Researching an Old House: Efforts and Methods

I have spent so much time focusing on the facts that I haven't even taken the time to try to documents the methods I've used to gain the information I've used in this blog.

As a child, I was fascinated by the wreck of the old 97. To this day, I still have my copy of the book written by Clara Garrett Fountain. I even read it to the children when I worked at the YMCA Afterschool Program in Wilmington. I'm sure most children in my generation who grew up in Danville owned the book or at least read it once. Written in 1977 and illustrated by children at Grove Park Elementary School, I don't believe there is any better way to begin a fascination with the history of your hometown.

It's that same story that lead me to explore even further in middle school. When my father worked at the Chamber of Commerce, I used to go into the archive folders and read the newspaper articles and, if I recall, a copy of the telegraph sent on that cold September day. Through those archives, I ultimately found a copy of the 1965 city plan book. Which fascinated me to no end.

Also in middle school, I got copies of the postcard history book and the Images of America book which I always enjoy flipping through and reading.

Then, in high school, my interest was renewed yet again. I moved into my first apartment, which was in an 1870s farm house. For my 17th or 18th birthday, a friend's mother gave me a copy of Victorian Danville: Fifty-Two Landmarks, Their Architecture, and History. Included in that book was the house in which I lived.

Through college, I loved reading that book and exploring the attic and "dungeon" of Ms. Gott's house. But it wasn't until after college that I realized I could make use of my mother's Ancestry.com account to get information on the house. I then learned that the Register and Bee were archived through that.

Within the past year, I finally got the opportunity to do real research at the courthouses in both Danville and Chatham. There, I was reading the actual deeds to the house. Most were typed, but others were handwritten. As Mr. Gott said, I was getting my hands dirty.

The hardest part, I think, of researching an old house is the more historical documents. When researching the newspaper online, you have to be able to account for typos. That can make searching online hard when the exact thing you need could be in any given article, but one typo means the search won't pull it up. I've lucked out a few times by a necessary article being on a page I was taken to for some other reason. It's daunting, to say the least.

When it comes down to doing the dirty work, though, deed searches are about as tedious as it gets. It's only been within the past 100 or 110 years that deeds were typed. In 1800s, the deeds were handwritten. Not only is it time consuming to decipher 130+ year old handwriting, but using indexes to look up which deed book and page to go to requires a lot of back and forth.

It's fun, though. I can honestly say I enjoy the time I spend doing this research, even if I come up empty handed. I may not find what I need, but every time I try, I learn something new and find another interesting story. And isn't that what it's all about?