How To Research Your San Francisco Home
Do you live in a historic house? Are you nosey about the stewards who came before you and want to learn more about them? Want to learn more about your neighborhood? Believe it or not, all of these things are intertwined.
Here’s an image of our house back in 1914 during the Market St expansion and tunnel. I wish we still lived next to a creamery!
I’ll tell you how I learned that Swiss immigrants built our house as a dairy farm (and has ties to Kite Hill - formerly Solari Hill, named for our house’s cows who grazed there), how our neighborhood took shape around the house over time.
It all started with the San Francisco Public Library card. You’ve got to get your card in person, but it takes just a moment to do and you get your card same day. You can log in as soon as you get home and you’re off on your search!
San Francisco does a phenomenal job at digitizing its records. If I wanted to research property in New Orleans, I had to go down to the Lands and Records Division and leaf through books and it took hours. To be fair, researching your house does take hours, but at least you can start from your couch. You can go to the main library and do even more research, but I haven’t done that yet.
Once you’re logged in, head to Articles and Databases. I liked Newsbank’s files on obituaries and other topics and the Ancestry Library edition. The other great option for searching your house/the family is the SF Digital Collections. Here’s where you’ll find your Sanborn Maps, etc. Here’s a great guide for navigating their website.
Another resource I like to read through is the neighborhood context statements from SF Planning Dept. Here is a list of the docs they have. I really love the geographic statements. I learned that my neighborhood in Eureka Valley had water and a street car that ran almost to our front door before 1900, which helped me figure out that our bathrooms and their clawfoot tubs, pull chain toilets are probably original and therefore important.
I also learned that the way they built houses here was to build into the natural curvature of the hills of Twin Peaks, which is why they are like an amphitheater, which I love since the houses seem to sparkle around out house at night. They also mention several families, street name changes (our section of 18th used to be an extension of Falcon St). There is so much in these docs - Eureka Valley is over 200 pages and I drink up every word!
The last place I like to look is Open SF History. I actually found our house from an image in 1914, but others have had luck finding more. It’s got a great map function and you can purchase images, too :)
