Historical Home Research

 

Record of the Month!

For the month of March, we are featuring our new house history research guide: Introduction to Historical House Research. The guide can be found under the Research Tools page of the Licking County Records & Archives webpage or a paper copy can be accessed in the Records & Archives Center Reference Room.

Introduction to Historical House Research


It is natural to wonder about the history of your home and property regardless of how long you have lived there. Researching when the house was built, how the structures evolved over time, and who previously lived there can be not only interesting, but helpful for the long term maintenance of your home.

However, researching the history of your home can be difficult due to the complex legal situations that can surround real estate, and because there isn’t a clear linear research path to follow. This guide systematically walks through a few of the most common misconceptions related to house research and what the realities are, how to develop research goals that will enhance your ability to conduct house research, a few strategies that can be used to start researching the history of your home, as well as a hefty list of resources and institutions.

While the primary goal of the guide is to provide some practical recommendations and resources for how to get started with researching your home, we also hope that more seasoned home researchers will be able to make good use of the Available Resources section. The Available Resource section includes a wide array of local, state, and national tools that aid researchers in their quest to discover the history of their homes. (Please Note: this guide is not intended to be a definitive manual for conducting house research, nor is it intended to be a guide for researching legal and/or safety issues related to your home and property.) 

Research can lead to all sorts of unexpected places-that’s part of the fun, you don’t know what you’ll find until you start to look! The images above are drawings of homes in Licking County from L. H. Everts’ Combination Atlas Map of Licking County, published 1875.

For more information regarding the Licking County Records & Archives Center, please feel free to contact us by phone at 740-670-5121 or email archives@lcounty.com.

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