Stuff You Should Know - How to Find the History of Your House

Episode Date: October 13, 2009

Ever wondered about the history of your house? In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck give listeners some pointers on determining the history of a house. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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See terms and learn more at discover.com slash online privacy protection. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. From HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.

There's Chuck Charles W. Bryant. Happy Leaf Ericson Day. Happy Leaf Ericson Day to you too, Chuck. And that is today is Leaf Ericson Day. And if you remember, Josh, in our recent podcast on the first Americans, you made a little joke. Do you want to hear it? Let's go back.

Columbus was beaten by a good 500 years by the Norse who were in Newfoundland. That's not what we were taught in history. Definitely not. There's no Norse Day. No. That'd be awesome actually. No Leaf Ericson Day.

I don't think there is. Not here. So there you have it. And there is Leaf Ericson Day. Yeah. And we both have a little egg on our faces because we didn't know that. And it is today. And it's very ironic.

Yeah. But people that wrote in said, I'm assuming it was a joke that you were saying. I know. That's how we get away with the most of the errors. I'm going to write them all back and say, You got it. You got the joke.

Yeah. There was actually one guy, if you love delicious irony, who said he was making his Leaf Ericson Day Viking hat while he was listening to that podcast. Yeah. Pretty cool. Where the clove is the first American. So yeah.

As you said, happy Leaf Ericson Day to you, Chuck. So now for your intro, which I'm sure you had planned before I eviscerated you. Nope. You pretty much, you eviscerated me, didn't you? Really? Maybe. Okay.

Well, Chuck, how old's your house, man? My house was built in 1932, I think. 1931 or 1932. Very nice. Old house. Yeah. It was from 1920, I believe. Yeah.

It's got to show me up. I know. I'm sorry, buddy. Okay. It wasn't intentional. You own. I rent. How about that?

All right. Well, that's the ultimate show up. Exactly. Thank you for that, Chuck. Sure. And I've often wondered like what has gone on with this house. There's this mysterious tarp that goes across the entire property.

A tarp? Like a plastic tarp? It's not plastic. It's woven. It looks like, you know what they use for silt fence? Uh-huh. Just like that, except it's not standing up and it's clearly it was purposefully laid down.

And my house is on a hill, so I've often wondered like did they build this over an old dump? But did they even have dumps like that in 1920? This is under the foundation of your house? It doesn't go into the foundation, but it goes all throughout the yard. And like I said, it's on a hill, so it could be just to prevent erosion or something like that.

That's probably what it is. I'm too lazy to ask the landlord what the deal is. Did they have erosion in 1923? No, they didn't. That started in the great erosion fire of 1989. Gotcha. Yeah. Someone will believe that.

Probably. Happy Leaf Ericson Day, Chuck. You too. But my point is, is I have no idea what's going on with my house or what went in, went on in my house. Me either. I know it got a roof like a couple months ago and that's all I know about the house.

So the history of your home is I got a roof a couple months ago. Exactly, as far as I can tell. But I know some really interesting stuff has gone on there. Something can't stand for what? Almost 90 years and not have something interesting happening. Agree in it. You would hope.

Right. And I imagine the same is true for your house. Yeah. I'm sure there's been squatting that had happened there before. Perhaps. And I know somebody who could go talk to you about this and that somebody is your wife. Yes.

She wrote this article. They were basing this on. I apologize for that intro. That's all right. Emily wrote this article and she's a freelance writer for How Stuff Works proving it's who you know, Josh. Agreed. In order to get jobs.

To some extent, yes, especially if who you know is hands down the finest writer at HowStuffWorks.com and also has the finest hair. She knows Robert Lam. So Chuck, let's talk about this. Why did I just mention your wife? Take it, Chuck. I'm trying to keep it on you.

I thought we just said because she wrote this article. Oh, okay. I wasn't listening. I was listening to your house. Gotcha. On HowStuffWorks.com. What did you come up with? Well, should I just get Emily in here?

Yeah, we probably should actually teach you how to make soap and how to find the history of your house all at once. Well, you know, there are certain steps you can take and we're going to go through those right now. Starting with talk to your neighbors. This new neighborhood, the neighbors, I don't know anybody. I don't talk to anybody. You mean I just moved in a couple months ago, but a classic

neighborhood though that you live in. It is very much so and I assume that the neighborhood would be much more community-oriented. Everybody's kind of doing their own thing. Everybody kind of says hi when you're passing by, but it's also a thoroughfare for people to get from one place to another. So I think that kind of lends this transient nature to it. Right, to get people speeding through your neighborhood.

Right, exactly. And everybody's a stranger because of that. At the last neighborhood, it was off of a major thoroughfare and it kind of isolated and everybody knew each other. It was really cool. It reminded me of a neighborhood that you'd live in as a kid because you'd go out and play, except playing, involved like heavy drinking, that kind of thing.

But like you had friends in the neighborhood, right? It was cool like that. But there were some neighbors that had lived there since the 70s that I knew of and had spoken to. They weren't old-timers, but they were, I guess they had grown up there a little bit. They were like, yeah, this place used to be a hotbed for meth. I found out that there had been a thriving meth lab just a couple

doors down from my old house. The one in East Atlanta. Yeah. Wow. So you can learn some interesting stuff about your neighborhood. Sure can. Yeah. Just by talking to your neighbors.

Exactly. So that's step one. Yeah, that's the easiest way to kind of get the ball rolling. Right. Let's say your neighbors, if you try to go up to their house and even if you're greasing their palms with some cookies, they're like, get off my property. Yeah.

Where do you go from there, Chuck? Well, if you want to start your investigation in earnest with records, you should go find the records, which is at the county recorders office. Right. And Emily makes a good point. She says that although there's a lot of people who are into digging up the history of their home, again, the impression this

is a lot like genealogy to some people. Absolutely. That there's not that many resources for old timey information online. No. You can't find a lot of these court records. They're housed on paper in the depths of city hall usually. And no one has said, hey, maybe we should take the time to scan these and put them online.

Right. So what are we going to find at the county recorders office? Well, what you want to find is the deed history of your house. Okay. You're going to find a guy in Birkenstocks with socks like playing a shooter. You'll probably find that. Sure.

You might smell some incense and you want to get the deeds and trace back the deeds to the original owner. If that's what your ultimate goal is. Right. To find out who originally built or owned your home. You're also going to find on file and what you would take, I guess, is your plot number or your address. Which could change, though.

It can change, which is why it's a good idea to know your plot number. That doesn't change. Right. I would say, actually, if you have a house that's 75, 80 years old, chances are your address did change. Yeah. Over the years. Especially if they doled it out kind of haphazardly at first.

Sure. Part of it out. When somebody builds a new house or something like that, nobody likes to be 735 and a half Ripple Street. I was a quarter in LA. Quarter? Yeah. It was 27 something and a quarter.

Huh. Because I was in a fourplex apartment building. I thought below half they just started assigning letters. I do. This is LA. I think they have eights and sixteenths. Maybe. People just like cramped in linen closets, right?

Another thing you can look for, Josh, is if you've ever heard of a Sanborn map. I hadn't until I read this and I went and did a little research on Sanborn and by God, they were interesting. Yes. The Sanborn map company was out of Michigan, I believe, and they serviced, and not in any kind of dirty way, the fire insurance industry. Yeah.

Apparently, insurance maps were big as a whole back then. Yeah. If you were located in Delaware, if your insurance company was located in Delaware and you had somebody in Taos, New Mexico who wanted fire insurance from you, what are you going to do? Send some guy out to look at every single one? No. They went and tracked with the Sanborn map company to make maps of 12,000 cities

and towns around the United States. And they did it from 1867 to 1970. That's pretty comprehensive. Hand drawn aerial maps. And these things were detailed, man. I mean, they look like land use maps of today. Yeah, yeah. There's not little tiles drawn in or bricks or anything like that.

I mean, they're detailed like, here's the closest fire hydrant. Here's how many sprinklers this house has. Here's where the windows are. Here's what the building nearby is used for. I was looking at one. I can't remember what town it was, but there was the foundry or the old foundry. It said vacant, and then there's the other foundry nearby. Here's these houses.

It's a drawing of a city. And they did it all over the place. Yeah. And again, they did it for the fire insurance industry, but these towns also got copies of these maps, and a lot of them have them on file. Totally. And I think because it was for the fire insurance, it was why you get detail like where the windows and doors were.

Sure. And I think it also says what materials your house was made of. Right. They also did them in Mexico and Canada. They also did maps on sugar refineries in places like Cuba and whiskey distilleries throughout the country because those things tend to explode. Sure. And yeah, the Sanborn Company basically made it so that you can find what your house looked

like any time during this period or what else was around. It's really cool because they also included street names and addresses. Right. So if your city has a Sanborn map, you are in luck. Yes. Agreed. 2023 is already well underway, everybody, so don't wait any longer to level up your small business.

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No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the page and enter our code STUFF. Hey everybody, it's a new year and it's a good time to take a look at your website. And if you take a look and you decide it looks kind of black, then it's time to head on over to Squarespace to create a new one. That's right, especially if you have, oh, I don't know, some kind of audience like we do.

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It's like the circle of life. So head on over to Squarespace.com slash SYSK for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. The other thing you can do is, well, if you are able to trace the deed back to the original owner, you can go to the internet then if you've got a name. It's always worth a try. Oh, definitely.

Because you never know if someone back then is noteworthy enough to be included somewhere in the historical records on the net. Right. If you can't get the deed, but you can, if you have other records like surveys, tax assessor census records, they'll have the names and ages and occupations of everybody in the house. Occupation, that's kind of cool. It is very cool. What would we be?

What would we be back then? Yeah. Oh, I was a cobbler for sure. Were you? Yeah, yeah. Cooper. Really? Sure.

Wow. Mary, what about you? She has no idea. Also, you can find the occupations of the people who own the house through a reverse telephone book. Yes, the Polk. The Polk Reverse Telephone Directory. Yeah.

Did you know about these? I had no idea. It's just such a smart thing. It sounds so old-timey. Reverse Telephone Directory. Yeah. That means you can search by the address if you don't have the name. Right.

You search by address and then it takes you over to the name. Right. And that will be at your library. So now we've moved on from the county courthouse. Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot to tell everybody we're at the library now. We're at the library now. Over here.

That's why it's so quiet. Yeah. So that's where you can find the Polk Directory and that's where you can find the occupation, which I think is probably one of the more interesting things. Well, you can in the census records too. Well, what if you can't find it? All right. So now you've got...

We're also... We're in the library still. Oh, that's right. Sorry. The name or one of the names of one of the homeowners who lived in the house before you. Yes. Now it can get interesting. Right.

Because I'd suggest that the internet, if the internet comes up empty, which it likely will. Not likely, but it may. Am I? That means you need to look at something called microfiche. Yes. And if you're under, oh, I'd say probably 30 years old, you probably have no idea what microfiche is.

The microfiche is...it's microfilm. I don't know why they call it microfiche instead of microfilm. Someone will know and we'll find out. Yes. Basically, it's a ton of information on a very tiny strip and you use a little magnifying glass. Actually, it's not a little magnifying glass. It's kind of big.

It's housed in a machine. Right. You can spin through. You got this cool little dial. It was so awesome. It was super old-timey. And you can spin through and find newspaper clippings. Yeah.

Used to use it, I'm sure, too, right? In the old days of research. Yeah, I was never a microfiche whiz, but I have used it. It's pretty fun. But you have to cross-reference it. You look for what you're looking for and then you go through a decade of newspapers on one film and you can find press clippings about whoever's owned your house. You might find that there was a murder there or that there were several murders there.

Because frankly, Chuck, isn't that what everybody's doing at House History is ultimately looking for? You know what's funny? I should show you my note right here. The real reason is to find out if anyone's been murdered there. Exactly. That's the number one reason I would say anyone would look at their house history. I would say let's cut to the chase, but man, it took us a long time to get to the ultimate

point. I know. Yeah. I do have one more point about microfiche though. Oh, okay. Because a lot of people think they're like Google masters and I research on Google and I'm so good at it. You don't know research, dude, until you get on microfiche.

That's where it's really hours and hours in the library and it'll seriously test your investigative skills. Yeah. These people who write a book based on a year of experience that they took a year out of life to go do something, then they wrote a book about it. Those people don't know writing a book. Talk to Norman Mailer. Go talk to Robert Woodward.

Go talk to these people who actually had to go do research on microfiche and didn't just blog about something they were doing for a year. It's not writing a book. It's called lucking out. It's called dropping out. Wow. So Chuck, microfiche, are we done with that part? Yeah, I think so.

The library is also where you're going to find the census records though that you were talking about. Wait, I thought that'd be at the city hall. It could be in both actually. Okay. If you strike out at the city hall, you can look at the library. The city hall. At the city hall.

And the other thing you can look at the library is look up some books. There may be a book called the history of Eastlake in Atlanta. And start thumbing through it. And there may be a picture of your house and the original mayor of Eastlake lived there. And when you find that out, try to contain yourself. Remember, you're in a library. Don't shout. Funny, you should bring up Eastlake, Chuck, because number one, that's where you live.

Indeed. And number two, Emily wrote about Eastlake. She did some research on Eastlake, right? Yeah. I think in order to write the article, she just did a little digging around about her own hood to kind of live the experience, maybe. And she found out some pretty cool stuff, actually. I had no idea.

She did. Eastlake is probably best known now as the home of the Eastlake Country Club. Old Country Club, host of the recent PGA tournament there. They've been hosting it for a while, right? Yeah. They usually have one tournament there every year, but now I think they finish the season there every year. Oh, okay.

So Tiger Woods was just in town, huh? He was right across the street from me. He's got a foul mouth. He does, actually. And I was able to make a couple of hundred bucks parking cars in my yard. That's right. Last year, Chuck set up a Bloody Mary stand in his front yard and was able to sell one before the cops came and took the joint down.

Chuck, Chuck Bryan is what we call a hustler. I thought that was a sterling idea. It was a great idea, except you didn't have a liquor license. Yeah. That was the only rub there. So yeah, it was shut down too sweet. So Eastlake, as it turns out, back in the day, the turn of the century, it was a farm five miles outside of the downtown center of Atlanta.

This was most of America at the turn of the last century. Absolutely. We should say the last century. Sure. And it had two creeks and a five-spring watershed, and the owner of a streetcar company in Atlanta bought this farm. He dammed it up and created a lake and like a beach community around this lake. Yeah.

And built a... An old-timey beach community. And it was actually one of the first, quote-unquote, suburbs of Atlanta, which is funny because the suburbs in Atlanta now are 40 miles away. Yeah. If you're a fan of urban sprawl, you're going to love Atlanta. Yeah. But Eastlake is Atlanta now.

It's not considered by any stretch of the image. Oh, very much so. Five miles from downtown is... Yeah. Like that. It's just a neighborhood. Although I suspect with traffic the way it is, it takes as long to get downtown from Eastlake these days as it did in 1900.

No. Are you kidding me? No. I'm just kidding. You're a cab avenue. It turns into Marietta and you're there. You're crazy. So the horse and buggy, that was quicker, you think?

Yeah. Okay. Now you have hopefully found out the owner of your house, the original owner. You've gotten some information and you may have gotten some information on the building of your house. Because you said the reason you would really want to find out is if anyone was killed there. There are other reasons too, like you were talking about architecturally. There's all kinds of architectural oddities many times in these old houses that don't

make any sense unless you find out the history of the home. Yeah. Emily says that you might find out that your kitchen is where you're living, your room used to be, which explains some of the odd angles. Was she talking about your house? No. Actually, we don't really have anything that odd except for the flooding issue in the basement, which I can't figure out.

But something more interesting, let's say you have a window in this little tiny closet and you think, why would there ever be a silly little window there? And then you find out that it was a back room distillery during prohibition or something. You never know. The house I grew up in as a child in Toledo had a secret passageway. No way. I kid you not. In the back of a linen closet, which the walls in the back were painted black, if you

pushed on the back wall, you went through a little door and you crawled through and you were on the steps going down to the basement on the other side of the house. How old was the house, do you know? I don't, actually. You're like 70s ranch. I don't think so, no, it was definitely 50s at least, but it was fun to play hide and go seek in there. Well, I bet if you have some architectural oddity in your home and you're into this kind

of thing, it'd be worth looking into for sure. Definitely. Also, if you are a renovator and you've been tasked with restoring a house, how else are you going to find out? Yeah, if you're really big into conservation and you have, say, an old Victorian home and you really want to bring it back to its former glory, you should respect the original plans of the house. Definitely.

And you can also charge an arm and a leg if you do all this extra research to renovate to the original state. Absolutely. And Chuck, one last thing I wanted to mention, ghosts. Sure. I didn't know this. I didn't either. In California and Hawaii, you are required to disclose any ghostly activity in a house

when you're selling it. Yeah. I didn't know that. I didn't either. But if you suspect that there's ghostly activity in your house and you don't live in any of these states, you might go back and find out that there was that murder that you've been looking for. Yeah.

And how cool is that? What, the murder part? Yeah, if you found out someone has murdered in your house, wouldn't that be cool? Yeah. That wouldn't scare me. I think it was neat. Yes, obviously, it turned into like an Amityville horror type of scene. Well, sure.

But you would have known something. Well, coming out of the wallpaper? Exactly. Yeah. That's a good reason. I would say if you have blood coming out of your wallpaper, that's a good reason to research history of your house. Good to work.

And the other final reason, I think, is if you might find out that someone famous used to own it or someone famous might have stayed there and you could potentially get it listed as a historical site and save that house forever. Yeah. I'll bet your house ends up on the register in 50 years. Nah. Okay. Let's get out the history of it, though.

All right. Are you really? Yeah, I'm going to look into it when I have time. You're not just saying that? No. Why? Do I usually not follow through my podcast promises? 2023 is already well underway, everybody, so don't wait any longer to level up your

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They have rates you literally can't find anywhere else, which comes in handy because postage rates just increased again, like up to 84% off of USPS and UPS. Plus, Stamps.com automatically tells you your cheapest and fastest shipping options. So use Stamps.com to print postage wherever you do business. All you need is that computer and printer. Set your business up for success. When you get started with Stamps.com today, just use our promo code STUFF for a special offer that's going to include a four-week trial plus free postage and that free digital

scale, no long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the page and enter our code STUFF. Hey, everybody, it's a new year and it's a good time to take a look at your website. And if you take a look and you decide it looks kind of black, then it's time to head on over to Squarespace to create a new one. That's right, especially if you have, oh, I don't know, some kind of audience like we do.

Squarespace member areas connect with your audience and generate revenue through gated members-only content. You can manage your members, send email communications and leverage audience insights all on one easy to use platform. Yeah. And if you have a big social media presence, you can display posts from your social profiles on your website. You can automatically push website content to your favorite social media channels.

It's like the circle of life. So head on over to Squarespace.com slash S-Y-S-K for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code S-Y-S-K to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Well, if you have a really interesting history for your house and you want a little more detail, you can read Emily's article, how to find the history of your home. Yeah. You can type that in the handysearchbar at housestuffworks.com.

Go find a sandborn map, just to look at them. Yeah, they are pretty interesting. You can find them online in some cases, not all. And since I said handysearchbar, that means, of course, that it's time for listener mail. Listener mail, Josh. Look at that, I just wanted to say that, give a special thank you to the boys and the Henry Clay people. Oh, yeah.

I'm holding their koozie right now. All right. If you remember a few weeks ago, we mentioned that some band in Southern California wrote us, and they were fans of the show. And I liked the CD, and I tried to get everyone together to go to the performance, which was a few nights ago. And I was the only one able to make it, unfortunately. So I met the boys in the band.

I met Joey and Andy, the two brothers, and I met the drummer, I believe his name was Mike, and that was the only other guy that hung out, had some beers. They're super cool kids, very, very talented. And remember, we said that we were going to be at that show, and we actually had two fans come out, seeking us out. Yeah, and you introduced your friend Justin to them as me, right? As Josh thought. It's kind of funny.

This lady comes up in the lobby after the show, and I'm hanging out with the band, and I think her name was Jeanie. And Jeanie, if I got that wrong, I apologize, I had a few beers at that point. And Jeanie and her husband came up and introduced themselves, and they were super nice and very complimentary. And they came to the show on our recommendation, and for Josh and Chuck Siden. Sweet. So in the city of Atlanta, we had two people interested in coming to see us.

It's awesome. Which is pretty cool. Well, that's not bad. It's like 50% of the people in Atlanta listening to us. That's true. And it was cool. I talked, you know, me and my band stuff. I just peppered them with questions about being in a band.

Right. I feel, I don't know, we hit it off. I feel like an honorary Henry Clay person. Sweet. And you may meet them in December if you come to LA with me. I'm not. You're not going to be able to come up? No.

So you got any letters? Yeah, I got a letter. Okay. This is from Emily, and we're going to say her last name because it's a special thing. Emily Friedendahl wrote us, I've been a big fan of the podcast since I discovered them in July. I was working a temp job, filing and making binders for eight hours at a time in a back room of a lighting company.

What? Not fun. The podcast helped her get through all this, we get a lot of these emails, people with foreign jobs. And she thanks us for that. And then she says, in fact, it got me so excited about how stuff works and the topics you covered, I decided it would be kind of a dream gig to be able to write some of the articles that you covered.

So I went online, submitted materials to be a freelance writer, and I just found out a few hours ago that I was accepted. All right, she's a colleague. She's a colleague. Emily is now a co-worker. And she says she can't wait to start rolling on a project and have you guys to thank for inspiration and for helping me put myself out there. And I emailed her a few times and told her congratulations, welcome aboard, and we'll

try and pick out one of our articles to podcast on. That's awesome. Congratulations, Emily. So she's a co-worker officially. Sweet. Chuck. Is that the only letter you got? Yep.

Okay. Let's plug Kiva. Yeah, go ahead. So Chuck had the bright idea of setting up a kiva.org stuff you should know team. And if you're not familiar with kiva, it is a microlending website. It's a non-profit, meaning you don't get any return on investment, but you do get your investment back if you choose. And loans as small as $25 go to fund bearer loans for entrepreneurs in developing countries.

And we talked about it on the microlending podcast. If you want to familiarize yourself with that, you can go listen to that one. It was pretty good. So you can go to www.kiva.org slash teams slash stuff you should know. And you'll come to the stuff you should own nations team page. You can donate whatever you want as little as $25. And like I said, don't forget, this is repaid. The loan is repaid.

They also have gift certificates on kiva.org, and it's a really good cost. Yeah. And we've already got 750 bucks donated. I know. And what, like 20 team members? Uh-huh. Yeah. We're stoked, and we want to call out again the lousy Colbert report.

Did you see that warning email we got from somebody? Yeah, yeah. It was great. It was like, don't you know what happens when you call out Stephen Colbert? Yes, you get his attention, which is exactly what we're trying to do. So we're calling them out, and there is lousy fans who are cheap. And we want to bury them. Except for the ones that cross over between that we share.

Sure. Of course. So we want to beat them and get their attention and challenge them to a kiva off. So if you have an interesting story about your house, if there is a murder there, Chuck and I definitely want to hear about it. Have any suggestions about the kiva team, let us know. Or if you just want to say hi, unicorns, tornadoes, torpedoes, any of that stuff, send in an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.

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