Ethan Simmons: Researching your house's history
Feb. 20—How do I research the history of my own home? Where do I begin?
Census records are a good place to start, but there are plenty of tools at your disposal.
Just ask the Champaign Public Library's Catherine Purcell, who made housing history her hobby during the pandemic.
Soon she'll hold another session teaching curious homeowners how to use the records at their disposal.
The Champaign library got access to
Ancestry.com near the start of the COVID-19 lockdowns. She was already interested in genealogy research — "So while I was stuck at home, I figured, 'Why don't I research my own house?' "
She dove into local census records and found some facts about its previous owners and history. A Realtor reached out to Purcell, asking the library to research an old home he was interested in selling, she said.
"I went, 'Well, maybe other people are interested in doing this too' — we have a lot of interesting old homes here," Purcell said.
On March 23, Purcell will host another tutorial for anyone fascinated in local home research.
"I've done research for people who don't know anything, who just know they have an old house. We get their address and go from there," she said. "I have some other people who have rumors of past influential people who lived in their house and want to know a little bit more about it."
There are lots of resources to use, Purcell said. For example, her own home started as a farmhouse, and didn't have an address in census records. The Urbana Free Library's archives helped out: They have records of the deeds for just about every address.
Most of the time it's pretty boring stuff, but every once in a while you get a divorce in there, it changes hands, and you can figure out more about the past owners," she said.
The cities of Champaign and Urbana and the Champaign County History museum all have records of past city directories as well.
