Circa 1770
Deeds, dead ends, and the weird satisfaction of not knowing yet
I was never a history person. I liked it in high school, but I never went looking for it later. I spent more time in math class or at the lab bench for physics and chemistry. When I read for fun, it was fiction, or food, or travel. Forward motion stuff.
So it surprised me that buying a house that’s “supposedly built in 1770” has turned me into the guy with fifteen browser tabs open, zooming in on scanned deeds at odd hours like there’s a prize at the end.
The former owners left us a small pile of old deeds. I assumed they’d be a quick curiosity, maybe an hour of skimming, maybe a fun anecdote at a dinner party if someone asked. Instead, they sent me straight down a rabbit hole, over and over.
It felt relatively straightforward at first. Find the deed, match the property description, trace the owners back. Easy enough. Then it got messy, fast.
The main problem is that old property descriptions are not written for someone in 2026 with Google Maps and an addiction to clean spreadsheets. They’re written for someone in 1820 who knows where the “old road” is, who knows which neighbor is “Mr. Green,” and who can look at a stake with a pile of stones and say, yep, that’s the one. Some of these deeds reference a rock, or a birch tree, as a corner marker. Which is great, unless you are trying to prove anything definitively two hundred years later and the tree is, predictably, not responding to my emails.
I also learned quickly that a lot can go wrong with a single misread detail. The deeds we were left by the former owners pointed to a chain of ownership that seemed plausible, until I realized the whole thing might be based on a bad assumption. Whoever originally tagged these deeds as belonging to this house appears to have misinterpreted the cardinal directions. East and west mattered a lot when a road was the main reference point, and it matters even more when the road has shifted, been renamed, or been swallowed up by new streets and a totally different way of describing addresses. One wrong directional read and you can end up confidently researching the history of someone else’s land.
Which was, I’ll admit, a little deflating. I’d been feeling productive up to that point.
The most satisfying moment so far came from my wife, not from the deeds. She found an old town map from 1838. It doesn’t get us back to 1770, but it gets us close enough to feel real. When we zoomed in, our house was right there, plain as day, sitting near the center of the map. The brook behind our house is there too, in the same spot it runs today. And a house down the street, the Alms House, shows up on the map as well, and even today we drive by some iteration of that same place.
We’re going to print that map and hang it in the house. Not because it solves the whole mystery, but because it’s a clean snapshot of this place at a point in time when it was still small enough to fit on one sheet of paper, and because it’s oddly grounding to see your home as a labeled object in someone else’s world.
At this point I’ve accepted that the online digging only gets me so far. The next step is going to be going down to the county deed records office and doing the in-person version of this, the part where you stop pretending everything is searchable and you start flipping through books, asking dumb questions, and discovering that one key record is filed under a name you didn’t think to search.
I’m sure I’ll hit more roadblocks. More false trails. More moments where something looks obvious and then isn’t. But I’m also kind of looking forward to that, because the point has shifted. I started out trying to prove a date. Now I mostly want to learn the story, even if the story is incomplete, even if the best answer ends up being “we think it was around then, but here’s what we actually know.”
Either way, I’m in it now, and I have a feeling this is going to take longer than I expected, in the good way and the frustrating way, which is usually how anything worth doing goes.