House history: who lived in my house before me?

Unless your house is a new-build, the chances are that it’s been lived in by someone else apart from you. Exploring the lives of the past residents is a great project, allowing you to use a mixture of online and offline resources to take a trip back into your home’s history. And even if you are the very first occupants of your home... you can always research the land on which it was built. When tracing a place there are always new discoveries to be made.

The below resources will help you get off to a great start.

Discover 7 simple steps to tracing the history of a house

• Get a map! - many areas have been drastically developed. A map will help you navigate the past
• The 1939 Register - great for mid-20th century discoveries
• Electoral registers - useful for tracing people year by year
• Your title deeds - see former owners
• Ask the neighbours…
• Street & trade directories
• The census

1. Plot your home on a historic map

FindMyPast has a great (free) house history map tool here that allows you to type in your England or Wales postcode and be taken through to a page that shows your location. You can choose to view the locality in modern times, mid twentieth century or nineteenth century.

2. Explore the 1939 Register – discover your house’s inhabitants at the eve of World War II

With a subscription to Findmypast you can see who was in your house when the 1939 Register was taken. For the background to this register click here. 

(If you don't wish to subscribe, when you get taken to the subscription page, scroll right down to the bottom of the page, and here you can just make a one-off payment to view one record).

You can then see the name, age and occupation of each inhabitant and also browse the households of other streets within that same postcode area. The 1939 Register for Scotland is not currently available online but you can order an official extract from National Records Scotland - details here.

3. Look through the electoral registers

Electoral registers are helpful if whoever lived in your house before you was eligible to vote. Remember that voting qualifications have varied over the past two centuries - so prior to 1928 you will not find all the adult inhabitants of your home necessarily recorded, as not all were eligible until then.

You can find the largest collection of electoral rolls on FindMyPast. FindMyPast has worked with the British Library to digitise the 1832-1965 electoral registers, which are accessible via subscription/payment as mentioned above, or you can explore these for free at the British Library’s reading rooms. See the Library’s webinar on exploring these records here.

For information regarding electoral registers for Scotland, the National Library of Scotland has information about access to past registers here.

Note that you’ll need to use the address rather than names, as the electoral registers are not indexed.

4. Track down your title deeds

Your house title deeds, usually kept by you or the solicitor who handled the sale of the property, should have details of each buyer and seller during the history of the house and may even record details of who owned the land the house was originally built on.

5. Ask the neighbours…

• To find out about inhabitants within living memory, why not ask your neighbours?
• Try to find out who’s lived on the street the longest and ask if they’d be willing to have a quick chat.
• Or you could try asking on the community pages of your town or village’s social media sites.

6. Browse street & trade directories

For properties dating to the early 1800s onwards, trade directories can help you to pinpoint former inhabitants or even point to a change of use – perhaps your home was once a shop, perhaps it was once home to one family, but it now apartments, or vice versa.

These directories, which are usually kept at local history libraries and record offices, list the inhabitants of an area’s streets at yearly (or less frequent) intervals. 

You can find a range of online directories for England and Wales at the University of Leicester here and Scottish directories are listed here. Remember to explore your subscription sites for collections of trade directories they may very well have too.

6. Don't forget the census!

The census is not just a family history goldmine; it's also invaluable for house history too.

The census is a great source for research, providing the name, age, occupation and place of birth for each of the inhabitants of your home in years gone by. The first census of use for this purpose is 1841 and they have been taken every ten years since (with the exception of 1941). Because of privacy rules, the most recent census you can access is 1921 for England, Wales and Scotland; 1911 for Ireland.

Explore the census at family history websites such as Ancestry, FindMyPast, MyHeritage and The Genealogist and you can view England, Wales, Channel Islands and Isle of Man free of charge at The UK National Archives in Kew, and at FamilySearch centres around the world. Remember, too, FreeCEN, where you can see census transcripts free of charge on this work in progress website.

For Scottish census images see ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk and for Ireland (limited census years) see the National Archives of Ireland census website.

Please note, subscription charges or pay-per-view costs may apply for some of the websites mentioned, although some do offer a free trial to new users and you may also be able to access the site free of charge at your local library or family history society. 

Further reading

• 3 essential records for house history research

• How to date a 19th-century terrace

• Video: A House Through Time Executive Producer Mary Crisp and Series Producer Caroline Miller speak about the thrill, privilege and enjoyment of working on 'A House Through Time'.