I have been attempting to research old houses and the like in my area and I have been finding it difficult at times. One I have specifically been having difficulty with is the first 200 years or so of history regarding Belvedere House located in Drumbo, Northern Ireland. I was wondering if you could pass on some tips and maybe help me in my research into the origins of the house previously mentioned. Thank you in advance.
Hello there. I had a similar project to do for university and my lecturer told me that county libraries and record offices were always a good place to start. At my local library those documents are stored in a downstairs area. And they also have maps and loads of local history texts. I think it's a good place to start.
Hi.
Local, specific history like this can be hard to track down sometimes, but if you have access to the public archives or records in your area - usually held in the local library or perhaps town hall - you can find out a lot there. In particular, there will be bills of sale, taxation records, land grants that can help you piece together the history of the house.
From the bills of sale you should be able to find the family name of earlier or even original occupants. Then you can expand that information into constructing a picture of the lives of people who lived there. For information on the occupants again, try town records. If that fails, scour the birth/death registers of your local parish. Barring a fire or something, they should have invaluable information on the people themselves - names, age, perhaps even occupation.
But like I said, start with your local public archives or town library. As they said in V for Vendetta, "The same is true of every country: their most reliable records are tax records."
Does Ireland have the concept of Land Title or title insurance? Throughout most of America we do and a title searcher would be able to provide a good jumping off point with a chain of custody back to the land patent.
Contact a title insurance company! Or go to your local Register of Deeds and ask them for help (your mileage may vary, they may refer you to a title insurance company).
In my part of WI title searchers double check 60 years worth of deeds for the specific properties their companies are going to insure, but could go all the way back to the Land Patent (where the government granted the land). This will give you lots of names of the owners, and a good jumping off point in terms of names of families who owned the land, etc. If you can find an abstract for the property, it will save a lot of work and give you the whole property history back to the land patent.
All it would take is a property address to find the tax bill, from there it should have the property description listed (Lot 3 of x subdivision, a metes and bounds description, etc.) and from there you could track all the deeds back on the property. A chain of custody can certainly be insightful, as it may show if the land was inherited (was it divided up among 6 children?), approximate death dates, divorces, etc.