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Do you know how old your house is? Are you curious?
When we bought our house over 10 years ago, no one seemed to know the exact age of it. At the time an elderly lady down the street said the house was here when she was a little girl and she was 90 then. I had always wanted to know when our house was built and to find out who some of the families were who lived here but didn't know how to go about it...until last year. That is when I received my spring copy of the Wisconsin Magazine of History. Among the many interesting articles there was a story written by Mark Speltz titled "If Ordinary Walls Could Talk." He tells how he researched the history of his house in Mineral Point and found out about the people who lived there before him. This inspired me and so I set out on my own journey to unravel the mystery of my house and the history of its former residents.
With out an abstract to use, I started by going to the County Treasurer's office to look at the tax records and to get a list of the former owners. The treasurer's office had copies of the tax records as far back as 1960 but prior to that, they had donated them to the State Historical Society in Madison. So, until I could make a trip to look at them, I decided to see what I could find in the Register of Deeds office. I looked through numerous heavy volumes of grantees and grantors and after six hours of searching I had traced ownership back to 1948. This is when someone suggested I check with the local title companies to see if they had a copy of the abstract on our property. The first one I went to found a dusty copy of the original abstract in their basement. Jackpot! The abstract dated from 1986 all the way back to when the land was patented in 1850 by President Millard Fillmore to the very first owner, Ebenezer Sexton, who was the founder of our town and for whom it was named. I could barely contain my excitement! What a great treasure to find knowing it would save me countless hours of searching through old court records!
However, this valuable new information still did not give me a clue as to when the house was built. For that I would have to see the tax records prior to 1960. I made a call to the State Historical Library in Madison and discovered that they no longer had the records. Due to a lack of storage space, they had transferred them to the Wisconsin History room at the University of Platteville in Grant County. So I made a road trip in late September to continue my search. Now that I had the names of the previous owners it was relatively simple to trace the time line back through the tax records to find when the house may have been built. This was finally accomplished by looking at what the tax amount was each year and when there was a big increase, I knew that the property had been improved upon in the prior year. So when the taxes went from $1.05 in 1917 to $23.27 with improvements valued at $1,000 in 1920 I knew the house was built in that short time span. However, the tax books from 1918 and 1919 were missing so that was as close as I could narrow it down to. The property changed owners twice in that time so I'm still not positive which one of the two built the house but at least I know more than when I started and that's always a good thing.
Since then I have researched some of the people who had lived in our home by using census records, death certificates, history of the town, etc. and found many interesting things about them. The first owner of our land and founder of our town is buried in our local cemetery and his son who died in the Civil War has a headstone there although he is actually buried in Arkansas. A lady who lived here, died after falling and hitting her head in the bathroom in 1936. I found grade school pictures of some of her children in our local library's history room. I also ran across a picture of one of her daughter's quite by accident last year at the American Legion. We were there for the Toys for Tots fundraiser and I just looked up and there she was! She had been the president of the Women's Auxiliary in 1942 but I found it so strange that her picture was right across from where I sat that night. She had grown up in our house and came back to live with her parents and her two sons after her husband died in a car accident in 1932...he was the warden at Waupon state prison at the time. There are several autobiographies written by residents of our town that give quite an insight as to what the town and people were like back when they were young. There is also a wonderful book that someone put together called "History of the Sextonville High School and Remembrances of Former Students" that is a treasure trove of information written by students who graduated from the school from 1913 to 1961. It also contains a history of how the town came to be.
My next step is to find descendants of some of the previous owners to see if they might have pictures of what the house looked like during the time they lived here. That would be a great find indeed!
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