Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In the hallway of her Georgian home in Esher, Surrey, Irene Jeffrey has a framed photograph taken in the early 1900s. A smartly dressed girl, perhaps 10 years old, sits in a pony and trap alongside an older woman, staring directly at the camera. They are in front of what is now Jeffrey’s house, with its bay window, orangery, and an arbour in the front garden. The photo had been given to her by the house’s previous owners, but the girl’s identity was unknown.Jeffrey, her husband and three children moved into the house in 2011. They aimed to restore the 220-year-old property to its former glory but when the renovation was complete in 2017, they felt there was something missing. “We’d restored the house, but I didn’t have the story,” says Jeffrey. “It has been part of so many families, so I was desperate to know more. I wanted to know who that little girl was.”As a present from her family, Jeffrey was given a coffee table book-style history of the house written by historian and A House Through Time co-author Melanie Backe-Hansen. “My focus is on the stories of people. For most houses, people don’t have a clue when it was built, or who lived there,” says Backe-Hansen. “It’s telling the story of the life of a house.”Genealogy has been a booming business for more than 20 years. According to Ancestry.com, over 100mn family trees have been made using their site alone. This interest has spread to our homes, with the digitisation of records making it easier to access information. In response to rising public demand, organisations such as The Library of Congress and Historic England have produced guidance for those seeking to find out about their properties. “Researching the history of a house requires a considerable amount of detective work,” says a spokesperson for Historic England. “The amount of information available will vary greatly from property to property.”Backe-Hansen is one of a growing number of experts who can be commissioned to do this “detective work”, trawling records and archives to piece together the story of a home and its residents. These histories can take different forms. US site HouseNovel, for example, started in 2022 as an “Ancestry.com or Wikipedia of homes”, allowing users to upload historical data and property stories. Now, husband-and-wife team Amanda Zielike and David Decker also produce bespoke house histories which are more narrative driven.Backe-Hansen takes a personal-meets-architectural approach: compiling a history of a home, presenting it in a neat PDF report or in a hardback book, sometimes hundreds of pages long. Histories tend to include details of former residents identified from census data, newspaper reports, archival material such as maps or photographs and sales records.“Television programmes such as the BBC documentary A House Through Time have fostered interest, because it showed people that it is possible, and that you can find out a lot,” says Cathy Soughton, a house historian and genealogist who has run Benchmark House Histories with photographer Carol Fulton since 2010. “They are growing in popularity.” “They’re very special places, houses,” adds Fulton. “You feel such a connection and an emotional attachment to your home — you want to look after it, like you would a member of your family or someone you love. It’s like a person in bricks. [Houses] are part of our lives, part of our history.”The oldest properties Benchmark has researched have dated back to the 1300s, while the newest is 1930s. “We’ve done Victorian terraces, thatched cottages, mills, rectories, old schools, castles — you name it,” says Fulton. “Every house has a history.” Investigations can take months (usually between two and six, in Benchmark’s case). Much depends on how well records have survived, which can vary wildly, even for neighbouring houses. Information might have been lost or destroyed. But, says Soughton, “we can always find something.”The opposite is also true. Soughton and Fulton worked on a solicitor’s office in Lancashire where they were given 300 boxes of fully indexed archival material dating back to 1866, including wallpaper and fabric fragments, drawings and photos. Luckily, a local archivist was able to advise on the most relevant boxes. “Otherwise it would have taken us forever,” says Soughton. Prices range from “a couple of thousand pounds” for an overview of a 19th-century house, says Backe-Hansen, to “over £10,000” for a comprehensive history of a sprawling country estate. At Etsy shop MyHoustory, run by historian Madeleine Oldale, prices for a printed report and “house family tree” span from £60 to £100, while HouseNovel’s premium package costs $999.The power of storytelling is not lost on estate agents. Backe-Hansen previously worked as an in-house historian at Chestertons and continues to produce histories for estate agencies. “The history is part of a house’s story. People are valuing that more,” she says. “People like to be able to touch and see the history of a house,” says Oliver Custance Baker, head of estate agency Strutt & Parker’s national country house department. “It’s something tangible that they can really understand, and provides a huge amount of interest.” At Great Tangley Manor in Surrey, for example, currently on the market, the windows were engraved by several members of the royal family in the early 20th century. “Owners see themselves as somebody who is going to pass it on to the next custodian,” says Custance Baker. This idea of custodianship is prominent among Soughton’s clients: “They see themselves as one link in the chain of the history of the house,” she agrees. One client, Elizabeth, who preferred not to give her surname, has lived in her rural Huntingdonshire home for 25 years, and had always “wondered what the walls would say if they could talk”. Last year, after renovating, her husband commissioned a house history from Benchmark. “It was a nice way of commemorating the new rebirth.”Elizabeth discovered that her house, built around 1780, had once been owned by a cousin of Lord Lucan, the fugitive peer who vanished after killing his family’s nanny in 1974. During the second world war, it had been requisitioned and used as RAF Bomber Command headquarters; both Elizabeth and her husband’s fathers had been in Bomber Command. “I wonder if our fathers came here or met here. It’s an interweaving of fate and history,” she says. “The book reads a little bit like watching the TV show Who Do You Think You Are? It puts everything into perspective and reaffirms why you liked it.”“You never know what you’re going to find,” says Soughton. “I compare doing house histories to doing complicated jigsaws where you haven’t got all the pieces. You’re trying to [find them and] match them together.” Working on one 16th-century cottage in the Cotswolds, Backe-Hansen found that it had belonged to Queen Elizabeth I. It then passed to her physician, Roderigo Lopez, who was convicted of treason and executed, supposedly for plotting to poison her. One of the house’s later owners was a merchant in France during the French Revolution; he became friends with Thomas Jefferson and Mary Wollstonecraft. “It was an amazing story,” she says.Backe-Hansen also researched a house in Gloucestershire where the owners “swore blind” that they had seen the ghost of a woman walking through their drawing room. A medium had given them a name: Edith. “As it happens, I did find an Edith Theyer who lived in the house during [her childhood] in the 19th century,” says Backe-Hansen. “Nothing tragic happened as far as I found: she later got married, moved to Gloucester and had children. Why do they feel she was haunting her childhood home? I don’t know.”These people trod the floorboards that we tread; they slept in rooms that we’re sleeping in. It’s quite moving. The nation’s history is there in the history of your propertyThere are also plenty of scandals, fights over inheritance and intrigue. Benchmark investigated a former convalescent home that opened in 1910. One of its residents, a young woman, had been hit by a train. The references to her death were brief. To Soughton, this seemed odd: usually, Edwardian newspaper reports were detailed. “Maybe there had been a cover-up,” she says. “The home had recently opened and it was aimed at more middle-class patients. They didn’t want to put people off sending their relatives there.”“Unfortunately, you do come across sad or tragic stories,” Soughton adds. “I say to clients: do you want to know everything that we find, good and bad?” Benchmark researched a thatched cottage where they discovered that the owner’s daughter had “expired” in the garden in the late 1800s. “[The client] asked us not to put that in the book. She had two young children and wanted to give them a copy when they were older.” To Soughton, though, births and deaths are part of the life of a house. “It’s inevitable that people would have died there.”While properties with famous connections are striking, it’s often the stories of ordinary people that are most captivating. “We reveal the stories of people that have been lost in time, or are not recorded in the history books,” says Backe-Hansen. “100 years ago, they weren’t deemed important, but delving through the archives now, you can find amazing stories of seemingly ordinary people.”In 2023, Alexander, who preferred not to give his surname, commissioned a history of his listed Georgian property in Camberwell as a gift for his wife. Although he’d “secretly hoped that Queen Victoria had stayed there”, when he read the history, it was another, more everyday resident he was struck by. A woman called Mary Spence had lived at the house for 48 years between 1799 and 1847, her husband having died young. She died in the house, age 91, “deservedly possessing the respect and esteem of her neighbours”, according to a newspaper report. “These people trod the floorboards that we tread; they slept in rooms that we’re sleeping in. It’s quite moving,” he says. “The nation’s history is there in the history of your property.”“Looking into the past is a way of understanding oneself: the forces that have shaped us and how we are in the present. It roots us with a sense of belonging,” agrees psychoanalytic psychotherapist Andrew Browne. “The person changes the home, but so often, the home also changes the person.”Jeffrey was able to finally discover the name of the girl in her photo: Violet Burrows. Her family and their servants had moved into the house in 1897, and Violet was born shortly after. Her parents lived at the house for 65 years until their deaths. Violet, meanwhile, married a farmer when she was 28 and moved to Oxfordshire.But the story stretched back beyond that. Built in 1805, the house had also been home to a naval captain in the 1840s, a celebrated Victorian sportswriter, and a second world war hero awarded the Military Cross. The house had three different names. But mainly, it had been a family home. Jeffrey’s family were only the fourth owners in more than 120 years. “Knowing that that little girl is Violet, I feel more connected to the house. I feel part of its story, rather than looking in on it,” says Jeffrey. “It’s got a soul to it. I don’t think we treat houses with enough respect. We just bash them around, rather than seeing them as a little bit of our tenure and looking after them.” And adding to their story. Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
