Our house heirloom

The most obvious building heirlooms are deeds. They can tell you more about the history of your house than any other source, revealing not only the names of former owners and occupiers, but also how the property descended, what it was called, its land, and tales of gifts, mortgages, debts and many other stories.

Other building heirlooms may be physically attached to the property. Take wallpaper for instance. Removing an old cupboard may reveal traces of old wallpaper, perhaps painted over, which when peeled away carefully can take you back through decades of decorating fashion applied to the very walls of your house.

Newspapers are sometimes found stuffed into cracks or under floorboards and not only provide entertaining reading but also indicate when works were being carried out in that part of the building. A Midlands Evening News from October 1900 inside a lathe and plaster wall panel gave us an approximate date that the room had been replastered – and possibly last decorated – as well as entertaining us with a story of a Wolverhampton glass dealer recovering damages from a cattle drover whose bull had pushed its head into her shop window while being driven to market.

Other artefacts might include shoes found in chimneys or between floors, and unknown tools and gadgets whose purpose has long been forgotten. Outside, it is not at all unusual to discover old bottles in sheds and outbuildings as well as in the soil itself. Outdoor structures may have been former privies or pig sties, and specimen trees may have been planted to commemorate a particular person or event in history.

One of our building heirlooms is a fragile old photograph of a distinguished-looking gentleman found in a cupboard. What will you leave in your house?

New look

We are tremendously excited about our new website launched this month. We wanted to have a brighter look, incorporate our blog that has been running for the last 18 months on a separate site, be able to update and maintain the site more easily, and, of course, to provide lots of interesting content for our visitors. Feedback has been very positive so far – do send us your comments. Many thanks to Ascendency Internet Marketing’s Website While You Wait service which we highly recommend.

Woodland bathing

One of our winter commissions was a Cheshire farmhouse near a former spa whose properties were widely acclaimed in the 18th century. Such was the efficacy of the waters that redundant crutches and bathchairs were left behind as newly invigorated bathers leapt onto their horses and galloped away. We traced the property’s tenants back through 250 years of estate records thanks to the fantastic Crewe archive. The changing fortunes of two of the farm’s 19th century tenants were vividly illustrated by their wills: one leaving over £40,000 to friends and family (including his ‘natural’ son), while 50 years later in the midst of an agricultural depression, a subsequent tenant left less than £100 and expired only hours after writing his will.

Tricky brickwork

The construction of a former coachman’s cottage on a Shropshire estate was something of a puzzle to its present and former owners who commissioned us to work out its original structure and explain how it had been built. Sue did a great job analysing brick bonds and came up with no fewer than six different bonds, four of which were on one wall. Mapping the bonding and the brick sizes enabled her to see which parts of the building were contemporary with each other, while comparisons with neighbouring buildings helped to date other parts of the property. Meanwhile my attention was drawn to the ‘unsuitable marriage’ of the estate owner’s eldest son that led to his eventual downfall, bankruptcy and a Chancery lawsuit.

Historical Highlights photo book

We also researched some of the history of an early Victorian town house in Shrewsbury and discovered that it had been renamed in the 1920s to reflect the Leicestershire birthplace of its owner. The occupations of its residents over the course of a century included an ironmonger, estate agent and auctioneer, vicar, Post Office engineer and gentleman of independent means. This client was the first to take advantage of our new, smaller sized photo book which is ideal for our Historical Highlights.

Top tweets

We’d love you to follow us on Twitter. Here’s a flavour of what you’ll see:

• 1831 Cheshire farm tenant had to do 2 days team work a year and deliver a cheese.
• Love reading the back of old postcards. Alice was missing Mr Gregory in 1908. Ah.
• Lord Crewe paid for ‘spent bark and wet hair’ sent to Crewe Hall in February 1832. My guess is for plastering but I could be wrong.
• Encountered an unusual name in the archives – Richard Strongitharm. Presumably a variation on Armstrong which is certainly easier to say.
• Witton-cum-Twambrooks is an actual place.

Blogging news

Curious rent demands, history by numbers and spot the difference, and an appreciation of indexers (Pulpit, goose in see Church) have all been discussed on our blog recently.

From the archives

Some 1639 Cheshire sins:

• John Ridley caught in bed with Mrs Pick the glover’s wife.
• Absence from church playing shovelboard.
• Elbowing Anna Taylor, sitting upon her in a pew that she called out in pain, her hat was almost thrust off her head and her band turned about her neck.
• Churchwardens accused of being arrant knaves who spent the parish money idly and did not attend church on holy days.
• Anna Anderton charged with wasting her dead husband’s estate on drink, living with John Cumberbach and neglecting her children.

When it comes to historical research, it would simply not be possible to access a fraction of the available material without indexes. Leaving aside the indexing of published books, there are literally miles of documents of every kind stacked on the shelves of archives around the world whose contents would be unknown and inaccessible if they were not catalogued. While it is possible to seach computerised catalogues, or indeed books, for any text, only a tiny fraction are available in this format. For the rest we depend upon the provision of indexes to give us access to deeds, maps, photographs, letters, surveys and all manner of material on people and places, and to entice us to explore such topics as ‘Church, pulpit, goose in’, ‘Licences, for corn dealers (badgers)’, and ‘Superstitions, magpies’ when we are in need of diversion.

As well as cataloguing historical documents, there are numerous patient folk, many of them volunteers, who painstakingly create name and place indexes from parish records that enable so many family historians to find their ancestors’ hatches, matches and dispatches records with such ease. It’s not all straightforward of course. Any archive may have tens or even hundreds of indexes to individual sources: wills, estate records, maps, photographs, newspapers, magazines, and so on, each of which may need to be consulted. But without indexes – and the people who create them – those records that have contributed to countless histories would lie unread and unappreciated. To indexers everywhere, I salute you.

All this information helps to determine how land and property changed over time; however it is not always easy to visualise this information. So using a technique not dissimilar to painting by numbers, each type of land usage can be coloured to depict whether the land was arable, meadow, pasture or plantation, using the information contained in the accompanying documentation. If this is done on a series of maps covering an extended period, a visual image of how land use changed is suddenly much more apparent. Comparative graphic representations such as these make it immediately obvious how the extent of a property’s land changed over time, how it was used and highlighting fields that were merged or divided.

In addition to looking at the land, the location and shape of buildings is of course crucial to understanding the history of a property. Changes to building outlines depicted in maps can help determine when a property was extended or even rebuilt, as well as determining the number and shape of its outbuildings, some of which may be described in property surveys. I never thought that the childhood pursuits of painting by numbers and spot the difference would ever be so useful.

Tracing the tenants of an old house can sometimes be easier than finding its owners, particularly if the property was part of a large estate. Some estate records contain rentals, accounts, and surveys, as well as leases, records of building works, and the activities of the land agent who had to hold it all together, all of which are fantastic resources for the house historian. Tracing a tenant back through these records can reveal what rent they paid, what other services they had to provide such as keeping a dog, delivering two ounces of pepper, a cheese, or a strike of oats at harvest, and so on.

In the days before house names became popular, many properties were known simply by the name of the person who lived there. The rental payments were usually listed in the same order within a parish or township, and once the tenant has been found, it can be relatively easy to go back through the records, picking them out each year.

A typical rental entry might be ‘Joseph Corbett for Bennett’s Tenement’. Pursuing Joseph Corbett back through the records might identify his predecessor as  ‘Richard Bennett for Bennett’s Tenement, late Drews’ and, ultimately, to ‘Henry Drews for a newly erected tenement’. Such a find would send you scurrying to the estate accounts looking for ‘monies paid to workmen’ in the hope of finding the bill for the actual bricks and mortar.

Even if the property was not named in the rental records, sometimes their predecessor is named, often for years after they have left the property or even died. So for example ‘Thomas Edwards, late Sarah Wright’ might be preceded by ‘Sarah, widow of John Wright’ and before that ‘John Wright’. And if John Wright, Sarah Wright, and Thomas Edwards all had to deliver a fat capon to the estate office each Christmas, that might just clinch the deal.