Melanie Backe-Hansen from BBC Two’s A House Through Time shares her advice for uncovering the stories hidden within the walls of a property
Researching the history of houses has become increasingly popular in recent years. Partly encouraged by the success of the BBC Two series A House Through Time, for which I was research consultant, more and more people are looking behind the curtains to discover the history of their home, or that of their ancestor. There are so many wonderful stories to discover about a property’s former residents and owners, including their working life and involvement in national events, along with potential skeletons in the closet and links to scandals of the past. I have been researching the social history of houses for almost 18 years, and I am continually captivated by the stories that can be uncovered.
Researching the histories of our houses involves piecing together a number of different sources to build up the story. There are many similarities between family and local history, and some of the important sources that you will rely on will already be familiar (although the information you will be looking for will differ), while others are likely to be completely new to you.
Points To Remember
Before getting started, there are a few key points to remember. First, a house’s number and name, and even that of the road it sits on, do change over time, and as you go farther back into the past you may find that there is no house name or number at all. This means that you end up following the trail of the names of former owners and occupants. Much like you would work back through the generations of a family tree, so too with houses: you work back through the centuries to piece together its story.
Second, it has only been since the 20th century that we have become more of a nation of owner-occupiers. Prior to the First World War, only about 10 per cent of people owned their own home so you will end up on two trails: that of the owners and that of the occupants.
Lastly, the availability of particular sources and the available dates vary significantly from county to county.
In recent years it has become easier to delve into our personal histories using online sources and subscription websites. While these are improving every day, with an increasing number of sources for house history being digitised, there are still many documents that need to be viewed in person at the relevant local archive.
In addition, the subscription sites lean heavily towards searches by an individual’s name (with only a few elements searchable by address), making it ve
