Before you moved in
Meticulous research can unveil the history of your home
Old homes have charm. Many feature craftsmanship that would be beyond most budgets to reproduce today. They also have a history. Previous occupants who walked the same halls, slept in the same bedrooms, dined with family at holidays. People who sat in its rooms and laughed or cried as life took them on its twists and turns. Original owners who met with an architect and made plans. Curiosity about that history is natural for many homeowners. But according to local experts, researching the history of your home can be a daunting experience, taking time and effort. And even if you search all the right avenues, you still might not find the information you were hoping to. But when you do succeed, the experience can be so rewarding.
“I think that knowing who has come before you (in a home) makes people feel like it cements them in that narrative. … They find their place in history,” said Julia Griffith, tour and membership coordinator at Historic Milwaukee Inc.
Many records online
Griffith, who studied art history and interior architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and who earned a master’s degree in historic preservation from the University of Pennsylvania, said she believes more people are doing research on their homes these days, primarily because technology lets them easily do some of the research from their homes, as records have been digitized.
“There is a real curiosity as to who has lived where you live, and people are trying to figure out why their house was built in a certain way,” she said. “A lot of time people want to know this history when they are trying to renovate or restore their houses and they run into problems.”
Griffith, who calls this process “walking backwards through time” because you have to start with the most recent paperwork, said this research also can give homeowners information on their neighborhoods.
“It gives people a deeper appreciation of their neighborhoods and what makes them unique,” she said.
Nancy Torphy, a retired librarian who teaches classes for Historic Milwaukee on how to research the history of a home, said the research isn’t hard to do, but that it can be tedious and time-consuming.
“You are not going to find one or two pieces of paper you can photocopy that will tell you everything about your home,” she said. “That’s not going to happen. And the answers you do get are not always simple.
“There are people who dig and dig and dig and sometimes come out with a lot of information,” she said. “Not everyone loves the research, but there is almost always basic information you can find.”
Long days
Sorting through building permits, tax records and deeds alone can take days, said Griffith.
“You will need solid four- to five-hour days to go through it all,” she said. “Sometimes information is on microfilm, or there is a database specific to deeds. A lot of it is getting the hang of how you search for the information and how they store it.
“Sometimes you have to make an appointment. You can’t do it in two-hour chunks of time if you want to make the best use of your time and be the most effective,” she added.
Torphy said that in the city of Milwaukee, the process should begin at the Milwaukee Development Center, where permits are filed. Homeowners not in Milwaukee would follow the same process in their own city or village halls.
“You give them the address of the property,” she said. “They will give you sheets of microfiche and you can go through them and you can find the original permit to build, that might include the name of the builder, and in some cases the name of the architect.
“You could see a building date and you could also learn if your house ever had another address. You could also see how much the house cost, get information about the building materials that were used, and see if there were other permits issued over time” — for example, for an addition that might have been built, modifications that were made, or if the building had any problems.
“You could find out that it was turned into a nursing home, or maybe a rooming house. These permits give you a lot of information,” she said.
Get that ‘legal description’
Torphy said the next important step is to get what is called the “legal description” of your property. “In Milwaukee you can go to the city website ( Milwaukee.gov),
then go to property records. You will find basic information about the house, but within the record there will be the legal description, which gives detailed information about the location of the house.
“That’s an important piece of information, because if you want to find out deed information when you go to the courthouse, you’ll need that,” she said.
Armed with a legal description, Torphy said, you’re ready to begin.
“I find it helpful to go to the Milwaukee Public Library to the humanities room on the second floor. There you can find city directories and all kinds of information about the city.
“If you learned the name of the person who built the house, or people who lived in it, you might also find information on them. You can spend hours going through city directories alone,” she said.
At this point you can also begin to look at your neighborhood.
“You can go into the art and music room at the public library and give them the address and see if they have a house history file. They also have Wisconsin architectural archives, which in many cases have blueprints of some houses. They are mostly prominent houses or houses built by well-known architects. But you never know what houses will be there,” she said.
Torphy added that a sticking point for those living in Milwaukee is that some areas around the original city were unincorporated years ago.
“The Town of Grandville, the Town of Milwaukee, the Town of Wauwatosa, the Town of Lake and others were unincorporated, so that can be a problem,” she said. “You are looking for building permits for homes
in an area that didn’t have a governmental body that was issuing building permits. Even though these areas were in what we consider the heart of the city now, they weren’t then.”
Persistence pays off
But don’t give up when you run into such obstacles, said Griffith.
“When you hit a wall, ask someone in the office for information so you can move on,” she said. But in some cases, especially when an area was unincorporated, there may not be a record to go back to.
Griffith added that different computer systems or filing systems are found in different areas of the city and that some even have multiple systems; that makes searching even harder.
“It’s always the same information, it just may come at you in a different way,” she said.
The age of a home factors in, too. “Usually, the older the home, the harder it is to get information,” she said. “With city records, it all depends on who the person recording the information was, how diligent they were, what was submitted, and what they saved.
“I’ve seen older ones that are kind of a cake walk, and newer ones that are harder. It all depends on who files it, what work was done, and if the property hasn’t changed hands very much. If one family owned the house forever, it can often be easy to get information,” she said.
Both Griffith and Torphy said that when doing research, asking previous owners and those who live in the area about your home is another good way to get information. But here Torphy cautioned that you shouldn’t believe every story you hear.
“Every house has a story, but those stories aren’t always true,” she said. “Be willing to keep looking into it to find out the truth. Some people have wrong information.”