Famous Hoosiers ~Biography Resource Center Tutorial
House History ~Bibliography ~Maps ~Web Resources ~House Styles of Wayne County
Consumer Information ~Free Annual Credit Report ~Opting Out of Prescreened Offers ~Consumer Contacts
Search Engines and Web Directories
It is unlikely that anyone has ever compiled a history of your particular house, so you will need to become a detective. Be prepared to invest some time in gathering clues. This subject guide uses Morrisson-Reeves Library materials that cover Richmond and Wayne County, Indiana. To find a general guide to compiling a house history anywhere in the country, try the following book from the circulating collection:
728.37 L72
Light, Sally. House Histories: A Guide to Tracing the Genealogy of Your House. 1989.
This page guides you through the steps of obtaining an abstract of title, title insurance, and searching courthouse records.
Once you have been through these steps, you are ready to begin searching library resources, using our bibliography, maps, online resources (newspaper index, website, and INSPIRE), and house styles in Wayne County.
Abstracts
Your search will be much easier if you obtain an abstract of title to your property. An abstract is a document that chronologically lists all recorded legal documents that have affected the title to a piece of land. You may have received an abstract when you bought your property. If you did not, call your lending institution and/or the abstracting companies in town (listed in the yellow pages) to see if they have your abstract on file. If a company has your abstract, ask them their policy for releasing it. If an abstract or lending company does not have the abstract, the other possibility is that a former owner still has it. Ask your realtor to request it from him or her since its main value is to the present owner. Once you get the abstract, keep it in a safe place, since it could cost several hundred dollars to have the research repeated.
An abstract is important because:
- It lists the names of the previous owners of the land. Finding information about a house usually requires learning about the people who owned the house or lived there. Once you have their names, you can look them up in county histories, city directories, and newspaper indexes.
- It lists all of the divisions that have occurred on the property. Here in Wayne County, the abstract will usually begin with an original land grant from the federal government, probably for 640, 320, 160 or 80 acres. This was probably signed by James Madison, or whoever was president when the land was granted by the United States. The abstract will then list every time the parcel of land was sold or willed or divided. The usual pattern in Richmond was that farms were cut down into smaller farms, and later bought by developers, who divided the land into lots. Your house will be on one or more of these lots.
- The abstract WILL NOT tell when a house was built on the land, because it only records information about the land itself. However, it will give clues about the house. Look for a sudden jump in the price of a lot (for instance, from $500 to $4,000 in three years.) This usually indicates that a house was built there during that time.
Title Insurance
There may be no abstract available for your property, or there may be gaps in the chronology of the abstract if title insurance was issued. Title insurance is a policy that reimburses the property owner for any damages or losses incurred through a defective title. When an abstracting company issues such insurance, they research the property but do not update the abstract. This practice is becoming more common because it is less expensive than updating the abstract. This means that the abstract for your house will probably stop at the last transaction before title insurance is first issued.
The Courthouse Search
If you do not have the abstract, the history of the land can be reconstructed in the County Recorder office. In Wayne County, this office is in the County Administration building. In the Recorder's office deeds have been recorded in two ways. Grantor indexes list the seller of the property. Grantee indexes tell who bought the property. To hunt the history of a property, you will look up the most recent owner in a Grantee index and find who sold him the property. Then go back to the Grantor index to see who sold that person the property, and so forth, alternating between the two kinds of indexes.
This may sound complicated but here is what you really need to know. Go to the Recorder's Office with paper and pencil when you have two or three hours to spend. Give a staff member the legal description or address of the property, and ask her to show you how to look up its history.
Remember, deeds and wills were not always recorded on the date they were made. Sometimes it took people years to get around to officially recording the information.
The Courthouse and Administration Building Complex are located between South 3rd & 5th Streets and Main Street and South "A." They are open Monday through Thursday from 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM. The County telephone number is (765) 966-8291.
Continue to bibliography, maps, online resources or house styles in Wayne County.
|
|