Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar on tracing the history of your house. My name

is Ella and I am a reference librarian here at the National Library of Australia.

I'm joined by Sue, who is not only also a reference librarian here at the Library, but

one of our most experienced and knowledgeable colleagues.

The National Library of Australia acknowledges Australia First Nations peoples, the first

Australians, as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and gives respect

to the elders past and present, and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres

Strait Islander people. As Sue well knows, some of the most common

questions we receive throughout ask a librarian service relate to people wanting to find information

about the history of a house. The reasons behind these enquiries vary; there

are those who are generally curious, those who have recently moved into a

new home, and even those who were renovating on an existing property and wanting their

extension to be sympathetic to their houses, original design, the list goes on.

Recently, we even had a question from a person wanting to know more about their house as

they think it might be haunted by previous residents.

And while we can't strictly help with the supernatural, we can help by showing you the

different ways to learn more about your house, no matter your motivation.

For those who have already tried family history research, I should warn you that a house history

search maybe almost as convoluted as a lengthy family history search, but there are ways

of finding answers. Australian houses don't go back centuries

and unlike family history, you should be able to get to the starting point.

Today, we'll be covering a number of ways to approach the research of your house as history.

Including the physical house styles, the social history of the area, and finally, how to find

out who might have been living in your house. In Australia, houses from colonial times onward

have followed fashions and showed particular styles over the years. This is generally true

for the whole of Australia, allowing for some regional variations.

Ella has been looking into the architectural trends.

It may seem obvious, but when starting out researching the history of your house, the

first step is to look. Start with what you know and what is right

there in front of you. Walk around your house, inside and out and

spend time studying it. Consider it from different angles. Think about

how it's different spaces interact with each other.

Look at your house is physical characteristics. What type of roof does it have? What shapes

or the windows? What building materials have been used? What kind of paint?

How does the garden interact with the man-made, if at all?

By getting to know your house in this manner, you will undoubtedly begin to uncover clues

about its history. It's also a good way to ease into your research

as the only resource you require for this initial study as time and make sure you take

photographs and notes to they'll be really useful to reference throughout your journey

to becoming a house historian. Once you've done this looking, you can then

go about identifying what style your house is in.

We'll now go through some of the key styles we see in Australian houses and how you can

identify them. It's important to note that we can't cover

every single Australian housing style in today's session. However, this list will be a great

place to start your research and quickly before we begin.

I also want to highlight that the photographs I'll be showing you today are all from the

National Library's collection. Once we've looked through them all, I'll make

sure to explain how you too can go about finding this kind of photographic material for your

own research. All right Sue, so the first house we're going

to be looking at today with this photograph from the Wes Stacey Collection is an example

of a colonial style house. Typical features of a colonial style house

are: symmetrical design, a corrugated iron roof, brick chimney stacks, external shutters,

wrap around verandas and multi-paned sash windows.

And what jumps out at you when we're looking at this photograph here in terms of those

features? Well, this is Entally House from the Wes Stacey Collection

and it's a lovely old house in Tasmania and it obviously has the shuttered

windows and the brick chimney stacks. And in this case they've included the veranda

all the way around the original colonial houses may not have had that veranda because it was

coming back from England, and they didn't necessarily have that, but once they got to

Australia and wanted to keep out the heat, obviously they they wanted to keep out the

heat and the dirt and the mess from outside. Yeah, it's that classic colonial aversion

to the dirt and the sun and yeah, everything Australian.

Yes, yeah. So if your house is in the colonial style,

it was likely to be built in the early to mid 19th century.

So we'll now go into the second house and this is a Victorian style residence, and this

is also from the Wes Stacey Archive and some typical features of the Victorian style house

are: cast iron or lacework, terrace housing a steep pitched roof.

chimney stacks, stained glass, windows and curve verandas.

So what can you see in this photograph? That jumps out at you, this one immediately.

It's the wrought iron, the veranda, the railing around the top.

Not so much the pitched the steep roof on this particular one, but the the thing that

makes it Victorian is the the wrought iron. Yeah and the veranda.

It's so intricate.

So I don't know if we can see if there's any stained glass, but I bet there is

Yeah me too. It's a beautiful photograph from the collection.

Yeah, well, Wes Stacey was an architectural photographer and he... anything that stood out

to him as being typical of that style that you can find quite a lot in that collection.

So if your house is in the Victorian style, it was likely built in the mid to late 19th century

All right, we'll go on to our third house photograph. And here we have an example of a Federation

style house. Some of the features of Federation style house

include: a terra cotta tiled roof. asymmetrical rooflines, gable and motifs,

leadlight windows, high ceilings

red-brown brickwork and a decorative timber veranda.

So what can you see in this photograph here that jumps out as federations so?

Well, the roofline. The roof line is amazing on this one. Its striking, really striking.

This is obviously a high-end federation. Yeah if if if the the house is sort of

like a regional home in a different area

or it didn't have... the person didn't have as much money building it

they would maybe not have as many little finials and gables and so on, but there would be some

decorative element, especially on the roof and also the fretwork around the front of

the the veranda. Yeah, it's beautiful.

Yeah, it's. And we can also see the start into the side

of the image of that decorative timber veranda. And when you look at the full shot of this

image, it's a really wide panning panorama and you can see that they've chosen to build

that veranda overlooking a really beautiful view. And and why wouldn't you?

So if you identify that you're researching a Federation style house, it was likely to have

been built from approximately 1890 to 1920. So next we look at a California bungalow and

this is a photograph taken by Harold Cazneaux. And some of the features of the California bungalow are:

a single story with double or triple low- gabled roof painted with battens. Wide eaves with

exposed rafters, stained glass windows, thick masonry veranda piers or pillars

rough rendered walls, enclosed front porches,

and terracotta shingles or a tiled roof. So what can you see in this appropriately

sepia-toned California bungalow image? So the closed front porch there is is the

obvious pointer to the to the style instead of the veranda like we had in the previous ones.

They've got the enclosed front porch again, keeping out the heat of Australia.

Yeah, with those thick walls as well and we can see to the right of the image as well

that rough rendering, which they often did with horsehair to give it a bit of a bit of

texture and to help it stick And a bit of brickwork for

for more texture at the front there. Yeah.

At the front there yeah that decorative brickwork. Absolutely, and we can actually see the two

inhabitants of this house standing on the porch. If you look very very closely which

is a lovely detail.

So if your house is in the California bungalow style, it was likely built around 1910 to

1930. All right on to the next, and we've got Art

Deco here. So some of the features of an Art Deco house:

are a flat roof, steel frame porthole windows, curved glass,

zigzags and geometric shapes, clean lines and glass bricks. So what can you see in this

photograph? It's very grand, isn't.

That curved wall, you know it looks like it's about to sail off in the sunset. Absolutely.

And the palm tree, they love the palm trees as well.

Yeah, very tropical. Yeah, and we've got that curved glass window

up there as well, yeah? Yeah, and we've got that curved glass window

The little details around this sort of little balcony thing. User that's exactly.

The balcony yeah, that zigzag shape yes and we we do know that you know there is a variation

of the Art Deco house that is called "The Steamliner" so very much fits in with this grand house

here from the Newcastle Morning Herald and Minors Advocate Archive.

So if your house is in the Art Deco style, it was likely built around the 1930s.

All right, we'll move on now to the post War House. A bit of a classic bit nostalgic.

And some of the features of a post-war house are: that it's simple,

has little embellishments, set well back from the street,

has metal casement windows and weatherboard cladding, but also brickwork.

So what can we see in this photograph from the Newcastle Morning Herald and Minors Advocate

Archive? Well, this one is the the brick one, but

weatherboard is, also, as you say, typical and and sort of

the hip roof it has here. This is the post war...

you know they're not going up into the roof and having a lot of high roofs like they did

back in in the Federation time.

Much more pared back. Yeah and yeah they took looked after their gardens

obviously too. Because this is the post-war austerity type, you know they they were coming back

and their houses were important to them, just like

my grandma's house. Yeah, absolutely. And it was when we were

researching for this webinar today. I did say this is sort of the most nostalgic house

style for me because this is, you know this is Nana's house.

Yeah, and you'll hate me for saying this because it is a bit of a unicorn of a situation, but

with this image as well and the title of this image is "Home of Mrs Ramsay, 9 Greenwich Road,

Greenwich Lower North Shore, Sydney 1956." So, this is an image not only of that house

style, but if you happen to live at that address.

You've got it. You have an image of your specific house, and there even is a little Mrs Ramsay

in that lower left corner tending to her garden. Could be... could be I liked.

Could be. Yes, could be.

Yes could. Yeah, I think so.

Yeah. But that that is very unusual.

Very very rare.

Yes yeah yeah. So if your house is in the post-war style

was likely built from 1945 to 1965. All right, we'll move on now to something

very different. We've got our modern style house.

So features of a modern style house include: that they were open plan with built in joinery,

large windows, a connection to the outdoors, and they were made out of a range of materials.

So brick, metal, glass, tiles and timber. So we've got this photograph here, taken by

Frank Hurley, and what are some of the features that jump out at you from this image?

It's immediately modern. Yes, obviously modern with the great

big windows. And not big.... sort of pane windows that they've got

the more interesting little architectural features, and the one on the side

there's sort of set in a little bit, and you can just imagine what it must be furnished

like inside. Beautiful.

My favorite style of house. I'm not ashamed to admit and I really love that boxy form

that they've got too. That's mirrored in the actual form of the building

and then the windows as well. There's that lovely repetition.

Great.

So if your house is in the modern style, it was likely built around the 1950s to the 1970s.

And finally! Wouldn't feel right not to give an honourable

mention to a uniquely Australian style of house. We're looking now at a photograph of

a Queenslander. So some of the features of the Queenslander are:

that they're a single detached house with a corrugated iron roof.

Their high set and they have that characteristic veranda which is often wrap around. But as

we can see in this case with this photograph taken by Greg Power. Not always.

So what can we see here, Sue that characterises the Queenslander?

Well, it looks like double story with some of them they may have been open underneath

to keep out the floodwaters, the ants. I'm not a Queenslander,

but I believe that was and to keep the air circulating through, yeah.

Whereas in later times they then could have enclosed it in, but but yeah, they're beautiful,

aren't they? With the with the veranda and

the columns. Yes, and I think this photograph really encapsulates

the fact that houses change overtime. So while you might have a house that you can identify

as an architectural style, there might be add-ons so that bottom story might not have

been there. But we can still use other features of the

Queenslander to identify this house as a Queenslander. Yeah, I think if you're living in a

Queenslander, you probably know. You probably....

you're probably aware ...have some upkeep to to deal.

with. But just in case. So these houses, the

Queenslanders started being built in the mid 19th century.

Thanks Ella. So what are some of the resources

you used to find these houses and how should we go around and go about looking for them

ourselves? There are a range of resources you can access,

both online and in person that can help you learn more about Australian house styles.

You can use these to first identify the style of your house and then delve deeper into understanding

the context in which it was designed and built. Don't worry about writing these links and

titles down, as we'll list them in the description box below this video.

For example, the National Trust has a great online publication that outlines Australian

housing styles, complete with wonderful illustrations of not only the facade of different houses,

but also illustrations to help you identify buildings including doors, windows, fences,

and roofs. So we've got the page up now, Sue. And I'll just show you so this is from the

National Trust and you can see it has these wonderful illustrations of all the different

house styles. And not only that, but also all the architectural

details relevant to each housing style, so doors, windows, fences.

Really helpful for people not only wanting to learn the history of their house, but also

again, if they're doing renovations, trying to keep everything sympathetic with that original design

That Victorian roof!

So beautiful. And the elaborate fireplacewith all the tiling around it.

Yeah, really beautiful, so that's definitely a resource to check out.

And there are also often state and territory specific documents you can find online, such

as this one from the Heritage Council of Victoria, and I've also got that up on the page. It's titled

"What house is that?" This is a wonderful document that outlines

housing styles specific to Victoria, such as the Queen Anne.

Well, there will be in other parts of Australia as well, but that's a a wonderful picture

of what it looks.

Like and I'll Scroll down 'cause I know you have a lovely story about one of these housing

styles. So this guide actually has it. It's incredibly

detailed. So not only does it list all the features, but it includes swatches of the

different paint colors that the houses would have been painted in.

So I'll go down to our post war. Where are we?

Our post-war house here. Yes, it's our "everyone's nan's house"

Yes! Everyone's nan's house. Including mine!

So if you scroll up, you can see that it was a a brick house.

But they were also weatherboard. Oh, actually, is that weatherboard or brick. It could be either,

but but the house I'm thinking of

where we lived it was cement brick and it was this blue colour. It was painted that

pale blue colour and it was exactly that style and you can just see from the picture where the

rooms were the lounge room, the bedrooms and yeah yes.

So nostalgic for you. Yeah, wonderful great.

So it's definitely worth looking at what information is up for offer from your local and state

heritage bodies. And along with these official websites, there

are also of course a wealth of unofficial websites written by architectural loving individuals.

And now I've mentioned online resources. I'm very happy to tell you

to go to the books! I might be a little biased working here at

the Library, but there is a wealth of illustrative and informative books that have been published

on Australian house styles. For example, there are books that give an

overview of numerous housing styles in the one publication, such as this book on Australian

house styles by Maisie Stapleton and Ian Stapleton and I really love the hand colored illustrations

in this book. It's a personal favorite of mine.

There are also authors who have chosen to focus on one particular style or time period.

Those that focus more on interiors and feature beautiful photographs, and even those that

are more text heavy and details based. And while talking about books, I should also

mention there are also publications dedicated to teaching readers how to become house historians

more broadly, such as this one by the National Trust.

These are very useful in providing clear steps to go about undertaking your research.

These books are all from the National Library Collection, though you'll certainly be able

to find similar publications in a library near you.

But if you are indeed planning to visit the Llibrary, and we welcome you to visit and look

at this material yourself, I suggest you take a look at our recent getting started webinar,

which also features Sue! You promised to teach us a bit about how to

find these images for ourselves. Yeah great, I sure did. So, as you know, the

National Library's picture collection is both large and diverse.

Specific to house imagery, we even have several names collections that may be of interest

to researchers. These include the Wes Stacey Archive architectural

photographs and the Harold Cazneaux collection. To show you how to look for house photographs

for yourself, I'll jump into our catalog. I'll bring up the catalog page here.

All right, so the first step is to limit your search to picture so we can see this ad limits

bar here. We're going to go down and select picture.

All right, I'm now going to type in my search terms. I'm going to do a simple subject search.

And I like to start broader so that I get a better understanding of exactly what is

in the collection. Even if you get a lot of results, you can

then filter down from there, so start broad to make sure you capture everything.

So we can see I've searching for Victorian house and I've selected the limit of picture.

Now I'm going to click find. Great so you can see I've got a long list

of results here. To find images that I can freely access and

view online from home, I'm now going to go to this narrow search bar to the right of

the page. And select all online.

So that'll give me a list of results that has images that I can access from home.

So I'm going to click on to one of the records clicking the title.

"Victorian style house with picket fence, Evandale TAS by Wes Stacey "from that Wes Stacey collection

that we've drawn upon so much today. So from here say if you're wanting to download

this picture for your own research purposes, all you have to do is click on the picture.

That'll take you through to its trove record. And then to the left of this page there's

this little page icon with a downward pointing arrow, which is the download button, and you

can click that and follow the prompts to download it.

So I'll go back into the catalogue record and something else I wanted to highlight

was the way in which from individual catalogue records, you can then find other relevant

material for your research. So say you're specifically interested in the Wes Stace y

Collection. You can click on this link here that says Wes Stacey next to the author

and, if you click on it, it will bring up all of

the results of images taken by Wes Stacey and I know you mentioned the Wes Stacey photographs

not just homes but buildings as well

Yeah, buildings, stately homes, barns and

shearing sheds.

Yeah, anything he thought was of aesthetic value. Yeah, amazing and something else you

can do from the catalogue record and I'll go back into that individual record now is that

we have something called subject headings here in the catalogue record listed and they're links.

So say you were specifically looking into Evandale TAS. You could click on this first

subject heading link. And it would show you I've just got the one today!

but if there were others relating to evendale, they would all be listed there.

So a really good way to filter down your search, but also broaden it at the same time to make

sure you collect everything in the one search. And that's how you too can go about finding

images of houses in the Library collection to help with your house history research.

All right Sue! Now we have a good idea of how to go about identifying the style of your

house. How can we then delve deeper and learn more about the history of the town it's in?

After looking at the architectural details of your house inside and out, you may have

pinpointed your house style and the general time it would have been built.

Then you can research the history of your suburb or town to find what style of houses

are common or typical for the area. This can point to a particular time when the town experienced

a growth. or an influx of new residents.

You might find out why there was a growth in a certain decade, for example, if it

was related to a new industry in the area, or when a railway station was built.

Perhaps the former owner of your house was employed in this industry. I'll give a couple

of examples of this in a moment, but to start with, try looking for a book or website showing

the history of your town, which will help in this research.

One way to find if there is a published history of your town is to use the

National Library catalogue, type in the name of your town or suburb and

add the word "history". So I'll do that here. I'm going to search for Glebe.

And as I said, I'll add the word "history" . And in this case I want to limit it to books.

To a book and then we'll click on find and we'll get a list of the books about historic

Glebe. There's lots.

Yeah, some of them will be about schools and churches and so on. And as you scroll down you'll see we've got a pictorial

history and the one we're going to look at today here is "Grandeur and Grit, a history

of Glebe" and Max Solling has written quite a

few different histories of Australian areas and I've got it here.

The history of grandeur and grip. The history of bleed and as you can see it's very substantial.

It goes right back to when it was first gazetted and named as a parish and you can see here

Chapter 6 is: "The business of building the suburb" and here we've got. Whoops, that's

OK. We've got pictures of terrace h ouses in in Glebe. So that shows you a

a lot of things that's going on in Glebe and all the historical people associated with

it as well.

Some histories, maybe centenary celebration booklets, which can often give names of council

members and other prominent citizens, as well as advertising for local businesses.

That meal that I've got one here about Gunnedah centenary and these books also may have photographs

showing buildings and streets then and now, such as this one.

Here we've got the Main St in Gunnedah as it was then and as it was when the book was published.

So Sue, can you expand on some of the reasons why it might be helpful to know more about

your town or suburb more broadly? Yes, one of the books we have

here is a history of Georgetown, which is in northern Tasmania.

It's said to be the third oldest European settlement named in 1811, so you might expect

there would be a lot of colonial style. and Victorian style houses. And there are

a few notable colonial examples. But the main settlement in northern Tasmania was moved

downriver to Launceston, I believe due to a lack of fresh water.

So Georgetown only has a few old colonial buildings, some cottages, churches and hotels.

As we can see on the picture we have on the screen.

There are no elaborate Victorian or federation examples. There was a period of little activity,

so while Georgetown has a long history for many years it only had a very small population.

It was used during the summer as a holiday destination and there were some larger holiday

houses built by the well to do, but for many years it was mainly a coastal town.

Low Head, just north of the town, had a pilot station and a lighthouse. This was

an important part of Australia's maritime history, but as I say there was not a large

permanent population. The book on the history of Georgetown,

although published in 1980, does not cover the later population boost in the mid

20th century, but we can confirm the main points with newspaper reports now on Trove

and other sources. In the 1950s, the Commonwealth and state governments

pushed to get industry and jobs to Tasmania. A major project was developing hydroelectricity

as they did in the Snowy Mountains, which made it more viable for large manufacturing

companies to use Tasmania as as a base and here you can see Tarraleah in 1959 where a hydro

electric company was busy And what a wonderful photograph with

that worker in the lower left hand corner working away.

And this, combined with the deepwater harbour in nearby Bell Bay, nearby to Georgetown.

Was more attractive to industry... was made more

Georgetown more attractive to industry and in this case it was for an aluminium company

then known as Comalco. All this meant that in the 1950s and 60s there

was a large influx of people and they would need to find somewhere to live.

In Tasmania, there was a Housing Commission which took a lot of took on a lot of building

work. As well as this, there were some workers who purchased

blocks of land made available at very reasonable prices to owner builders.

And we've got a

photograph of those workers. Yes, that's from the Mercury that post-war style.

And with the bulldozer out front. So in Georgetown, many houses fit the post war, austerity style

and the residents would have been factory workers.

Factory managers and executive staff actually

lived a bit closer to the water with nice views and a bit more stylishly.

This image from the Hobart Mercury is from

an article type entitled "Georgetown Grows Up" featuring pictures of the town in 1953.

As the population rose from 350 to nearly 2000 in three years.

That's incredible. An incredible jump. Exactly, yeah, in other towns there may have

been different reasons for an influx of new residents.

If you live in a former gold mining town, you might find that there are a lot of houses

from that built in that boom time. In country areas, farming and other industries

may have ensured a relatively constant population for many years, perhaps with a boost in population

when railway station was built in the town. Here we're looking at Yass, a town in

New South Wales. Gazetted in 1837 but with buildings in the

Main Street that looked much older than Georgetown's mid-century buildings.

Yass, has a long agricultural history well known for the production of merino wool. It

also had a number of flour mills. The Yass railway junction was connected with

yes in 1892, so a house in Yass could have a much longer history than one in the earlier

established Georgetown. Wow, it really is valuable to learn that broader

town history for context. So then how do we go about learning about

the individuals who lived in a specific house?

Well, now we'll get down to the nitty gritty

part of searching the records. We have a handy guide here at the library and I'll jump straight

to our FAQ: "How do I find the history of my house?"

You'll notice here that we have listed resources from the different states and territories.

This is because like birth, death and marriage registries, title deeds for buildings are

the responsibility for each state. Here we have given links to research guides,

for example from state libraries and state archives. You can find extra help for each

state in these. As well as links to the land registries or

title offices. As an example, I'll use the guide here to

the State Records Authority of New South Wales and I'll just open that link and go here to

the House and Property guide from the State Records Office.

You can see in their table of contents the different things that they can give you, uh,

including Department of the Valuer General they used to

value when, when there was a deceased estate they would go in and value or the the.

All the objects within the House would be amazing.

All the objects wow. All objects wow.

You can learn a bit about that from their webinar here that they've got there.

Right? The one we might be interested here is records

relating to occupants. Because you're asking about how do we find who lived there? Yeah,

and it will depend on...

I've just clicked on that. On when our house was built in what date you're looking

at, so the earlier ones are going to be census musters and guides.

You might be able to use electoral rolls. Sands Directory is a street directory, and

we'll talk about those later, and you can see also, there's the Land Registry services,

which will give you the the title holders and the

the leaseholders over the years this is not held by libraries or archives. This this is

like the the births, deaths and marriages. This is for title records and you will

Yeah, great, it's wonderful. Have to pay for.

So it's each state or territory that's responsible for those, rather than a cultural institution.

Each step, yeah. Exactly, and so if we go back to our guide

here we can choose one of those, and I'm going to choose the one in WA which is called Landgate

So I'll open that one up and show you some

examples from the deeds that you can get there so he will look under for buyers, sellers

and owners.

Order a title or survey. Yeah, and then we got click down here again

and then you can see historical records. This tells you what you can expect from historical

records. For example, you can find out when the property

when the block came into being. If a mortgage was associated with the title, and that would

indicate perhaps if there was building on the land or improvement.

And and it will give you the names of the people who owned that piece of land

throughout time, and the when it changed hands.

And that's kind of.

Of like that golden nugget for your house history researcher, isn't it?

Exactly, yeah, so they do have some samples here so I can show you a sample of a certificate

of title. And here we have when it loads up, we've got

this Patrick McGovern was a....

had this piece of land in the Cockburn Sound location and it was a huge

parcel of land, and if you scroll down, I think it tells you here how many acres it

was on... twelve chains, forty-five links and etc etc. Because

this is a a very old historic it, it was first done in 1883 and you can see where it was

located here. Its historic yeah, what a wonderful document.

Its yeah what a wonderful document. They usually have the old ones. Had these

little maps on them and here it's got the transfer of land

in 1902, so it will tell you that as well. 1902!

And I love that in this case this example as well when it was transferred to Edward William.

a Fremantle gentleman and it was transferred at 3:00 PM on the 9th of May,

yeah. On the 9th day of May.

Yeah, it's very detailed.

It's very detailed.

You need to know these things.

You may have noticed if I just close this one now scrolling down the page a bit and

I mentioned it earlier that there is a cost involved.

So depending on the state you're you're living in, there might be different costs, and in

fact in the New South Wales Land Titles Registry Office, they will

direct you to a broker, they don't do the searches themselves. You need to go to a broker

and they've got a list of people that can help you with that on their website.

Oh wow.

Right?

Right, and also if it looks like if your house has been extended or the land divided at some

point, you can apply to your local council for that type of record too. They'll have records

of planning permission and the people who applied for the Planning Commission along

with the building information like if they had to add extra sewerage lines or something

like that. But there will be a fee from that for that

Council search as well. And say I wasn't in the position to spend

money doing this kind of research. What are some of the other resources I could access

that are freely available.

Well, let's look at a few different options. So directories, maps and newspapers, so I'll

just close these windows and go back to our

catalogue is what I want. And start with post office directories. So

post office directories were produced in all states. Their were fore-runners to telephone

directories as well as a basic street directory. If you live in a city or in a suburb, you

should be able to search a post office directory to help you find the homeowner in a certain

year. Some issues do cover country areas, but these

are not as detailed as the city directories. Your state library will have directories,

just search for post office directory in their catalogue.

There are few different publishers some are available online, others through state library

catalog or other websites such as the City of Sydney Archives which has the Sands directories

online in the National Library collection, we can use an example from the Wise's NSW

Post Office directory. So I'm going to search for that now.

Why is it whoops? I better do it correctly. Wise's

New South Wales... Directory, you could just search for post

office directory. You would eventually come up with it.

But you know a specific title. In this case, yes.

Yeah, yeah, there are different publishers and Wise's was one of them. So we... look...there's

obviously different ones here, but we'll look at the first one and we can just click straight

on the image to go to the

online version. Because it's been digitised

It has been digitised. You can then click on browse this collection, but there

is no quick search. It's not like a newspaper search. You will have to click on it and search

like a book. So if we're going to choose.

1911 and the street, we're going to look for is Albion Street in Annandale.

Wonderful lucky if you're a viewer today and. Wonderful lucky if you're a viewer today.

And you live in Albion Street, so it's a row of terraced houses between Nelson St and Susan

St, and there's the map on the screen there. Living on that street.

Living on that. To show you where it.

Is great, so you've got that identified. The house that we're gonna be look.

Yes, now as I say in this case you can't just search it, so you're going to have to look

for the street index, and there's a lot of preamble in the directories with advertising

and so on. So we're going to look for the street directory.

Street index which is. This one.

Great I think. If I can get it up on the screen, we can see

the street index and if we scroll down a little bit, we're looking for Albion Street.

There we go. And Albion Street is here. Albion Street,

Annandale. It's on page 105. So then you just have to scroll down to.

Page 105 this is where you flex those house historian muscle and.

Yes, you just have to be patient. There we go, there's page 105 and you can

see Annandale is here and tells you where all the council chambers are.

And we're looking for the for the street, the part of the street of Albion Street which

is in between Nelson St and Susan St. OK, and it's on the left hand side, yeah?

So useful to know again, that context of the suburb.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. So we've got Nelson St here we've got Susan St here and we've

got number 18 is Victor J Midson lived there in 1911. The reason you do need to it is helpful

to know where the streets are is because

not all directories will have the the house number, especially the the outer suburbs and

the and the older ones. They won't necessarily have a number, so you're

going to have to count up the number of blocks in between the streets to find out where your

house was.

Then you can go back to the... your family history

understanding and search for Victor Midson. Or you could even go back to the catalogue and

see if there's a map of the area. And see if we can find a map of.

Annandale, now I've lost the catalogue.

So you're just opening up the catalogue again. The catalog let's go back to the catalogue.

There we go, we go back to the catalogue. Let's look for Annandale.

And this time we're going to limit it to maps only.

And there's maps. And here they all are the maps of Annandale.

So many of these have been digitised too. There have been a lot have been digitised

as well, and in this case we're going to look at a plan of North Annandale.

And if we scroll, how do we are we have to, oh, we can scroll in. Yeah, the maps are very

actually they're very...tight? I don't know. They're very dense with information, there's a lot of data on this.

And you can scroll in really well so you can see here we've got Nelson St here.

Very dense with information. There's a lot of data on this, yes.

Susan St here. Yeah, and that's the place that we would be looking for. Number 18. But

here in this 1890 map, the house is not

built and it's still even part of. It is still the water reserve.

There, so it's more a parcel of land rather than a house.

Yeah, it's a part of it, so the houses built before 1911, but after 1890 so it helps you

to narrow the gap. Yeah, yeah, so you can see when it was was built.

Yeah, absolutely, that's a much smaller spans of time.

So it really is indeed useful to look for maps of your area then Sue.

Then so yes, it can be, especially if there's been changing numbering of the street, which

can happen. For example, going back to Georgetown in Tasmania

for a moment, I can tell you that the house numbers for Goulburn St changed at some point

between 1968 and 1972. In 1968. The electoral roll shows it shows a family

at number 89, while in 1972 they are at number. 5, not because they moved, but

because the street numbering was reversed when the road was extended to the north and

they needed. More numbers that could be so confusing

when you're undertaking your house history research.

Exactly. The local council or state archives may have historical information about this.

So back to Yass, we can find an example of strett changes using an early map, so this is

the current map and we're looking for 17 Lead St which is on the corner of Lead St and Plunkett St.

And you've got that pinpointed here on this map. Yeah, wonderful.

Yep, so for looking for a map of Yass, I can look for a map and I happen to know there's

one dated 1936. And I've limited it to maps still.

And I can click on that one. And here's the map of the town of Yass.

Again, with so much detail, so much detail. Yes, but you can scroll in, so

that's not a problem. Yeah, and we're looking for lead street if you remember which is.

Here Yep, so Lead St goes up here to Prichett Street or Richard St?

Prichett Street. And then it stops and then it changes to Bourke St.

This is 1936. Now our current map says that

Lead St goes all the way up to Plunkett St. Well, this is our house on the corner here

on Franklin Street, but something's changed. It had changed from Bourke St to Lead Street

at some point and you can also see while we're on the map that this block that we're looking

at. Yes, so something changed.

Which is now #17 is huge, so it has been subdivided at some point around the house we're looking

for is a really old. Federation House built in 1910 and right next

door there's a mid-century house. OK, so there's been some change as time? Yeah yeah.

OK, so you know that they've been development over time. Yeah, yes.

So you know that they've been development over time. Yeah, yes.

So we were able to find a Gazette notice to show in 1963.

Uhm, there's Bourke. St has now changed to Lead St in 1963.

It's good to know, and you did mention searching newspapers earlier, and I assume you mean

the wealth of digitized historic newspapers available through Trove. Can we do something

as simple as just plugging in an individual address into Trove?

Well, we can certainly try! OK great, we happen to be in Trove at the moment looking at our

viewer and we are going to look only in newspapers. OK, great.

Will search we're searching for 17 Lead St yes yes. So if I and I'll put quotation marks

around it so we'll get

more concise.... more concise results.

Exactly. 17 Lead St. Yass

And we're searching only in newspapers. And we get nothing. That's disappointing.

However, you can keep trying. Don't give up on your first try.

So we're going to make this whoops 17 Lead St.

So just the St rather than full word "street" Just the St this time and we've got a couple

of family notices here and these come from the Canberra Times which are a little bit

later than some of the other newspapers and you can see here.

Oh wow. We've got Philip Howard of 17 year lead St

that's his funeral. Actually if you click into it, his name was Philip Herbert.

Howard, actually is that...Howard. There it is Phillip Herbert Howard, 17 Lead

street OK, but we know that 17 Lead st used to be Bourke St.

So we have another option to search for. So we but keep that name in mind.

Let's look for 17 Bourke St. And again we'll just go in.

We're going to put the whole. Thing this time OK.

And see what we come up with. And we've got here.

Some more results. Again, we've got the 17 Bourke St, Yass

And there's Mr. Herbert Philip Howard from 17 Bourke St yes. So he he hasn't changed.

Yeah, and this. So he hadn't changed house. His house has

just changed street name News. Hadn't changed house. His house has just changed

street name News. This confirms that it was wasn't the number

that changed, it was the street of the change, and it looks like he was appointed as a justice

of the peace. Wonderful.

Back in 1950s, 1940s and 1950s, but. It's be aware though we have other options

for searching in Trove. If your house has

a name. See if your house has a plaque on the side of the door that has a name on

it, yeah? We can search for the name of the house.

However, be aware that not all houses were given a name. Don't expect to find a name

for your house in a title search through the title office because the name

is not officially recorded, a family might give a house name in the same way as they

would name a pet, and it would just change with a different family.

The house in yes did have a name. It was called "Hillview". When searching for this, you might

need to use a hyphen, or you might not. But anyway, we can look.

For "Hillview", you can try we back on Trove. OK so back on Trove

And we can search instead of searching for 17, we can search for Hillview.

And see what comes up there. And here's a page for little people on Gumnut

Blossom's weekly chat and we've got someone from Hillview Bourke. St Yass, called Pam Kearney,

and we can go in and find out what she's talking about here.

She wants a pen friend.

She would like a pen friend, yes, and and this was the Catholic Freeman's Journal,

and they had these childrens' pages for the they'd right into Gumnut Blossom and ask these

things, yeah?

Get advice and ask questions. And yeah. So without going step by step through all

the details, I can tell you that in 1946 in the Cootamundra Herald, we found

that Pamela Kearney was engaged to Bert Quinn of Young.

And her parents were Mr and Mrs. E.H. Kearney. Then using electoral rolls, another newspaper

and gazettes we found that Mr Edward Hastings Kearney was a post office worker and acting

postmaster in Yass in 1940. We've got an image of the.

Collection here and here's the post office that he would have worked in, taken a

little later. Of course, the Kearneys only stayed at 17 Bourke

St until 1941, when they moved to Sydney, so there is still a lot of detective work

to complete on this particular house. Land title records will go back much earlier and

newspapers can also help with the search.

So this sweet little letter in 1937 started...

has started it off with the family search and there's another result that also another letter

from Pam telling us that she had...now she had a baby brother.

Don't, yes, I think it was in this one and on the second page.

She says in the Little people section if we go under here.

In the Little people section again. There's Hillview Bourke St.

"Since I last wrote to you, I got a little baby brother. His name is Edward Lee."

That is very sweet. Good on Pam for writing into these papers so that her descendants

can look at them themselves too.

Wonderful.

So I think that's just been a quick overview of how you can use.

maps and papers to track down families who live in your house, but it may take some time,

patience and perseverance, but could be an interesting exploration.

Thank you Sue. That was a really great explanation of the nitty gritty research you can undertake

while researching the history of your house. It's it's very easy to see why people get

so caught up in their research. Such a lovely note to end on two with little Pam's letter

announcing her brother. And with that, we've come to the end of our

webinar today. We hope everyone tuning in has learned something during today's session.

Whether you're a lifelong house history buff or new to the world of tracing house histories.

We encourage you to take a look at other Library webinars to enrich your research as well as

our FAQ page on tracing the history of your house, which is linked below.

And if you need any help undertaking your research, you can also always turn to our

Ask a Librarian service for assistance. And don't forget your own state libraries

and archives. Thanks for tuning in.