Curious about your home’s history? Kansas City Public Library has a boot camp for that

By Jill Draper

Photos courtesy the Kansas City Public Library

If you live in an older house and have wondered about its past, you might be interested in residential genealogy — a new term and a new trend in the last 10 years or so. 

According to the Kansas City Public Library, house history is the most frequently asked question at the Central Library’s local history archive called the Missouri Valley Room.

To meet this growing interest, a senior special collections librarian offers a short course to help curious homeowners answer three basic questions: what year was my house built, what used to be there, and who used to live there? 

“I call it House History Bootcamp,” said Michael Wells, a history major and map enthusiast before he joined the downtown library. He says people can do a lot of their own research online, but it helps to first attend the free two-hour program he teaches.

Wells steers home researchers toward city and county property records, but also atlases and directories assembled over the years by real estate, insurance and marketing companies. One atlas is a huge 1939 volume of intricately produced fire insurance maps for Kansas City. It was updated in 1953 by mapmakers who pasted bits of hand-drawn corrections over the original drawings. These depict the footprint of buildings, type of building materials, placement of windows and other small details. 

Another popular resource is the R.L. Polk & Company’s City Directory, which Wells describes as an A-to-Z list of everything in the city, including home and business addresses, names of spouses and job titles of residents.

A fun thing to do is search a building’s address to see if it’s been written about, says Wells, who points out that local newspapers used to print much more information than they do now. One resident discovered that a past owner of the home had survived being hit by lightning twice at an area golf course. Others found reports of their homes being burglarized or damaged by fire years ago.

Some homeowners unfamiliar with Kansas City’s past have been shocked to find another type of historical detail — racially restrictive covenants — on their home deeds. This is especially common in parts of south Kansas City, Wells says.

In 2012 the library’s Missouri Valley Room gained a collection of tax assessment photos from 1940. This collection of postage stamp-sized images of local homes and buildings is almost like today’s Google street view. The photos were taken through the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era work-relief program.

The photos can be searched online by street intersections, and the library will scan an image (for a $10 fee) that can be enlarged and printed. People like to display these in their homes and businesses. “It makes a good story at dinner parties and holidays,” Wells said. Unfortunately, most of the photos stop at 75th Street, the city’s southern limit at the time. “There was a similar Jackson County WPA project, but we don’t know where the records are,” Wells said.

He notes there’s an overlap between the Kansas City Public Library’s resources and the Mid-Continent Public Library’s Midwest Genealogy Center, which focuses on family history. “The approach, skills and resources used are very, very similar,” he said. 

“It all gives you a glimpse of history. I’ve helped so many people that when I drive through any neighborhood, I have a sense of knowledge of how things used to be.”

The next House History Bootcamp is scheduled for 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday, May 18, at the Kansas City Public Library’s Plaza Branch, 4801 Main St. Email Lhistory@kclibrary.org or call 816-701-3427 to register.