House history reports
Who lived in your house, and when — with the record beside every name
A sourced history of one address: the families who lived there by census year, the deeds and land patents behind it, the newspaper notices that mention it, the directories that list it, and the photographs and maps that show its street. Every line cites the record it came from; nothing is guessed.
What you would tell us
- The address, as it is today
- Anything you already know (a year built, a previous owner)
What you would receive
- A dated timeline of residents and owners, each with its citation
- The records themselves, linked, so you can read what we read
- A plain statement of what could not be found
Which public archives this draws on today
- Chronicling America (Library of Congress) — Historic US newspapers 1690s–1963 with OCR text: obituaries, notices, local news
- National Archives Catalog (NARA) — Passenger lists, naturalizations, military service and pension files, homestead/land files, census images, federal records
- Open Archives (207 archives: Netherlands, Belgium, France, Suriname + US indexes) — Civil registration (birth, marriage, death), church books, population registers, notarial and tax rolls, militia — 207 archives
- Internet Archive (texts) — Digitised books: county and town histories, city directories, yearbooks, genealogies, church histories
- DigitalNZ / Papers Past (New Zealand) — Papers Past newspapers 1839–1980s (full text), plus NZ library, museum and archive collections
- Library of Congress — Prints & Photographs — 1.2M+ photographs, prints and drawings: portraits, studio and news photography, places, military, FSA/OWI
- Wikimedia Commons (free-licensed photographs) — 147M free-licensed media files: historical photographs, portraits, maps, scanned documents from GLAM partners
7 live archives hold the record types this service rests on. Archives whose terms forbid automated access are never searched by machine; where one of them holds the answer, the report says exactly where to look.
Interested?
Or search the archives yourself, free, right now.
Provara's rule for every service: a fact is shown with the record it came from, or it is marked as unsourced. Nothing on this page states a fact about any person or place; it describes what would be researched and from which public archives.