One of my favorite closing gifts for a client who just purchased a historic home in Jacksonville was a sweet booklet of their home’s history. They were so thankful of this thoughtful gift and can’t wait to start making their own memories in their lovely new home.
I love learning about history. I’ve visited over 50 National Parks and Historic Sites, and hundreds of museums all over the country. I studied history at Rutgers University and later at the University of Florida during my graduate work. I dedicated most of my career to working with museums, cultural institutions, and historic preservation. Research feels like settling in with a comfy blanket and hot cup of tea — it feels like home.
What better way to use my self-proclaimed history-nerd status in my real estate career than to deep dive into the history of a client’s home? It is not as daunting as it may seem. I have a few easy steps to set you on your way to learning more about your home, too!
Where to Start?
Is your home a contributing structure to a National Historic District? If so, the City of Jacksonville, as well as the State of Florida, will have what is called a Florida Master Site File (FMSF) on your home. The FMSF often includes a lot of the basics about your home, including the year it was constructed, the architect and builder, and the important architectural features. Jacksonville’s residential areas on the National Register of Historic Places are Durkee Gardens, Old Ortega, Riverside/Avondale, Springfield, and Downtown.
On the website for the Historic Preservation Section at the City of Jacksonville, you can find lists of contributing structures by address for Riverside/Avondale and Springfield. You can also call their office to see if they can provide access to a site file in any of Jacksonville’s National Historic Districts. Riverside Avondale Preservation has many of their site files scanned and they have a vertical file on almost every home in the district, which sometimes contains more than just the site file. The Springfield Improvement Association & Archives actually has the site files for that district scanned and available for online access, which makes research so much easier!
Next Steps!
Visit the Special Collections at Jacksonville Public Library downtown for some deep diving into research. This is where things get fun! One really great resource is the Sanborn Insurance Maps, which you can find online in several places. However, there is nothing like leafing through the huge old books and the secrets they hold in person. The image to the right is just a small section of one of the largest books you will ever behold. They have to place the book in a cradle in order for you to use it.
The Sanborn Maps were maps were designed to assist fire insurance agents in determining property hazards and they are a treasure trove of information. They show the size, shape, stories, and construction of dwellings, commercial buildings, and factories as well as fire walls, locations of windows and doors, sprinkler systems, and the uniform nature of them showed changes of the buildings over time. If you shine a light through the back of a page like the one to the right, you can see alterations to the buildings directly pasted on top of the map. I felt like a history spy from National Treasure when I learned that secret!
The downtown library also holds old City Directories where you can search by address, find the name of the person living there, then search by name, and often find all the people living in the household and their occupations. Be aware! Some addresses have changed over time. So, pay attention to the cross streets when you are doing your address search in a city directory!
The library also has various newspapers on file where more prominent buildings were listed under the building construction activity sections. These newspapers have their own directories which can help you narrow down your search before you hop on the microfilm machine and start zooming away.
Additional City Rescues
On the City Property Appraiser’s website, search for your home address, then scroll down the page to the Sales History section. Find the most recent transfer of the property and click the book/page number link. You will be directed to an image of the deed located on the COJ Clerk of Courts website. Within each deed is Property Description that references a Book and Page number for the historic City of Jacksonville Plat Maps (see image top left for an example).
Now, visit the Clerk of Court website and search by Book/Page. In the example above, I would search for Book 2, Page 4. Then click on the Plat Map results and voila, winner, winner chicken dinner - you now have a copy of the plat map for your neighborhood. For this particular home, you would look for Block 80, Lot 5. That is where the historic property is located. I also had a nice print of this plat map framed for my client as another special closing gift.
Another avenue at the city that is a little more daunting than others is researching your building permit and plans, if they exist. These are located in the building department. Call their offices first to make an appointment. This takes a lot of time going through microfilm to locate and there may be nothing at all to find, so it is all about patience.
Ancestry.com
Finally, and this is not accessible for everyone, but if you do have an Ancestry.com account, that is a really great way to find out even more information about the people who lived in your home. You can do a reverse search with an address by year. Again, make sure you have the right address because they did change over time in many cases.
For this example, I found the correct address in the City Directories by looking at the cross streets. Then I searched the historic address in Ancestry.com and found the 1910 and 1920 census records, which listed every household member, their age, where they were born, where their parents were born, their occupation, relation to the head of household, and more. This is the 1920 census which shoes that eleven people lived in this home in Springfield. ELEVEN! There was a man and his wife, his three children, one son-in-law, three grandchildren, and his sister in law and her son. This is a 2032 sf house! Some couples want a house that big to themselves these days!
I hope this information was helpful to you. If you start your journey in historic research and get stuck, reach out to me! I would love to help and get nerdy about history with you.