Researching Your Home

FOR A DEEPER DIVE INTO RESEARCHING YOUR HOME …

There are many primary and secondary resources online and within Arlington. However, many of their user interfaces were designed for professionals who were already acquainted with the data; instructions may be confusing for beginners, and ‘help’ screens are few. Consider the following to be sites well worth visiting and, with study and help, the beginning of a fascinating journey into local history.

Real Estate Sources
Deeds, mortgages, and all other public documents pertaining to Arlington real estate are copied and preserved at the Middlesex County (South District) Registry of Deeds in Cambridge. Recorded documents date from the 1630s to present. In spite of what the search page says, the principal transaction indexes of grantors and grantees can be reliably searched online only from the 1970s forward. Images of specific documents can be retrieved by their “book and page” numbers. About a century of these images are online. Prior to that, and to consult the earlier indexes, you’ll need to visit in person during business hours. By analyzing these documents, a researcher can establish the history of a property's ownership.

Wills of the deceased, inventories of their earthly goods, and lists of their next of kin are part of the records within the Middlesex Probate and Family Court in Woburn. The Probate Registry contains all the index books of cases by names and time back to the 17th century, but only the most recent 30 years of physical cases. At this writing, the way to request the papers in a probate docket before 1990 is to call the court at (617) 225-0781, and ask to have your case placed on the “order list”. The week’s orders are dispatched Friday afternoons and take about 10 days to return to Woburn. Expect a call or email when your papers arrive, and be ready to examine them; ordered cases are returned to their off-site repository after a week.

Some historic probate records have been collected by the Commonwealth from familysearch.org or americanancestors.org. Access to both is free when you create an account.

For deep genealogical research, the Commonwealth’s Registry of Vital Records and Statistics has records of births, deaths and marriages from 1931 to present. You can push that horizon back another 90 years to 1841 through the Commonwealth Archives.

Atlases and Plans

Robbins Library owns Arlington atlases, with notations of the homesteads of residents, dating from 1872, 1898, 1922, 1923 and. There's also a Zoning Plan map from 1933 that can be helpful. The Registry of Deeds has the same atlases, plus 1900 and 1901. Robbins also has microfilm copies of the marvelous Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps from 1885 to 1927 (more editions are in the Library of Congress.) Street by street, structure by structure, Sanborn mapped America for the benefit of insurance underwriters. For a local idea of what a Sanborn Map portrays, here's a vendor offering pages from the Arlington edition of 1923. The online images can be expanded for greater detail.

Representations of some 17th and 18th century maps of Menotomy are found in Digital Commonwealth. The O.H. Bailey panoramic map (1884) is famous for its bird’s eye view of Arlington; it was created entirely from field notes and ground-level sketches!

People and Businesses

Town Directories, 1869-1940 (with gaps): Lately, Robbins has scanned and shared with Internet Archive a wealth of resources once available only in the Local History Room (4th Floor, with special rules for admittance and handling of items.) I especially appreciate the 19th century Town Directories (almost always entitled "City Directory" by their publishers) and the "True List" annual town censuses. Be aware that, when street names and numbers were being invented, they changed frequently. Remember also that, like the U. S. Census, the True List began as a "head-of household" enumeration and women are often unseen until widowhood. 

The Robbins Library has compiled a single text-searchable database of historic town documents and publications, including town directories, Arlington High School yearbooks, town annual reports, and the “True List” town census at https://archive.org/details/robbinslibrary

Another valuable local resource is the Arlington Historical Society Online Archive.  In addition to being useful for obtaining photographs of houses or information about builders and inhabitants, the Historical Society and the Jason Russell House and Museum are a wonderful way to learn about Arlington’s colorful history.

Robbins Library’s digitizations of  Historical Arlington Newspapers includes not just the Arlington Advocate (1871-2005), but also its one-time competitors the “News”, the “Daily News”, the “Press” and the “Enterprise”. This incomparable resource was made possible in 2022 by generous sponsors, and we owe them our thanks.

Also at Robbins Library are the Annual Reports of the Town of Arlington, 1842 to Present. From the 1840s to the 1870s, Annual Reports record the property tax rate and the total tax assessed upon all taxpayers. After adjusting for poll taxes, you can sometimes spot the acquisition of a homestead by a jump in someone's tax bill. After the 1870s, you can look up each structure and its valuation by taxpayer. This will reveal, for example, the house built in 1895, and the barn that was added in 1901. After about 1910, these individual listings aren't included in the town reports.

Neighborhood Surveys and Histories

Books that delve deeply into Arlington history and some of the town’s neighborhoods:

• JM Goldson preservation survey - a treatise on research, as well as data compiled on homes located south of Arlington High Schools in areas developed from 1890 through the 1930s.

The following titles are available from Robbins Library - sources for Arlington history are found at call number 974.44 ARL

• History of the Town of Arlington, Massachusetts 1637-1879 by Benjamin
  Cutter (1880)

• Town of Arlington, Past and Present 1637 to 1907 by Charles S. Parker (1909)

• Images of America: Arlington (1997) and Arlington: Twentieth Century
  Reflections (2000), both by Richard A. Duffy

• Ice, Crops and Commuters: South and East Arlington's Historical and
  Architectural Heritage

• Northwest Arlington, Massachusetts: An Architectural and Historical Study

• Mill Brook Valley: An Historical and Architectural Survey (the above
  three studies all prepared by the Arlington Historical Commission)

• The great swamp of Arlington, Belmont, and Cambridge: an historic
  perspective of its development, 1630-2001 compiled by Sheila G. Cook
  (2002). HIST. COLL. 363.7394 GR
  

Books and Sites about Home Architecture

• A field guide to American houses: the definitive guide to identifying and understanding America's domestic architecture. By Virginia McAlester. (Available at Robbins Library). This is a “go-to” book for understanding domestic architectural styles and history.

• American House Styles is a good and comprehensive guide to the historical sweep of architectural styles in America, from the producers of This Old House.

• The Sears archive of the homes they sold depicts America’s evolving middle-class taste in architecture.

• Drawing Toward Home: Designs for Domestic Architecture From Historic New England

• At Home: Historic Houses of Eastern Massachusetts

• History Cambridge (Formerly Cambridge Historical Society)

• "Find A Grave" Arlington MA

• Cemetery Plot Search (in Arlington MA)

• Building Permits in Arlington MA

United States Census

What used to require hours of scrolling microfilm at the Boston Public Library, or at the regional Federal Records Center of the National Archives on Trapelo Road in Waltham is now online. The seventeenth decennial survey (1950) is the most recently released. Family Search has published a helpful guide. 

• Enumeration District Maps for Arlington, 1950: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/12549101

• Finding enumeration Districts (EDs): https://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html

• https://stevemorse.org/ has a number of resources, 

• https://www.censustools.com/find-a-census-listing-by-street-address/

• https://stevemorse.org/census/changes/ArlingtonChanges.htm
  

©2024 A. Michael Ruderman. All rights reserved. Published with permission by the Arlington Historical Commission.