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.

The definition of a boundary is important as it sets the compass for the way forward. To know the edges of your chosen place will help you locate the county records office, local archives, diocesan or specialist archives where all the lovely records are deposited. Also it helps resist the temptation to move beyond the set boundary and prevent the study getting out of hand. Straying beyond a defined boundary is another study.

A street, hamlet, village or small town may be a choice. In parish registers of marriage, it is common to see ‘o.t.p.’ which stands for ‘of this parish’. In some cases, studies are formed from the parish boundary. By way of example, the parish of Rillington (St. Andrew) is within the union of Malton and the wapentake of Buckrose in the East Riding of Yorkshire and the parish contains the township of Rillington and the chapelry of Scampston. Following reorganisation of Local Authority boundaries in 1974, Rillington is now in North Yorkshire. Historical records for a chosen place may be lodged in different local archives over time due to boundary changes, sometimes in a different county.

There are many websites to help you define your boundary such as genuki.org and familysearch.org.

There are no rules regarding setting up and managing a One-Place Study, as every study is as individual as its topography and inhabitants.

Walk the boundary of your chosen area and the lanes just like ancestors did in the ancient custom of ‘beating the bounds’. Notice the buildings, fields, rivers and public footpaths which make a study unique and creates a distinction and enhancement to the traditional records of family history.

Get your boots on and define your boundary.

The parish map for the East Riding of Yorkshire is reproduced with permission of the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies in Canterbury. The original map may be found in the Phillimore Atlas & Index of Parish Registers 3rd Edition, by Cecil R. Humphrey-Smith.