Oh, and I checked Zillow, and the house I grew up in is now worth over $2M. Insane. My parents sold it in 1976 or 77 for $60K.
This isn’t supposed to be a reply to JaneDoe specifically (should be to the OP)…hit reply in the wrong place and can’t figure out how to change that.
I like the idea of putting a note in their mailbox from you with contact info. Though small towns seem to be more “friendly” where people showing up unannounced is a little more accepted, you just never know.
I have visited the street I grew up on a few times over the years, and wanted to go knock on the door as well. I wanted to know how the interior looked…any changes or whatnot. I also thought they may be interested to know that my dad helped design and build the house with an architect friend of his, and I even helped with a few things when it was in the building stages (I was a young kid, so nothing too difficult). I never got up the courage to knock though, and it didn’t occur to me at the time to leave a note.
But then I looked the house up on Zillow a few years back, and there were numerous photos of every part of the house. It had been updated and remodeled, but the exterior is still the same. New landscaping too. There were a few changes I wasn’t too keen on, but overall it looked real nice. I never got the chance to show my dad, as he passed away before I found the images…he would have been interested to see that.
I looked my childhood home up and was horrified at the changes. Drop ceilings covering the lovely open beamed rafters that Dad used to stain every couple of years. All of the trees had been cut down to allow toy haulers and semi trucks parking in the front yard, and the lovely green backyard of my childhood didn’t have a single one of the plants Mom planted, instead it was all gravel covered with dog shit.
I’m sorry I did it, as they say “you can’t go back home again”.
That must have been disappointing to see. Yeah, I guess it’s a risk you take. But the good memories you have of your home will always remain, at least. 
I once went to a garage sale at the house I lived in from the middle of high school until I moved out after college (my parents sold it and left the state about 10 years after that). I told the owners that I had lived there and the man invited me in for a tour. They had glassed in a screen porch and combined an office and powder room to make a little suite for his mother-in-law who lived with them, but there weren’t really any other changes.
My father had planted and propagated a lot of pachysandra in the back yard of that house, and when he died, his best friend asked the owners for a few plants to bring to my dad’s funeral. He gave them to my mom and sister and me to plant at our own houses. That’s one of the nicest things anybody has ever done for me.
I lived in England for a few years in the '80s, and when my husband and I brought our daughter there in 2018, I wrote a letter to the current owners of the house introducing myself, telling my story, and asking if they’d mind letting me take a look around. They never responded.
Probably the best way to assuage such suspicions is to bring old photos of you at the house (as @Ulfreida’s guests did). Sure, it’s possible to fake old photos, but that seems like an awful lot of work to do just to case a house for a burglary.
This is a picture I took a few years ago of my grandma’s old house, where I spent many years of my young life. I wanted to knock, but didn’t dare (also, they’ve built a cage around the front porch).
I’m pleased to see there’s a bit of info on Zillow as well. They’ve fenced the back yard and expanded the driveway, I see, but from what I can see of the rest of the neighborhood, not much has changed. Yay!
I grew up on a farm. It was old when I lived there (probably built around the turn of the century. The last century.)
Anyway, it is empty but not abandoned (no one lives there, but people do come and go rarely. What they’re doing, nobody knows.) After asking around with the guy that runs the dump (if anyone would know…) and knocking at the new hose built in the field to no answer, we just decided to go walking around. There was a gate, and yes it was technically trespassing, but away we went.
It was really sad. The building weren’t that great when I lived there, but they really had deteriorated. The house windows were wide open, as was the roof of the barn. We didn’t go inside any buildings (that was a line of trespassing I didn’t feel like crossing).
If someone was living there, I wouldn’t have had any qualms about knocking. Even now, it isn’t the kind of area that shoots first.
About five years ago, my doorbell rang on a Sunday morning. There was an older gentleman at the door, who asked me how well I knew one of my neighbors (across the street, and one door down). I confessed that I didn’t really know that neighbor – a single guy, who very much kept to himself. About the only time I ever saw him was when he had been outside, walking his dog – after the dog apparently passed away, I didn’t remember ever seeing the neighbor outside.
The older man went on to tell me that he had grown up in that neighbor’s house, in the 1930s and 1940s. He had come to the neighborhood for a Knights of Columbus meeting, and decided to swing by his old house. He’d rung the doorbell, and asked the neighbor if he would be able to go in and see the house – the neighbor curtly refused, and shut the door on him. (And, frankly, from what I could see from the exterior, the house had become quite run down.)
The older gentleman and I chatted for a while; it turned out that his childhood best friend lived in my house.
Last year, it turned out that the neighbor passed away in his house. He had no close family, and when another neighbor called the police to conduct a well-being check, they had to break down the door, and found him dead; he’d been there for maybe two weeks. 
A few years ago, an old friend of mine and I took a field trip to the neighborhood where we both grew up. My friend is the administrator for a Facebook page for that neighborhood, she’s also extremely outgoing bordering on crazy - the kind of person that can be a lot of fun in small doses.
We talked to some of the residents, the ones that were hanging out outdoors.
No one was home at her old house. We caught up with the residents of my old house as they were coming home, they were polite but didn’t offer us a tour, I didn’t ask and I restrained my friend from asking.
We also knocked on the door of a woman who was very active on the Facebook page - she lived in the house of my childhood best friend. She wasn’t home, a teenaged daughter opened the door and we told her we might try again later.
After this little excursion, we found out that shortly before our adventure there had been a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood and there was a suspicion that burglars were casing the neighborhood. I’m sure our excursion added some fuel to the fire, although I messaged the woman whose door we knocked on to let her know it was us, not a potential burglar.
I don’t really have anything to say other than that this thread reminds me of this Kids in the Hall sketch.
When I was a kid, maybe ten or so, my family took a road trip through the Southeast USA. One of the stops was our first home, a duplex where we lived when I was an infant. The current owners were nice enough to give us a tour. I don’t know if my parents called in advance or how the arrangement was made. They showed off all the remodeling to my parents, which honestly I could not care less about. In hindsight that makes perfect sense, as it would have been 100% awkward to just walk around with no pretense of conversing with the host. They had wallpapered over most of my nursery room but the ceiling still showed the clouds my Dad had painted a decade ago.
That was only a ten year gap - as for my parent’s childhood homes and various past apartments, we only drove by or stopped in the street for a few seconds to point it out.
~Max
I recently looked at an old photo of my (deceased) father and his (deceased) baby brother – both single-digits age – from the mid-40’s, in front of the house they lived in at the time.
The address was visible on the home’s façade. I saw the house on Zillow, and just thought about sending a copy of the pic to the current owner of the home. Maybe they’d get a kick out of it.
If you had such a photo of the house in question … from The Olden Days – particularly if you’re in the photo – that might give you a whole lot of cred to ask a “weird question” like … can I look around the interior of the house?
Which I might just be tempted to do, if I were in your position.
Realizing that I didn’t actually answer the OP’s question in my earlier post:
My parents still live in the house that we moved to on my tenth birthday, so visiting that house is easy (as someone else noted upthread).
The two* houses where I lived as a younger kid are fairly close to where I live now: one is about 4 miles away, and the other about 15 miles away. I drive past them from time to time, just out of curiosity/nostalgia, but I’ve never really considered going up to the door and knocking.
*- technically, I lived in another house, in California, for the first three months of my life, but not only don’t I have any memory of it, my parents don’t even remember the address.
Or, I suppose, if you had kids in tow. That might assauge the fear of burglary.
It was a spontaneous thing, where we rang the doorbell. “They were very cool about it.”
~Max
A few years after the Miranda Lambert song came out, 2012 or '13, I rang the doorbell of my childhood home during a trip to the area (a suburb of Portland, OR). I almost chickened out, but my wife prodded me enough. I wanted her to see the inside as much as I wanted to see it myself, as it’s no ordinary house.
I lived there for about ten years, from age 3 to 13, 1982 to 1992. The lady who answered the door recognized my last name because they were the same family that bought it from ours 20 years earlier. She immediately let us in and graciously let me give my wife a tour.
It’s built along a hillside, effectively four storeys high with nine individual levels (including the garage), with six staircases and a ladder to the loft. One side of the big-ass kitchen is open to a family room below, and another side has a large serving window to the dining room. The floor with us kids’ bedrooms is open to the floors below, making a cathedral like space three storeys high. Lots of other quirks, like the little door to a tiny crawl space hiding inside an attic room behind my old bedroom (the current owner didn’t know it was there).
It was a really nice time. My description isn’t doing it justice. My wife was flabbergasted seeing it in person.
Taking my family on a road trip to California, we stopped in the dippy little farm town I grew up in from first to eighth grade. Went by the house my father helped build. All the trees we had planted 50 years ago are of course now huge fruit bearing trees. Didn’t really recognize the place. Took a photo of me in the front yard. Didn’t knock on the door or anything. Heck, if they saw us, probably wondering why the hell did a van pull up, someone get out for 30 seconds for a photo, and then hop back in the van and drive away. No idea where that photo actually is now.
I’ve done it twice. On a trip to the northeast I just walked up and rang the bell. Explained the situation and they let me in and look around. It was great, a real time warp.
At one house as we were leaving I noticed something that I’d long ago forgotten: a cast aluminum eagle that I made in shop class in junior high school was still mounted above the garage. The owner graciously offered to let me take it but I said no, thank you.
I must’ve mentioned it to my brother because years later for my 50th birthday he gave it to me as a gift. Turns out that he reached out to the owner and reminded her of it, arranged to have another similar eagle mounted in its place, and had it shipped out. It’s now mounted above my own garage door. Isn’t that great? What a thoughtful brother I have.
I was out raking and noticed a car with two senior women going slowly past our house, turning around and slowing so much that on the second pass they were almost stopped. So I asked if I could help them.
“This was our aunt’s house, and we spent weekends and holidays here.”
“Do you want to see what it looks like now?” We were happy to learn of the house’s history, and watch these women reminisce.
So don’t hesitate to knock! Humbly (don’t bang).