How To Research Your House
“How do I learn more about my house?” is the most often asked question posed to our volunteers, and with good reason – Brattleboro is full of old houses with fascinating histories. But be aware that unless something quite historical happened in your house, Brattleboro Historical Society most likely won’t have specific information regarding your house. That doesn’t mean we can’t find out about it – all it takes is detective work. Although house numbers are important to start your search, names of the owners, or people who lived there will be important later.
Your best bet is to start either at the Town Clerk’s Office on the first floor of the Municipal Center or online with Brattleboro’s town records and follow instructions there at Brattleboro Town Records. Or at the town clerk: tell them your mission – to find out as much as you can about your house. You can add that you expect to continue your search at BHS after you deplete their references. You can give them your current address and they will point you in the right direction in their office so you will be able to trace your house deeds, often back to its construction. In the case of older homes, you will be looking at original deeds which were meticulously handwritten in beautiful script. You would want to copy pertinent information, especially dates and names. Better yet, take pictures and use them for reference.
If you are looking for only building information regarding additions/updates to your property, you can go to the Planning Office on the 2nd floor of the Municipal Center and look at permits taken out to renovate your property.
After you have finished at the Town Clerk, you can go to the BHS Research Room on the 3rd floor of the Municipal Center and we will be able to help you find information in our files, if there is any. We have the Manning City Directories which will list your house by street number and occupant and often occupant’s occupation. Street addresses have changed 4 times since 1900 so these directories are invaluable for researching your house. The fun continues when you search online to find out what interesting things previous owners were up to. We will also search our photo collection for your house –sometimes we have those.
Searching newspapers online is available in several places. One excellent free site is ChroniclingAmerica.com at the Library of Congress. Just be sure to limit your search, at first, to Brattleboro newspapers. Another excellent site, though there is a fee, is newspapers.com. You may use our subscription at BHS Research Room and search all their digitized newspapers by keyword. Searching by owner’s name or street address might turn up something like the date the barn on your property was built, the reason the driveway is in an unusual location or any number of interesting tidbits, such as funerals or weddings in your house, a neighborhood squabble, or fires and natural disasters. The old newspapers were full of such things.
Researching isn’t hard and can be lots of fun discovering new and interesting facts about your home and who used to live there. Be a detective and start today!
Rev. 9/22/25