DO YOU KNOW WHO LIVED IN YOUR OLD HOUSE?
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
Do you know the history of YOUR house?
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Most people don’t know that the entire history of their homes can be dug up with a little bit of elbow grease. While Brownstone Detectives provides this service to clients, we are always more than happy to help homeowners to do the digging themselves.
One of the first steps – of many – that we take when researching the history of your old house, is uncovering the chain of title – that list of individuals who bought and sold your property throughout its lifetime.
To discover this list, a trip to the Department of Finance leads us to the old dusty tomes that contain this information, recorded in the old stylistic cursive freehand of the time.
The listings of the home sales of a certain house/address were not simply recorded in order within the book. Each sale that took place in relation to that property was recorded as it occurred. So, for instance, if there were 20 years between sales of your home, those sales would usually be located several pages from each other. So, finding the chain of title usually takes a bit of digging.
Once you have determined the property conveyances that have taken place, you record the information for each sale and then you head to the microfilm reels section of the Department of Finance that show the old actual deeds of sale (if they can be found).
If you are fortunate, you will find a lot of good names to start your research so that you can determine just what happened at your house over the past 120 years! Then the REAL digging can begin!
If you have any questions about researching your New York City home, feel free to contact us.
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Brownstone Detectives is an historic property research agency. Our mission is to document and save the histories of our clients’ homes. From our research, we produce our celebrated House History Books and House History Reports. Contact us today to begin discovering the history of your home.
[…] visit to the Department of Finance to determine the chain of title – a process that we highlighted in a previous blog post, which certainly would have had Morse’s name if he had been the owner of the building – an […]