So what will I do with this information? First I am going to contact the current owner of the Harper Home to see if she can verify where the 1854 purchase information came from. If she does not know, I will go to the library and look through the Deed Index to see if I can find William Harper purchasing the land from Murdock and Dickson. If I can locate the deed it will verify that Murdock owned the land prior to the date I had in mind, and it also may provide further clues within the deed as to when Murdock himself purchased the land. Keeps your eyes open as you browse through newspapers. You never know when a clue may pop out.

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When researching the history of a house or property, historic newspapers are sometimes overlooked as a resource. Not only can the papers provide some historical context for what was going on in the community when the house was built, they also are a great place to look for your property owners. It was through newspaper ads that I was able to ascertain that the farm I have been researching was put up for public auction. Google has an archive of the newspapers that it has digitized, and you can find the link here. Look for newspapers from your town or community, and you will see the issues that are offered on the site. Once you have clicked on the link for your local paper, simply enter the address or even just the street name you are researching and see what pops up. Also search for the names of your property owners to see if they are mentioned in the papers. You just might be surprised!

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I continued working my way backwards through the directories with Graham, and when he no longer appeared I used the earlier census records to find out who was living in the home. At this point I have established that Rudolph Huelke owned the home in 1920, and that he registered for the draft in 1918 listing the same home as his address. The family that appears in the 1910 census is shown to be renting the home. That means I need to look for Huelke as a grantee from 1910 through 1918.

In the meantime I have continued my pursuit of John J. Murdock, and I will update my most recent findings in the next post.

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A couple of years ago I began researching the history of a house that we own and use for our business in Shrewsbury, Missouri, which is a suburb of St. Louis. Because I have run into a number of challenges in my research, I thought it might be helpful to let you know the approach that I have taken in case it can be of assistance to you in your research. According to St. Louis County, the house was built in 1900. While that information gives me a starting point, the date used by the county is only an estimate. The house could have been built earlier, but it took until 1900 for the tax assessor to document the house for tax purposes. In fact, we had an addition put on the house several years ago, and the contractor said that based upon the construction materials (most notably the nails) used in the original house, he would date it at pre-1900. That information gives me an additional clue as to when the house was built.

The land upon which the house sits was part of a farm owned by John J. Murdock (also spelled Murdoch), who purportedly was a General in the Civil War. I will write more about John Murdock in a future post, as he was quite an interesting fellow (though not a General or any kind of officer in the war). Just under 300 acres of the Murdock land was ultimately obtained by Farrar & Co, who formed the Shrewsbury Park Land and Improvement Company. They filed their first plat with the county for part of the land in 1889, dividing it up into predominantly 50′ x 150′ lots which they offered for sale at the cost of $100 per lot. Our property is part of this first subdivision. The best way to determine land ownership is to trace the deed transactions on the land. In St. Louis County there is an index – sort of – to the grantors (sellers of the land) as well as the grantees (buyers of the land). The reason that I say “sort of” is because while the index is in alphabetical order, it only sorts by the first letter of the name. So in order to look for Shrewsbury Park and Land Improvement Company I have to look through ALL of the names beginning with S. The first issue I ran into is that the Shrewsbury Park and Land Improvement Company sold LOTS of land. There was no way for me to know what piece of property was being sold without looking at the microfilm of each and every deed. And I didn’t even know for certain which year to look at. Knowing that I might not have enough years left in my life to follow through with that approach, I decided to attack the issue from the other end.

In St. Louis County you can go online to the county government website, enter your address and obtain a list of the last few deed transfers. In my case, I was able to see the grantors and the grantees back to 1985. If your county has this search available to you, it can shave many years off your research of the deeds.  Again, since I don’t know when the couple listed in 1985 bought the house, it would have been very time consuming to go through the grantee index year by year. So I turned to some other genealogical resources to help me narrow down the years. I will discuss my next steps in a subsequent blog post.

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How does this help the house researcher?  Here is an example. I am researching a property in Shrewsbury, Missouri that was once part of John Murdoch’s farm. I knew that Murdoch had been a partner of Charles K. Dickson in an auctioneer company in downtown St. Louis. When Dickson died, Murdoch was responsible for the debt of the partnership. I wondered if he had literally lost the farm when he lost his business. By entering John J Murdoch  in the search bar, I received the following result.

It is not important that you be able to read this, but you can see that I can look at all the highlighted words to ascertain if it is about my property. On the left hand side of  the page it shows which book this came from, and whether the book is available to borrow, purchase or read online. In this case the ebook version is free, and I can download the book if I want to do so. While you cannot copy the text from the website, you can select PrtScr on the keyboard of your pc (Shift+Option+3 on a Mac), which captures a screen shot of what you are looking at. That is what I did with the image above. You can then paste the screen shot into a program such as Microsoft Word or a photo editing program so that you can save it. I also copy the website link and paste it next to the screen capture so that I can remember where I found the source.

If you use the Advanced Search option you can narrow your results significantly. For example I could enter John Murdoch plus the subject line of St. Louis to eliminate all the other John Murdochs out there. Since there are a lot of John Murdochs who appear in a regular Google search, this feature is very helpful. You can also add a range of years to help narrow down the search results. Don’t forget to use alternate spellings as well. John Murdoch is often listed as John Murdock, so I always look for the name both ways. Try searching for the name of your street, subdivision or community as well. My search resulted in the information that John Murdoch did indeed lose the farm. This information gives me a clue as to when I should be looking for a purchaser of the land.

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