, someone will believe that, probably Happy leaf erricks in day Chuck YouTube. But my point is is I have no idea what's going on with my house or what went in went on in my house. I know it got a roof like a couple of months ago, and that's all I know about the house. So the history of your home is I got a roof a couple of months ago, exactly as far as I can tell. But I know some really interesting stuff has gone on there.

Something can't stand for what almost ninety years um and not have something interesting happening. Agreeing it, you would, you would, hope, right. And I imagine the same is true for your house, like I'm sure there's been squatting that had happened there before. Um, And I know somebody who could go talk to about this, and that somebody is your wife. Yes, she wrote this article. I apologize for that intro. That's all right. Emily wrote

this article. And she's a freelance writer for how Stuff Works, proving it's who you know, Josh agreed in order to get jobs to some extent, Yes, especially if who you know is hands down the finest writer at how stuff Works dot and also has the finest hair. She knows Robert Lamb. So, Chuck, let's talk about this. Why did I just mention your wife, baket Chuck, I'm trying to keep it on you. I thought we just said because

she wrote this article. Okay, I wasn't listening how to find the history of your house on house to porks dot com? Would you come up with? Well? Should I just get Emily in here? Yeah? We probably should actually teach you how to make soap and how to find the history of your house all at once. Uh. Well, you know, there are certain steps you can take, and we're going to go through those right now, starting with talk to your neighbors. This new neighborhood, the neighbors, I

don't know anybody. I don't talk to anybody, you mean, I just moved in a couple of months ago. But a classic neighborhood though that you live in it is very much so. And I assume that there the neighborhood would be much more community oriented. Everybody's kind of doing their own thing, you know, everybody like kind of says

hi when you're passing by. But it's also a thoroughfare um for people to get from one place another, So I think that kind of lends this trans the nature to it to get people speeding through your neighborhood right exactly, and everybody's a stranger because of that. Um At the last neighborhood was it was off of a major thoroughfare and it was kind of isolated and everybody knew each other.

It was. It was really cool. It reminds me of a neighborhood that you'd live in as a kid um because you'd go out and play except playing involved like heavy drinking that kind of thing. But like, you had friends in the neighborhood, right, it was cool like that. Um. But there were some neighbors that had lived there since the seventies that I knew of, um and had spoken to. They weren't old timers, but they were I guess they had grown up there a little bit. They were like, yeah,

this place used to be a hotbed for meth. There's like a I found out that there had been a thriving meth lab just a couple of doors down from my house, in my old house. Yeah, the one in East Atlanta. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So you can learn some interesting stuff about your neighborhood just by talking to your neighbors exactly. So that's step one. Yeah, that's the easiest way to kind of get you get the ball rolling. Right.

Let's say your neighbors, Um, if you try to go up to their house and and even if you're greasing their palms with some cookies, they're they're like, get off my property. Where do you go from there? Chuck? Well, if you want to start your investigation in earnest with records, you should go find the records, which is at the

County Recorder's Office. And Emily makes a good point. She's she says that although there's a lot of people who are into digging up the history of their home, I gat the impression this is a lot like genealogy to some people, UM, that there's not that many resources for old timey information online. Now you can't find, um, a lot of these court records. You know, they're housed on paper in you know, the depths of city hall usually, and no one has said, hey, maybe we should take

the time to scan these and put them online. Right, So what are we going to find at the County Recorder's office. Well, what you want to find is the deed history of your house. Okay, you're going to find a guy in birkenstocks stocks like playing a recorder. You'll probably find that. Sure, you might smell some incense. And you want to get the deeds and trace back the deeds to the original owner. If that's what your ultimate goal is, to find out who originally built our own

your home. You're also going to find on file. Um, and what you would take I guess is your plot number or your address, which it can change, which is why it's a good idea. To know your plot number. That doesn't change, right, I would say, Actually, if you have a house that's sent years old, chances are your address did change over the years, especially if they doled it out kind of haphazardly out the h the when

somebody builds a new house or something like that. Nobody likes to be you know, seven thirty five and a half. I was a quarter in the l A. My apartment was. Yeah, it was seven something in a quarter. Because I was in a four plex apartment building. I thought below half they just started assigning letters. Do this is l A because I think they have eights and sixteen people, just like Crampton and Linen closets. Right. Another thing you can look for, Josh, is have you ever heard of a

Sandborn map? I hadn't until I read this, and I went and did a little research on Sandborn, and god, they were interesting. The Sandborn map company was out of Michigan, I believe, and they serviced and not in any kind of dirty way. The fire insurance industry. Apparently insurance maps were big as a whole back then. Yeah, if you were, you know, located in Delaware, if your insurance company was located in Delaware, and you had somebody in Taos, New

Mexico who wanted fire insurance from you. Um, what are you gonna do? Send some guy out to look at every single one? Now, your contract with the Sandborn Map Company to make maps of twelve thousand cities and towns around the United States and from eighteen sixty seven and nineteen seventies and drawn aerial maps. And these things were detailed, man, I mean like they they look like um land use

maps of today. Um Like there's not a little tiles drawn in or bricks or anything like that, but I mean like they're detailed, Like here's the closest fire hydrant. Here's how many sprinklers this house has. Here's where the windows are. Here's what the building nearby is used for. I was looking at one. I can't remember what town it was, but there was like the foundry or the old foundry, and it said like vacant. And then there's

the other foundry nearby, and here's these houses. Is the drawing of a city, And they did it all over the place. And again they did it too for the fire insurance industry. But these towns also got copies of these maps, and a lot of them have them on file because it was for the fire insurance. Was why you get detailed like where the windows and doors were. And I think it also says what materials your house was made up. Right. They also did them in Mexico

and Canada. They also did um maps on sugar refinery in places like Cuba and whiskey distilleries throughout the country. Um, because those things tend to explode. And uh yeah, they the Sandborn company basically made it so that you can find what your house looked like any any time during this period or where what else is around. It's really cool because they also included street names and addresses. So if you're if your city has a Sandborn map, you

are in luck. Yes, agreed. Um. The other thing you can do is well, if you if you are able to trace the deed back to the original owner, you can go to the internet. Then if you've got a name, it's always worth a try. Oh, definitely, because you never know if someone back then it was noteworthy enough to be included somewhere in the historical records on the net. Right you and you you if you can't get the deed, but you can if you have other records like surveys,

tax assessors, census um records. Uh, they'll have the name and ages and occupations of everybody in the house occupation. That's kind cool, it is very cool. Um, well we'd be what would we be back then? Yeah? Oh I was a cobbler for sure, were you? Yeah? Yeah, Cooper? Really wow? I underestimated you, Jerry, what about you? She has no idea? And also you can find the occupations of the people who own the house through a reverse

telephone book. Yes, the polk the polk reverse telephone directory. Yeah, did you know about these? Had no idea that. It's just such a smart thing, and it's so it sounds so old timey reverse telephone directory. Yeah. And that means you can search by the address. If you don't have the name, right, you search by address and then it takes you over the name and that will be at your library. So now we've moved on from the County Cord. I'm sorry I forgot to tell everybody we're at the library.

Were the library here? That's why it's so quiet. Yeah, So that's where you can find the polk directory, and that's where you can find the occupation, which I think is probably one of the more interesting things. You can't in the census records too, well, what if you can't find it? All? Right, So now you've got we're also we're in the library still so U sorry. Now now you've got the name or one of the names of one of the homeowners who lived in the house before you.

Now it can get interested, right because I suggested the internet. If the internet uh comes up empty, which it likely will not likely, but it may, am I that means you need to look at something called microfiche. Yes, and if you're under oh i'd say probably thirty years old, you probably have no idea what microfiche is. So microfiche is, um, it's micro film. I don't know why they call it micro fisi instead of micro film. Someone will know and

we'll find out. Yes, Um, basically, it's a ton of information on a very tiny strip and you use a little magnifying glass. Actually it's not a little magnifying glass, is kind of big machine. Right. You can spin through. You got this cool little dial old timing, and you can spin through and find um newspaper clippings used to use it. I'm sure too, right, And yeah, I was never a microfiche, whiz, but I have used it. It's

pretty fun, but you have to cross references. Like you you look for what you're looking for, and then you go through like a decade of newspapers on one film, and you can find press clippings about whoever's owned your house. You might find that there was a murder there, or that, um, there were several murders there. Because frankly, Chuck, isn't that what everybody is doing? A house history is ultimately looking for. You know, it's funny, I should show you my note

right here. The real reason is to find out if anyone's been murdered there exactly. That's the number one reason I would say anyone would look at their house history. I would say, let's cut to the chase. But man, it took us a long time to get to the ultimate point. I know. Yeah. Um. I do have one more point about microfiche though, because a lot of people think they're like Google Masters and research on Google line. I'm so good at it. You don't know research, dude,

until you get on microfiche. That's where it's really hours and hours in the library, and it'll seriously test your investigative skills. Yeah, these people who like write a book based on a year of experience that they took a year out of life to go do something and then they wrote a book about it. Those people don't know writing a book. Talk to like Norman Mailer, Go talk

to like um Robert Woodward. Go talk to these people who actually hand to go do research on micro feache and didn't just blog about something they were doing for a year. It's not writing a book. That's called lucking out, it's called dropping out. Wow, so chuck microfiche. Are we done with that part? Uh? Yeah, I think so. Um. The library is also we're going to find the census records so that you were talking about. Wait, I thought that be at the at the city hall. It could

be in both. Actually, if you strike out at the city hall, you can look at the library at the hall at the city Hall. And the other thing you can look at the library is look up some books. There may be a book called the history of East Lake in Atlanta, and start thumbing through it, and there may be a picture of your house, and you know, the original mayor of Eastlake lived there. And when you find that out, try to contain yourself. Remember you're in

a library, don't shout funny. You should bring up east like Chuck, because number one, that's where you live. Indeed, and number two, Emily wrote about Eastlake. She did some research on Eastlake, right yeah, I think she in order to write the article, she just did a little digging around about her own hood to uh kind of live the experience maybe, and she found out some pretty cool stuff. Actually,

I had no idea she did. Eastlake is probably best known now as the home of the Eastlake Country Club Old country Club, host of the recent PGA tournament there for they've been hosting it for a while, right, yeah, they usually have one tournament there every year, but now I think they finished the season there every year. So Tiger Woods was just in town. Hun, he was right across the street from me. He's kind of foul mouth, he does, actually, And I was able to make a

couple of hundred bucks parking cars in my yard. That's right. Last year, Chuck um it up a bloody Mary stand in his front yard and I was able to sell one before the cops came and h took the joint down. Chuck. Chuck Bryant is what we call a hustler. I thought that was a sterling idea. It was a great idea. You know, you didn't have a liquor license. Yeah, that was the only rub there. Soeeah, I was shut down

to it. Sweet. So East Like, as it turns out, back in the day, the turn of the century, it was a farm five miles outside of the downtown center of Atlanta. This was most of America at the turn of the last century. Absolutely, we should say the last century. Uh. And it had two creeks and a five spring watershed. And the owner of a streetcar company in Atlanta bought this farm. He damned it up and created a lake and like a beach community around this lake, and the

old built hotels. And it was actually one of the first quote unquote suburbs of Atlanta, which is funny because it's the suburbs in Atlanta. Now, are you know, forty miles away. Yeah, if you're a fan of urban sprawl, you're gonna love Atlanta. But East Like is Atlanta now, it's not considered by any stretch of them very much. Five miles from downtown is that it's just a neighborhood,

although I suspect with traffic the way it is. It takes as long to get downtown from East Lake these days as it did in Now you kidding me, No, I just shoot down to cab Avenue turns into Marriad and you're there. Uh so the horse and buggy that was quicker, you think, Uh yeah, Okay, Now you have hopefully found out the owner of your house, the original owner.

You've gotten some information, and you may have gotten some information on the building of your house because you said the reason you would really want to find out to see if anyone was killed there. There are other reasons to like if like you were talking about, architecturally, there's all kinds of architectural oddities. Many times in these old houses don't make any sense unless you find out the

history of the home. Yeah, Emily says, um that you might find out that your kitchen is where you're living room you should be, which explains some of the odd angles as you which you're talking about your house. Actually, we don't really have anything that odd, except for the flooding issue in the basement, which I can't figure out.

But like something more interesting. Let's say you have a window in your uh this little tiny closet and you think, why would there ever be a silly little window there? And then you find out that it was a back room distillery during prohibition or something. You never know. The house I grew up in as a child in Talita had a secret passageway, no way, I kid you not, in a in the back of a linen closet which

the walls in the back were painted black. Um. If you pushed on the back wall, you went through a little door and you crawled through when you were on the steps going down to the basement on the other side of the house. So how old was the house? Do you know? I don't actually like seventies ranch, I don't think so. No, it's definitely, uh fifties at least. Yeah, but it was fun to play. How you can go

seeking there? Well, if you, I bet, if you have some architectural audity in your home and you you know you're into this kind of thing, would be looking into for sure. Definitely. Um. Also, if you are a renovator and you've been tasked with restoring a house, I mean, how are you how else you going to find out? Yeah? If you're really big into conservation and you have a say, an old Victorian home and you really want to bring it back to its former glory. You should, you know,

respect the original plans of the house. Definitely, and you can also charge an arm and a leg if you do all this extra research to renovate to the original state. Absolutely, and chuck um. One last thing I wanted to mention um ghosts. Sure, I didn't know this. In California and Hawaii, you are required to disclose any ghostly activity in a house when you're selling it. Yeah, I didn't know that.

I didn't either. But if you suspect that there's ghostly activity in your house, and you don't live in any of these states, you might go back and find out that there was that murder that you've been looking for. Yeah, and how cool is that? What do you want to part or that? Yeah, if you found out someone is murdered in your house, wouldn't that be cool? That wouldn't scare me. I think it was neat unless obviously it

turned into like an amiable horror type of scene. But well, exactly, that's a good reason, I would say, if you have blood coming out of your wallpaper, that's a good reason to research the history. And the other The other final reason I think is if, um, you might find out that someone famous used to own it, or someone famous might have stayed there, and you could potentially get it listed as a historical site and save that house forever. Yeah. I'll bet your house ends up on the register in

fifty years. Okay, but I'm gonna find out the history of it though, all right, are you really? Yeah, I'm gonna look into it when happens. You're not just saying that? Do? I usually not follow through my podcast promises. Well, if you have a really interesting history for your house and you want a little more detail, you can read Emily's article, Um, how to find the history of your home. You can type that in the handy search part works dot com go find a Sandborn map just to look at him. Yeah,

they are pretty interesting. You can find them online. Um, in some cases not all um. And since I said handy search bar, that means, of course that it's time for a listener maid listener mail Josh. Before we do that, I just wanted to say that give a special thank you to the boys and the Henry Clay people. Oh yeah,

I'm I'm holding their couzy right now right. Uh. If you remember a few weeks ago, we mentioned that some band in southern California rote us and they were fans of the show, and I like the CD, and I tried to get everyone together to go to the performance, which was a few nights ago, and I was the only one able to make it, unfortunately. So I met the boys in the band. I met Joey and Andy, the two brothers, and I met the drummer. I believe his name was Mike, and that was the only other

guy I met. Hung out, had some beers. They're super cool kids, very very talented. And remember we said that we were going to be at that show, and we actually had two fans come out seeking us out. And you introduced your friend justin to them as me as Josh. I thought it was kind of funny. This lady comes up in the lobby after the show and I'm hanging out with the band, and I think your name was Jeannie and Jeannie. If I got that wrong, I apologize.

I had a few beers at that point, and Jeanne and her husband came up and introduced themselves and they were super nice and very complimentary, and they came to the show on our recommendation and rate Josh and Chuck Sider. So in the city of Atlanta. We had two people interested in coming to see us. It's awesome, which is pretty cool. Well, that's not bad. It's like the people in Atlanta listening to us, and it was cool. I talked you know, you know, me and my band stuff.

I just peppered them with questions about being in a band. I feel, I know we hit it off. I feel like an honorary Henry Clay person. And you may meet him in December if you come to l A with me. I'm not you're not gonna be able to come up. So you got any letters? Yeah, I got a letter. Um, this is from Emily, and we're gonna see her last name because it's a special thing. Emily friedened All wrote us, I've been a big fan of the podcast since I

discovered them in July. I was working at temp job, filing and making binders for eight hours at a time in a back room of a lighting company. Not fun. Um. The podcast helper get through all this. We get a lot of these emails of people born jobs. And she thanks us for that, and then she says, in fact, it got me so excited about how stuff works and the topics you covered. I decided it would be kind of a dream gig to be able to write some of the articles that you covered. So I went online

submitted materials to be a freelance writer. And I just found out a few hours ago that I was accepted. She's a colleague and only is now a co worker, and she says she can't wait to start rolling on a project. And have you guys to thank for inspiration and for helping me put myself out there. And I emailed her a few times and told her congratulations, welcome aboard, and you know, we'll try and pick out one of

our articles the podcast. That's awesome. Congratulations Only So she's she's a co worker officially, Sweet Chuck, is that the only letter you got? Okay, Um, let's plug Kiva. Yeah, go ahead. So ok had the bright idea of setting up a Kiva dot org. Stuff you should know team uh And if you're not familiar with Kiva, it is

a micro lending website. It's a nonprofit UH, meaning you don't get any return on investment, but you do get your investment back if you choose and loans as small as twenty five dollars go to fund bigger loans for entrepreneurs in um developing countries, and we talked about it on the micro Lending uh podcast. If you want to familiarize yourself with that, you can go listen to that when it was pretty good. So you can go to www.

Dot Kiva dot org, slash teams, slash stuff you should know, and you'll come to the Stuff you Should Known Nation's team page. You can donate whatever you want as little as twenty five bucks. And like I said, don't forget you this, this is repaid. The loan is repaid. Uh. They also have gift certificates on Kiva dot org and it's a really good cost. And um, we've already got seven fifty bucks done age I and what like twenty

team members huh. And we're stoked and we want to call out again the lousy Colbert Report and to see that learning email we got from somebody. Yeah, yeah, it was like don't do you know what happens when you call out student Colbert? Yes, you get his attention, which is exactly what we're trying to do. So we're calling we're calling them Outain is lousy fans who are cheap

and we want to Bury. We're the ones that crossover between share of course, so we we want to beat them and get their attention and challenge into a kiva off. So if you have an interesting story about your house, if there's a murder there chucking, I definitely want to hear about it. Have any suggestions about the key the team, let us know or if he's wanted say high, unicorns, tornadoes, torpedoes, any of that stuff. Send in an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on

this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com. Want more house stuff Works, check out our blogs on the House of works dot com home page. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you