House History Tool – Owners & Occupiers
Hidden House History Owners and Occupiers
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2. Before You Get Started
Before you get started in the archives, though, there are some key questions you need to ask yourself about your house, which will help to determine your overall research plan.
A few key tips to remember are that:
- You should always work backwards in time, from fact to fact, and make sure you know where your house is situated. This may sound obvious, but many of the records youre going to be using are arranged by historic administrative districts ecclesiastical parish, electoral division, manor, poor law union, census district.
One of the best ways to organise your research is to make a copy of a modern large-scale map that shows your house and the surrounding area, and list the relevant districts on it.
If you go to your local studies centre, you can find historic maps created by the Ordnance Survey back to the mid-nineteenth century; even if your house isnt shown, get copies as far back as the maps go and mark the relevant districts on it for reference. Your local studies centre should hold reading material that allows you to get this information.
