Every House Has a Story: My Conversation with GenFriends
I recently sat down with host Cheri Hudson Passey and her panel of professional genealogists on the GenFriends Genealogy Chat Show to talk about a subject I never get tired of – researching the history of a house. You can watch the full conversation, “Researching House Histories with Marian Pierre-Louis,” on the GenFriends YouTube channel.
If you’re not familiar with GenFriends, it’s a weekly YouTube show where Cheri and a panel of professional genealogists welcome guests, dig into research topics, and keep tabs on genealogy TV. For this episode, the panel included Melissa Barker (The Archive Lady), Jenny Hawran (Like Herding Cats Genealogy), Laura Hedgecock (Treasure Chest of Memories), and Dr. Shelley Viola Murphy (Family Tree Girl). A lively group with a lot of good questions.
Why houses, and not just names on a chart
We started with how I got into this work in the first place. I grew up in Connecticut in a town with one of the highest concentrations of historic houses in the state, in a household where genealogy was simply part of daily life. Houses turned out to be the perfect complement to that. They’re physical, tangible proof that someone stood in this exact spot a hundred or two hundred years ago. A gravestone works the same way. It’s not your ancestor, but it marks the moment and place where the family gathered to say goodbye.
Building a talk around one house
One thing the panel wanted to know was how I prepare talks for different towns and historical societies. Rather than give a generic presentation, I research an actual house in each town I’m speaking to. It’s more work – I’ve given roughly 21 house history talks in the past six months alone – but it means the audience is learning about the exact record types, quirks, and gaps they’ll actually run into in their own town’s archives. It also allows me to become broadly familiar with researching in a wider geographic area.
Where the research actually starts
For anyone wanting to try this themselves, we walked through the process: deed research comes first, always. You work backward from the present, just as you would in genealogical research, proving each change of ownership. From there it’s old maps (starting broad, at the whole-town level, then zooming in), census records, probate files, and building surveys.Regional differences matter too – deed language, local materials like granite versus sandstone, even architectural details can point to exactly where a builder learned his trade.
The house as part of a neighborhood
One of my favorite threads in the conversation was about widening the lens past a single house to an entire street. I’m currently working on a project researching every house on one street, along with the church that anchors it, and mapping how families overlapped and connected over time. Genealogists tend to research people in a vacuum; house history is a natural way to put them back into the community they actually lived in.
We also talked about the value of oral history and the sheer luck of a good doorstep encounter including a story about knocking on the door of my own great-grandfather’s former farmhouse in upstate New York and being welcomed in for a tour by the owners.
If you’ve ever driven past an old house and wondered who lived there, what they built it with, or what the neighborhood looked like when it went up, this conversation is for you.
Watch the full episode: GenFriends Genealogy Chat Show: Researching House Histories with Marian Pierre-Louis
Have you researched the history of your own house? I’d love to hear what you found.
