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Don't stop with your family tree - your house, too, might be hiding skeletons in the closet, as Anna Milford reveals.
Today houses that are made infamous by murderers and bodies discovered under the floorboards are demolished and the street name is changed to hasten oblivion. However an ancient castle, where the victim was royal and the scandal shook the throne, overflows with documented history and becomes a major tourist attraction - better still if a ghost still haunts the scene of the crime.
Most of us live in something in between. And many of us are discovering the fascination of researching the history of the buildings in which we live.
Old houses may stand on their original foundations, but appearances change over the centuries. The modern passion for meticulous, 'authentic' restoration would have baffled our ancestors who were forever updating their properties. Given the chance, Bess of Hardwick, cousin to Queen Elizabeth and a martyr to agues, would have double-glazed 'Hardwick Hall, more Glass than Wall' with plastic-framed units. Nor did William and Mary hesitate to commission Christopher Wren to add a classical frontage to Tudor Hampton Court.
Stuart magnates tore down timbered Elizabethan halls and built Jacobean manors of intricate brickwork. Their Georgian successors knocked down unwanted wings to add extensions of dressed Portland stone and Grecian pillars. In turn the Victorians and Edwardians ran riot with false Tudor beams, barley sugar chimney pots, diapered brickwork, stained glass and gilded turrets - sometimes in the same building. Try similar 'vandalism' today and the local conservation/ amenity /heritage lobby will be down on you, appropriately, like a ton of bricks.
Thanks to the Corn Laws, farmers prospered during the Napoleonic Wars. Many spent the money 'bettering themselves' by enlarging the simple farmhouses of their yeoman ancestors, making them into manors fit for gentlemen. My Suffolk home from which I was married was one such 'Waterloo house'. House names Glebe cottage, the Old Rectory, the Dower House reveal their identity quickly, but others take careful investigation since hunches are seldom acceptable substitutes for firm evidence. Locally there is a Horseman's House - not that of a keen huntsman, but the quarryman who supplied stone for the Victorian church.
Did a gamekeeper, lock-keeper or a gatekeeper live at Keeper's Lodge and did a farrier or worker in iron look out from Smith's View?
Fields may no longer surround Hop, Orchard or Harvest Cottage but earlier farm records for the sites will be available. There are thousands of Mill Houses in the country, but were they water, corn or even fulling mills? The Oast House, The Maltings and Old Fyning House are all connected to brewing, while Hatch End marked the edge of a wood.
Construction sitesTerraces of identical small houses on the edge of villages and towns are usually signs of canal, and later railway, building from mid-18th to late 19th century - both of which may have vanished but these basic dwellings remain. Our branch line lies beneath the M25 and research reveals that Flyer's Way refers not the nearby WW2 airfield but to an old steam locomotive.
Similar terraces are common in the coal mining towns of Wales - served by Bethel, Sion and Ebenezer chapels. Hundreds of thousands of such dwellings sprung up in the burgeoning industrial cities of Victorian England and are now being knocked down by over-enthusiastic town councils.
How old is your house?Street names give clues to dating houses. Any original building in Alma Place or Sebastopol Square probably dates from the 1850s decade of the Crimean War; Mafeking Way or Ladysmith Close from the Boer War; Mons Terrace from the Great War.
Any Coronation or Jubilee Street needs further investigation. Was it 1902 Edward VII, a year late, 1910 George V, 1937 George VI or 1953 Elizabeth II? Edward VIII was never crowned and Victoria had both an 1887 Silver and 1897 Golden Jubilee.
PedigreeTop of the hierarchy of houses are the stately Chatsworth [shutterstock 1908906], Longleat [shutterstock 667574], Montacute and others with their owners' aristocratic pedigrees as carefully recorded in their muniment rooms as every alteration to the structure of the buildings.
Next come the homes of the landed gentry, an upwardly mobile sector of English life who were apt to upgrade once-simple homes into Parks, Halls or Granges as they rose in the world. Anything with Priory or Abbey tagged on is likely to be spoils from the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Prior to the railways succeeding generations lived in the same area, but by 1850 the population was on the move and home ownership grew more diverse. Most, but not all, properties are now listed at the Land Registry.
Haunted?A house with a history is one thing, as is a good night's sleep, so ghostly manifestations are best left to properties of the National Trust and English Heritage.
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