If you are researching in an urban area, are you aware if the house numbers were changed at any point during your research time period?
Are the contemporary numbers different from what they were during the time your ancestor lived there?
Location matters.
And if you don’t have the answers to these questions, start with the reference section of the town/city library and go from there.
4 Responses
Goid idea, it does help.
Found that out when I went to Chehalis, Washington looking for my gg grandparents home went to city hall they looked it up for me, they even found where they moved to after that, got to get pictures of the farm that they had before moving to town
Excellent point. Last week, when researching an address, I found that the street had been completely renamed. I never considered the effect of the renaming of streets that they do now affecting genealogy. But it makes trying to see where your ancestors actually lived a bit difficult.
My city library has city directories thru the years. While researching my neighborhood, I noticed that during the WW II era, several houses in my block had more than one house number (?housing shortage). After the war years the houses reverted to single dwellings, but the house number was not always the same as the one prior to the war.
Also, original street names and numbers were changed when areas were taken into the city.