Customer Reviews

Houses and Homes: Exploring Their History (American Association for State and Local History Book Series)

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Whether you're interested in researching a house's history to start a historic neighborhood society or to aid your genealogical research, you'll find great details here for how to determine the age of a home.

The book explains how changes in technology and the American landscape affected home construction. Rooms used to have multiple functions until the Victorian era, when they became more specialized and each room acquired a specific function. Some functional rooms, such as the 'family room' and the garage would not appear until the end of WWII, as a result of the baby boom and increased mobility.

You will learn about common building methods and how homes in specific regions were affected by cultural and environmental influences.

There are also interesting anecdotes about unusual discoveries... such as the story about the woman who was puzzled about groove marks in the floor of a room, until she learned that the building had once been a dentist office, and the dentist used to roll the dental chair across the floor in that spot.

Each chapter contains a useful bibliography, and the section on finding written records is good too.