I’m curious how many times the house I grew up in has been sold, and likewise my neighbors. I’d like to try looking them up online on realtor sites.
But these houses did not have addresses. Mail came to the Post Office and you’d address letters to Napier, Post Office, State. Or, Napier, Zip. I’ve found newspaper accounts of things like house fires, and they describe the location as “on A road between B road and C road”, but that’s not specific enough as B and C were miles apart.
You probably need to find the plat map and get the actual tax ID for the property.
Good luck - it’s easy to do out here, because everything is digitized and on-line, but might not be so easy where you live.
Does the house still exist? Because of E-911 programs, nearly every dwelling in the Lower 48 now has a normal, city-style address. Besides the usual places like Google Maps, Here Maps, and Bing Maps, see if the county in question has a GIS website. Many will show you the legal description and the address for any building or property you point to.
But I think those real estate sites will only show transfers that have happened during the last 20 years or so.
Use the county’s GIS site to get the parcel number. Usually there will be a link to the Assessor’s site that will have all the info they have on the property.
I do a lot of property tracing as a historian. If your county auditor’s site has a GIS as sitchensis suggested, start there. Once you get one house, you can select others from the interactive map.
But you need something to get started: name, address, permanent parcel number, etc, If you do not know the present owners of any of the lots, try Google map for that street. Switch to the aerial photo view and zoom in on the houses and select one. Google should give you the address.
Take that address to the GIS site to find what it has on it. Chances are the sales history will not go back very far. The oldest lots I have seen cataloged on GIS were from the late 1980s, many cities are much more recent then that.
To go earlier you will need to visit the auditor’s department and go through the books. Each county has it’s own system, and they vary considerably, so you will need to get a quick tutorial from the staff. They are generally quite helpful
What happens if you go to a site like Zillow, enter the zip code and zoom in on the map till you see the right lot and click on it? Do they give a property id number of any sort?
(They do give an estimated value for the lots around us that don’t have addresses.)
This is probably your best bet. If you can find the location on a map, you should be able to zoom to it, and click on the property to get information. Often called an identify tool.
One, the driveway is now a named street, so the house is no longer on A Road, it’s on D Lane.
Two, it has a house number now, on D.
Three, it is now in a different city. The house didn’t move, so I suppose the edge of the city did.
I have recent sales info but not old sales info. May dig further.
Once you get this information, you can go to the city’s property tax office or on-line site, enter the numbers, and get the property tax information, which will give you all the deed information. This falls under “public information.”
Or go to any real estate office and ask them to do it.