Researching former residents of your home

Every house has a cast of characters

Walk into any older home in Britain and you are following in the footsteps of everyone who lived there before you. The family that planted the apple tree, the lodger who worked at the gasworks, the widow who took in sewing, the young couple who saved for years to buy their first radio. Their stories are rarely written down in one neat bundle, but they are very often recoverable, and the search is one of the most satisfying projects in family history.

What makes house history so rewarding is that the evidence is unusually concrete. You are not chasing a surname across three counties; you are looking up one specific address, year after year, in records arranged by street. Here is how to go about it.

Start with what the house itself remembers

Before you touch a single record, gather everything you already have. Title deeds, mortgage papers and any old conveyances often name previous owners and sometimes their occupations. Your title register will show when the property was first registered and may refer to older documents held elsewhere. If a solicitor or a former owner kept the deeds, it is worth asking politely — old documents are frequently handed on rather than thrown away.

Then look at the building. Datestones, boot scrapers, blocked-up doorways, an outbuilding that clearly once held a copper or a mangle, a Victorian range behind a modern fireplace — these all hint at how the house was used. Old photographs of the street, often held by the local studies library, can show changes in numbering and layout that will save you endless confusion later.

Census returns: a snapshot every ten years

The census is the backbone of any house history. Returns from 1841 to 1921 are widely available, and because they are arranged by place, you can find your address directly rather than searching by name. From 1851 onwards you will usually get the full street address, the name of every person present on census night, their relationship to the head of household, ages, marital status, parish of birth, and — most valuable of all — occupations. The 1921 returns add place of work and the name of the employer, which can pin a resident to a particular mill, railway company or shop.

A few cautions. The 1841 census rounds adult ages to the nearest five years and gives only a rough indication of position within the enumeration district, so precise identification can be tricky. Children's ages are given accurately. And remember that a census night is a single night: a travelling salesman or a servant sleeping over at the big house down the road will appear there, not at home.

Electoral registers: the annual roll call

Electoral registers fill the gaps between censuses, and since the 1830s they have been compiled annually and organised by street. If your house was standing in 1897, there is a good chance some resident of it appears in the register for that year.

Do bear the franchise in mind, though, because it shapes who you will find:

• Before 1918, registers list only men who met a property qualification — lodgers and adult sons living at home are often absent.
• From 1918, women over thirty who met a property qualification appear, as do many more men.
• From 1928, all adults over twenty-one are included, so later registers are far fuller.

Even with those limits, registers are superb for dating a change of occupancy — the moment a family arrives or leaves — and for confirming who was still in the house in the 1930s, after the census trail runs out.

Directories, rate books and the wider paper trail

Trade directories were published every year or two from the late eighteenth century into the twentieth, and they typically list residents street by street, giving a name and often an occupation. For a house in a market town, they can be the quickest way to confirm a sequence of occupants across several decades. They also tell you what the neighbourhood was like: a street of shoemakers, drapers and a single public house reads very differently from one full of clerks and schoolteachers.

Beyond directories, look for:

• Rate books and valuation lists, which record who was liable for rates on a property and its assessed value — useful for the 1910 valuation, which lists owners and occupiers in remarkable detail.
• Tithe apportionments from around 1840, which name occupiers and owners of land and property in most parishes.
• Probate records and newspaper archives, where an address may appear in a death notice, an auction advertisement, a bankruptcy hearing or a report of a wedding.
• The 1939 register, taken at the outbreak of war, which lists residents by address and gives dates of birth and occupations.

Piecing the story together

Two practical warnings will save you a great deal of frustration. First, house numbers and even street names change. A redevelopment, a new post office, or a council decision in the 1930s can shift a property from number 14 to number 22, or rename Alma Street as Alma Road. Follow the neighbours as well as the house: a distinctive combination of surnames either side of your address is the best confirmation that you have the right building.

Second, properties were often subdivided. A house that today is a single family home may have held two households, or a shop with living quarters above, or a landlady and three lodgers. Let the records tell you what the house was, rather than assuming it has always been what it is now.

Take it one decade at a time, keep a simple table of address, year, occupant and occupation, and note your sources as you go. Bit by bit, the names on the census pages stop being entries in a column and become people who chose your house, decorated it in their own taste, complained about the same draughts, and moved on. It is a quiet thrill to realise that you are, in the longest sense, simply the latest in a long line of residents.