As for county records…best I can say is “depends”…depends on the level of reporting that has been typical and customary is your particular county.
I was a Real Estate Appraiser in southern/south central Illinois for 5 yrs,I still do some consulting and data collection, My family is still in the business and I have personally been in every court house South of Springfield; Some counties keep impeccable records, some are quite shoddy at the whole record keeping game. Try to find your Property Record Card, it may be quite helpful…there is a chance that your township assessor has your Property Record Card as they are ultimately responsible for “valuing” your property for the tax rolls.
Start at your county “Supervisor of Assessments” and go from there…if you don’t find what you need there go to the recorder of deeds and back track your deed. At this point you would basically be “abstracting” your title, you may have had an abstract done when you purchased your home. If you have title insurance check with them, they may have an abstract already.
Hope this helps…if not PM me I am sure I can get you on the right track.
Renee, would you ask your good friend if she might be willing to field questions on historic preservation, the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards, etc., if and when they come up again? I know since I’ve been a member there have been four or five occasions when someone wanted an answer to some specific question on historic preservation or restoration. Ralph124 (IIRC) asked something last year; the year before, there was a NYC-area question, and so on. I worked for several years with a multi-discipline consulting firm which secured a few historic preservation grants for communities; the architect specializing in that sort of thing for us back then moved away and I’ve lost touch with him, and the planner/grantwriter colleague I worked most closely with retired and lives off his investments now, except when doing an old client a special favor – something I’m very loath to ask him for. And I “know just enough to know how much I don’t know” – adequate information to give the most basic of answers and suggest to the questioner where to look for better, more detailed answers, but no more. We have two or three professional planners who are Dopers, but none with that sort of specific expertise AFAIK. The questions don’t come up often, but they do require her sort of special expertise when they do. Obviously it’d be the same sort of free shared information pooling that GQ already is, and I certainly have no official status to ask this in any formal capacity, but as the guy who (with elmwood) seems to end up taking point on those questions, it’s a resource this board could use if she’d be willing.
The problem with using U.S. Census records is that households are not listed in any particular order within the enumeration district (the area assigned to one census taker). And it takes a lot of cross-referencing and map consulting to find which enumeration district a particular address is in, because the district changes from census to census.
The Dutch Colonial architectural style was at its peak in the mid-to-late 1920s.
My advice:
Visit the building department of your community, and find when the original building permit was issued. If it’s not available, then …
Check the tax assessor records. If there’s no date listed, then …
Go to your local library, and check through city directories. Start at 1930, and work your way back. The year the address doesn’t appear will be the year the house was built.
In any case, odds are probably very good your house was built between 1925 and 1929.
And even then they didn’t start noting street names and house numbers until 1900 (or perhaps a bit later - I forget), and local enumerators were sometimes rather sloppy or lazy when it came to noting such info.
If the house is in an urban area and you can find a collection of city directories going way back, that usually works well (unless the name of the street changed or the city changed its numbering system at some point).
If you have an Abstract of Title for the property, the first (large) mortgage on the property after it was sold as a lot often coincides with the year the house was built.