Collins Tracing Your Home's History [Hardcover]

The indispensable, practical guide for anyone interested in discovering the history of their home.

Following on from the huge surge of interest in tracing family history, more and more people are turning their attention to the fascinating story of the home they live in. For anyone who has ever wondered how to date an architectural feature, or why those windows have always been bricked up, or just what kind of lives previous inhabitants lived within the same four walls, this is the definitive handbook.
The starting point for home history research is wonderfully close at hand – the most obvious clues are literally all around you and local archives are also a rich source. The book kicks off by showing how someone completely new to the subject can date their home, track down deeds, and start piecing together the lives of previous occupiers through local history archives, census records and other sources. Increasingly, the archives are available on-line so the book is packed with up-to-date website contacts.
And for those who want to take their search further, Anthony provides the tools to dig deeper and investigate everything from intricate architectural details to the geology of the land on which your home is built. The book covers all ages of home so is a wonderful universal sourcebook, whether you live in a 16th-century cottage, a Victorian terrace or a 60's flat. Anthony's approach throughout is to pepper authoritative information with plenty of useful personal tips and fascinating anecdotes and examples, bringing alive the subjects he talks about and painting a compelling picture of the lives of our forbears.

Every home has a story to tell.

When was your home built and why? Why does it look the way it does? What was the land previously used for? How have your home and the area around it changed over time? Who has lived in it, and what happened to them?

The answers are out there, and Collins Tracing Your Home History helps you to find them. Whether you're a beginner looking for a starting point, an experienced home history sleuth in need of a new direction or someone who has traced their family history but wants to know more about their heritage, this comprehensive and up-to-date practical guide is the only resource you will need.

From title deeds to ordnance survey maps, from fire insurance records to census returns, there is a wealth of information about your home waiting to be discovered. With the growing amount of information available online, tracing your home history is becoming more rewarding than ever.

Author Anthony Adolph has been tracing home histories for twenty years. Among the many fascinating examples he gives in this book are: a family's garden where the funerary urn of an ancestor from the Roman sixth legion was dug up; a Greenwich home said to have been visited by the ghost of a boy who died two years earlier in Jamaica; a converted oast house in Sussex that played an important part in World War Two… a country house, once inhabited by a great aunt of Diana Princess of Wales, which has previously served as a nursing home, a block of flats, and a home for the exiled King of Norway during the Second World War.

This is the complete resource for discovering the history of the place where you live, and of the other people who have called it home.