I've spent the last month working on a side-project: a documentary history of my house — deeds, censuses, estate maps, newspaper archives. Real archive work too, days in local libraries and record offices, not just a laptop and 400 browser tabs. What a massive nerd.
I've tried to find out about every family that's passed through the house since 1878 — at least 13 households. Amongst them and their stories are a colonial official's questionable collection of African artefacts, a Labour councillor's doomed run at Parliament, and a member of the West Yorkshire Militia. The inspiration for the project was the 1889 Ordnance Survey map, where the house and the neighbourhood around it were captured in amazing detail — I've obviously been enjoying designing the thing as much as researching it. I've tried to make the page feel like a history unfolding, and to make the varying levels of certainty in my findings part of the thing itself, rather than smoothing them away.
<dl class="note-stats"> <div> <dt>Sources cited</dt> <dd>131</dd> </div> <div> <dt>Years traced</dt> <dd>188<small>1838–2026</small></dd> </div> <div> <dt>Households</dt> <dd>13</dd> </div> <div> <dt>Neighbouring villas cross-checked</dt> <dd>20</dd> </div> <div> <dt>Dated events pinned to the record</dt> <dd>60</dd> </div> <div> <dt>Open questions, still chasing</dt> <dd>16</dd> </div> </dl>
The colonial official's story turned into a rabbit hole of its own. He was born in St Kitts, ended up working in Lagos as a tax auditor, and came into possession of fifty or so objects from Benin and Nigeria — which ended up at the Exeter museum when his wife died a couple of decades after him. I'd emailed the museum's curator for any information they had a while back, but they knew next to nothing about him, or how he came to have and donate such an array of objects at a time when the British were up to seriously dark shit in Africa. In the end I found out more about him than the museum knew, and have been able to share my research with them to add to their own records — which felt like a genuinely good outcome for a side-quest that started as idle curiosity.
A completely different household bought the house decades later: a twenty-four-year-old railway clerk who'd just become the youngest councillor the town had ever had. Within months of moving in he was adopted as his party's prospective parliamentary candidate, fought the next general election from the house, and lost heavily, as any Labour candidate would have in that seat, though he polled a respectable 29 per cent. He sold up the year after the defeat, to his own brother-in-law, and left the country for good — he died in Spain decades later, his wife in France. Neither story would have surfaced from a name on a census line alone; it took the newspaper archives, side by side with the deeds, to make either of them a person rather than an entry.
Some of what's still there to find, sitting in the fabric of the house itself rather than in any archive: bell-pull wiring still strung through the loft, a coin from 1936 turned up under a floor, a cowbell buried by the garden's own cedar, a date scratched inside a fireplace — 2 11 16.
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Because I don't want to be killed in my sleep, I figured it best not to publish the thing. If you'd like a look, drop me a note and I'll send you the password — or go straight in below if you've already got it.
<form method="POST" action="/house" class="note-gate"> <input type="password" name="password" placeholder="Password" aria-label="Password" autocomplete="current-password" required /> <button type="submit">View /house →</button> </form>
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