Hands up if you’re a local or family historian who’s been captivated by the BBC2 programme ‘A House Through Time?’ Yes as we suspected, a sea of hands are creating many waves and ripples! As the backstories are revealed, we learnt in this third series who lived, loved and died in one property in Bristol. Using an eclectic mix of records and sources, the viewer is guided through an historical timeline of events from when the house was first constructed, through to present day. We also witnessed the impact of national and local events on the people who lived there.

As you start to trace the history of a property and its occupants, we know it can be time-consuming collating the information from a variety of sources. So, if you’ve been inspired to now start your own house history research, then allow Name & Place to keep your work both secure and manageable. As your research grows, our unique software designed as a 3-dimensional layered database, enables you to take slices through your data at any moment in time during the history of the house in order to produce the outcomes you need. Think of a Rubik’s cube which also layers diagonally and it will give you a clue as to the benefits you can achieve. Once your information has been entered, the options as to where you subsequently retrieve, display and share it have few limits.

Sample house deeds

After identifying your chosen place be it a dwelling or building, you can now start to gather your sources, maps and old postcards. Successfully locating the precise house and plot of land on a map can be the first challenge as many of the older properties in a rural environment were not allocated numbers until the twentieth century. Once secured, using the Name & Place database, you can start working through this suggested checklist:

• Add a NEW PLACE and work backwards from what you know. If the deeds are not in your possession then contact the Land Registry to consider your options. https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/land-registry
• Layer on an entry from the 1939 Register for a full household transcript and use the 1945 Farm Survey if relevant to take notes of the rooms and their contents. Don’t forget the garden.
• Previous census imports 1841-1911 may have picked up your place so you can now review the enumerator’s route against a tithe or OS map.
• Check the 1910 Valuation Office Survey for land use, value, ownership and description.
• Electoral Rolls and Poll Books may contain names, addresses and qualifications for voting. Always worth a look.
• Don’t forget Trade Directories can also hold evidence of names and occupations.
• Rate Books were local taxes for the upkeep of local services so use them. You may discover the names of previous owners of a property.
• Add sources such as deeds and wills to document the changes in land ownership.
• Click on MEDIA to download your selected images such as old postcards, present-day views and old photographs.  Once imported you can readily compare, contrast and document any visual changes in both the appearance and structure. This is also where you can add images of tithe, Ordnance Survey and footpath maps.
• Is the property is a listed building? Check https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/ and if so, try and establish why and are the reasons still relevant today.
• People make a house a home so introduce the characters who lived there over time.

Maps, showing your house’s position in a wider context, can be easily added to your research project.

Et voila! A house history timeline at your fingertips.

Family Historians are familiar with squeezing out every possible fact from primary evidence such civil registration certificates and wills. Any extra information gleaned is a bonus and can extend a pedigree by providing, say with a birth certificate, such information as the mother’s maiden surname. Equally, a marriage certificate may identify the name of the father of the bride and groom along with witnesses and of course a death certificate should state not only who registered the death but also the cause. Finally, if you’re fortunate and can locate a will, then sometimes up to three generations can be mentioned as beneficiaries in a will as well as bequests made to favoured servants and friends.

Examination of records for a one-place study are conducted with a slightly different outlook. Whilst scrutinising a community as a whole, people can be discovered where you’d least expect. Always be on the look out to uncover the unexpected.

Instead of searching for the name of a person in the online catalogue of a local archives, diocesan record office or specialist repository, an alternative search should be focussed on the place.

A plethora of records will become apparent which may not have been considered when looking for a person:

• Board of Education returns
• Private lunatic asylums
• Ordnance survey sheets
• Lease and release
• Bargain and sale
• Friendly Society records
• Glebe terriers

… and many more.

Although the emphasis shifts from tracing ancestors to witnessing the development of a community, these records can provide evidence that places an individual in a specific time and a place which may not have been apparent from the census 1841-1911.

The deed in the above photograph records the parties named in the purchase of land for a Methodist chapel in 1803. The signatures of the trustees are recorded at the bottom of the page along with their seals. By the time the trustees were updated, a note explained the current status of the signatories i.e. deceased, resigned and gone to America.

By using Name & Place you can import the document image and record the details of some of the members of the Methodist congregation. You can identify the parties and who were trustees thus narrowing down the date of their death and emigration, building an holistic overview of a small section of the village, land earmarked for building and inhabitants who were nonconformists.

By encompassing all record types in its data repository, with full indexing, Name & Place enables matches to be found in more obscure documents. Using its full search capabilities, you can manually locate based on person or place names but we’re also employing intelligent matching to try to suggest possible connections you may not have noticed across all datasets.