Workshop will aid home histories

If you own an older house in the Spokane area, chances are that house has a story to tell.

But while many resources are available to help uncover the history behind your home, the process can be daunting.

City directories, tax records, construction permits and title documents all sound like good places to start. But where exactly is the Spokane County Department of Building and Planning?

How do you find records of old insurance maps? And just what exactly is a microfiche?

The answers to these questions and more can be found Saturday at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture’s house research workshop. Sessions will be led by experts in the Spokane Public Library’s Northwest Room and at the MAC’s own library and archives.

During the five-hour workshop, librarians Dana Dalrymple and Rayette Sterling will provide an overview of the research process, helping participants learn about everything from the architectural style of a given home to the lives of its former inhabitants. Some might even discover historically significant events and people associated with their homes, such as the architect, if there was one.

Although MAC curator Patti Larkin admits there is no guarantee that a house has any history worth researching, “if it does, you’ll have experts there to guide you.”

At a minimum, the workshop aims to walk participants through the myriad resources available to them. Workshop attendees will learn about permit histories, chain-of-title reports, how to find the legal description of a home, and how to look up previous owners in the R.L. Polk city directories, which date back to 1883.

Other resources will include the library’s Sanborn Insurance Maps, which show the original location and building footprint of a home or other structure.

“You can also find any work that’s been done on researching your house – historic register applications, reports, different surveys, things of that nature,” Larkin says.

Larkin said participants also will have the opportunity to find old photos of their homes and neighborhoods in both the library and museum photo archives.