Libraries and leisure

Tracing the history of a house

These notes are intended as a guide to the basic sources available at Hertfordshire Archives & local Studies for researching the history of a house.

Tracing the history of a house is a difficult task and the searcher is frequently doomed to disappointment as changes in ownership, boundaries and names mean that all too often, the thread is lost. In most cases it is extremely rare to be able to discover the name of the architect, if any, or exactly when the house was built. Written documents, generally speaking, cover either the legal history of the site or the affairs of the families who have owned or lived in the house.