It was the cat who made the first discovery: a stash of 1950 Oregonian newspapers in a hidden slot underneath a built-in buffet with a hole just the right size to crawl into. But the find was just the start.

When Dawn and Jeremy Peterson prepared to gut the attic of their 1914 Craftsman bungalow eight months later, the real treasures emerged.

Through a false ceiling panel, the couple found a stash of girlie magazines and schoolwork from the 1940s. They found a 1914 calendar swept into a crevice under the flooring. They found old negatives, which they later developed. And hidden under insulation and a piece of old newspaper, they found a 1911 postcard with a photo of Jessie W. Palmer Lucas and her infant son Calo Benton Lucas—the house’s first residents.

Dawn was hooked. “OK obsessive,” as she admits in her blog, Bungalowcious (http://www.suburbanchaos.com/journal/).

Pieces of the Puzzle

The Petersons moved into the house in Portland, Oregon, in April 2007. Last summer, they were drawing up remodeling plans and researching the permit process at the City Resource and Records counter. When they obtained copies of earlier permits and learned the names of the builder and first two owners, Dawn started to “go on the bunny trail,” she says.

She began online, with the site PortlandMaps.com, which provided many city records as well as the lot ID. The house had been re-addressed in the 1930s—not an uncommon occurrence—and discovering that made other things fall into place. She also used the census and death records on Ancestry.com and other genealogical websites to learn about the owners.

At the city registrar, she reports, “I painstakingly went through rolls and rolls of microfilm and printed out all the old deeds for the house.” This gave her the names of all the other owners and their occupancy dates. The library has a collection of Portland city directories (many of the earlier ones listed occupations and workplaces as well). She also found obituaries for 10 occupants and the builder’s family.

Armed with all this information, she sat down to prepare a timeline for the house. Now posted on her blog, the timeline lists all the former residents and information about each including birth dates, death dates, burial locations, and family events.

From a business card found in the attic, along with stacks of unused wrappers for Lucas’s Delights, the Petersons learned that the Lucas family had used the house as a candy-making shop in the 1920s, and Jessie painted roses on handmade candy boxes. The porch was insulated with 1924 newspapers, so the Petersons think the Lucases enclosed it and made a separate entrance for the candy shop.

One important source of information was the wife of Calo Lucas, the baby on the postcard. She told Dawn that Jessie had been an artist who painted landscapes of Oregon ’s Mount Hood. The Petersons—surprise!—found such a painting in the attic.

Family and Grocery History

The house at 1 Main Street, Setauket, Long Island, had been in Bev Tyler’s family for generations. When he moved there in 1950, at age 12, with his parents and brother and sister, he was too young to care about family memorabilia. But in the 1970s, after he became interested in writing local history (he currently writes a biweekly history column in the Village Times Herald), his mother showed him what they had found in the house.

His great-grandmother, Mary Swift, had married a sea captain and traveled with him to China and Japan from 1858 to 1861. The family found letters she wrote to her sister, detailing her life on the ship and in Shanghai, Nagasaki, and Yokohama. Sea chests and navigation instruments from the 19th century were found in the attic.

Bev was fascinated. Why did his great-grandparents go there—what was the big draw? He learned that Commodore Perry had just opened Japan to U.S. trade in 1854. Bev plunged into research on the time period and trade with China and Japan.

But there was more: the Tyler Brothers’ General Store was located in front of the house from 1820 to the 1930s, and the attic at 1 Main Street (since renumbered as 97 Main ) held daybooks naming all the people in the community who visited the store. Before stores had cash registers, everyone’s purchases were entered into these books, Bev says. At night, the grocers would move the information into a ledger under the shopper’s name and tally how much each one owed. People would pay monthly; farmers might pay twice a year or trade eggs, chickens, milk, or cheese. Bev donated the books to the archives of the Three Village Historical Society in Setauket and plans to do the same with the letters.

Going back even further, Bev inquired at the county clerk’s office for the deeds to the house. Before it had come into his family, the owner was Amos Smith, who had died in 1799. Bev tried to look up Smith's will, but he didn’t leave one, so officials had taken a complete inventory of his property, a 12-acre farm. “The list is wonderful,” Bev says, ranging from beds and bedding to numbers of cattle, swine, oxen, and sheep.

“The interesting part,” he adds, is that when he’d identified the earlier owner, “it turns out that Amos Smith was a relative of my wife—so she reminds me that her family lived in the house before mine did.”

Imagining their Lives

Gail Dooley moved into her century-old house in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1995. “In the first place, I am just fascinated by history—living in a house, I think about the former owners all the time and try to imagine the lives of these people,” she says.

Gail says that when you buy a house in Iowa, you’re given an abstract containing every paper that has to do with the property—even divorce papers, foreclosure documents, and wills. “It’s so, so cool,” she says. “You hold them in your hands and you know anyone who had anything to do with your house has held these papers.”

She longed to find some sort of artifact from the previous owners, but she searched for years without finding a thing. She may have missed out on renovations that could have proved fruitful in her quest—by the time she bought it, she says, the house had been modernized quite a bit. Still, she dove into research.

For years, on 1 January the Sioux City Journal would publish a list of all buildings that had been erected in the previous year. She found that Andrew Martin Haley had built the house in 1889 for $4,200. Haley was a steamboat captain and one of the oldest settlers in Sioux City. Next, she checked social columns: might they have had a housewarming party? Indeed, a few months after moving in, the Haleys threw a bash for their newly married son and his Iowa National Guard unit. The article even listed the food that was served and the games they played.

A Precious Find

Then it happened. “Last summer while in the attic, I unintentionally bumped a piece of cardboard on the floor and realized that I had exposed what seemed to be a small piece of paper,” Gail reports. “Turns out, it was a little graduation week booklet, dated 1893.”

The booklet named one of the Haley daughters, but at first Gail couldn’t tell where the school was. At the Sioux City Public Museum, she checked all local graduations; the Haley girl wasn’t there. She went back to the newspaper social columns, and there she learned that the Haley girls were attending an Episcopal school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 85 miles away.

Naturally, “I took a road trip up to Sioux Falls,” she says. In the local paper there, she found more information about the graduation week events and visited the school buildings, which are now a retirement community.

“By last summer I knew a lot about that family,” Gail says. “This particular gal, one of the things that utterly, utterly fascinates me: she moved from Sioux City to New Haven, Connecticut, a few years after graduation, and her occupation was voice teacher—which is what I am.”

A Historian Renovates

As first-time home buyers four years ago, Mark Speltz and his wife, Kari, were interested in an old Victorian. They found one in the little town of Mineral Point, Wisconsin ’s third oldest city.

Speltz is a historical researcher with American Girl, and he was eager to delve into the house’s architectural past even before they moved in. His first stop was the Mineral Point Archive, a rich source of documents. There he found an old photo, taken from a distance. It was his house, but the back was one story, instead of its current two. Someone had left a window open.

“Having found the photo really inspired me to keep going,” Speltz says. Not only that, but the archivist knew the house—she had played there as a child—and was able to supply him with the names of some previous owners.

Speltz was taking a graduate-level course in local history, so he thought, “I’ll just do my house.” This enabled him to dive deeper and get credit for it. His detailed account of his research was published in the Spring 2008 issue of the Wisconsin Magazine of History.

Speltz and his wife undertook renovations, but they never did find personal items belonging to previous owners. Speltz did, however, find architectural clues, including a signature on a beam in the attic with a date of 1902.

He also had the advantage of living in a historic small town: stories came from neighbors or sometimes strangers walking past. For example, two town residents happened to recall a story about a doctor who was killed in the house.

A Murder Mystery?

That, of course, was a little creepy. “At first, my wife was sort of surprised and a little uneasy,” Speltz says. “We didn’t want to know which room.” But it was not uncommon for people to die in old homes. To pass away at home, surrounded by family, is “the way it should be,” Speltz says.

Only not quite this way. The Mineral Point Tribune reported in 1909 that Dr. Simon P. Deahofe, the house’s second owner, had committed suicide after learning that his sick wife would probably not live long.

Yet the rumor persisted that Deahofe had been killed by his wife’s sister, who was visiting at the time. The wife recovered quickly—the newspaper reported that she took a sleigh ride two weeks later—and lived another 41 years, according to Speltz.

He searched hard for further information or police records, but found nothing. He also tried to find Deahofe’s descendants, but the last family member has died. At this point, he’s ready to let the mystery rest.

Lasting Ties

Now that they’ve finished the renovations, the house is on the market. The idea of leaving is bittersweet. When you uncover personal stories and know its past, Speltz says, “The house takes on meaning.”

The new buyer will get a pile of information. But if Speltz had received such a chronicle when he bought it, would that have taken the fun out of it? He laughs.

“Me personally, as a researcher and a historian, I love digging and finding those details,” Speltz admits. Still, he wouldn’t mind having something to start with, next time.

House Genealogy

For all their avid digging on behalf of their homes, neither Dawn Peterson nor Gail Dooley feels the same pull to work on her own family history. In both cases other relatives have taken on that role.

Since Gail is not from Iowa —she’s a Southerner—doing research on the house and its previous families gives her a connection to the area, she says; it’s like her own genealogy there.

The first family lives vividly in her imagination. She knows that the house next door was built by the Haleys’ eldest daughter, and she thinks about the mother and daughter “running across the driveway to visit each other.”

Peterson’s favorite house-ancestors are clearly the candy-making Lucases. “They seem to have the most colorful past,” she says. The family also has its share of links to Dawn's present. Since she's a graphic designer and Jeremy is a photographer, it’s nice to think the house was once a studio. And Dawn likes to bake sweets and goodies, too.

When visiting Jessie Lucas’s daughter-in-law this June, she learned of a further coincidence. Jessie was born 1,800 miles away, in Owatonna, Minnesota—as Dawn puts it, “a.k.a. Nowheresville”—which happens to be Jeremy’s hometown. Now Dawn is envisioning Thanksgiving research possibilities when she and her husband visit Minnesota this fall.

“I may work up the courage to call up some other living relatives as well,” she notes on her blog. But she admits it’s awkward because house genealogy isn’t considered to be as important as family genealogy. “No, I’m not related to these people, but I find a great need to preserve their stories with this house,” she writes. “Blame it on the [HGTV] show If These Walls Could Talk.”

This work copyright 2008 MyFamily.com, Inc., all rights reserved. To see this work in its original context and to view others like it, visit www.ancestry.com.

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