Researching your Home



The Mabee Farm, Rotterdam



Everyone’s home has a history, are you interested in learning more about yours? Have you been remodeling or cleaning out and found something belonging to a past resident that made you curious? Did someone famous live in your house, was someone murdered in your house? Do you want to decorate the walls of your house or business with images from the past? We can help you answer these queries!

 Here at the Schenectady Historical Society we have resources which can help you learn about your house, whether it is located in the Stockade or Mont Pleasant. We have many files and photographs about streets in the city of Schenectady, if you want to see what your house looked like in the past, and how your street has changed with time. We have some files dedicated to specific houses, and who knows, one of those houses could be your home!

The Ingersoll Home, Niskayuna

 We also have city directories if you are interested in knowing more about past residents of your house. Were the past residents doctors, butchers, GE workers? Did a family live in your house, did they take in boarders?  If your house has an historic marker we have some original application forms, which may provide you with more information about the origins of your house. We also have scrapbooks on several of Schenectady’s oldest streets, assembled by Jonathan Pearson, a nineteenth century historian. Pearson collected maps, mortgage information and lots of other information and assembled it house by house, street by street. These scrapbooks, known as the street books, can provide a vast amount of information about a property.

The possibilities are vast, so drop by the library and learn more about your house and its past!