i'm going to be talking about our historic house plaque program and we're really looking at tonight as our kickoff for this program which really we started to discuss about this time last year i think  as co chair of the bellman historic district commission we received several calls from owners of historic properties asking about the possibility of getting a plaque for their historic home so working with the historic district commission and the historical society we had a sort of an ad hoc committee to talk about how best we could do this the reason to do it really we want to be able to recognize historic structures in our town and also to recognize  historic preservation again as i mentioned with all scenes church property owners to really make efforts many times spending extra money to use appropriate materials and methods to preserve their homes all for the good of preserving our town belmont the town of homes this program is completely voluntary we had a few people ask when we started think about this program if i get a program if i get a plaque will i be able to make changes to my house and i wish it was that simple that i could just go around town and pick plaques up on people's houses and then they couldn't do anything but but no if you have a historic plaque you're you can paint it purple you unless you're in a historic district and then that's a problem but in no way does participating the plaque program prevent you from changing your house or from selling it if a future owner decides they want to take the plaque off that that's fine also  so we i did some research and we looked at other town to see what their plaques looked like george packer two was on our committee really took the lead in that with terry mccarthy from the historic district commission and it turns out that there is a monopoly on sign making in in massachusetts or in new england really there is one company old colony artists in wiscasset maine that make these plaques and they make them for all the towns in massachusetts so we look through pages and pages of plaque ideas from other towns and we also wanted to look at plaxo already existed in town and if you driven around belmont you may notice that some of our historic houses have plaques that look kind of like this so we thought rather than create a new design that would conflict or or wouldn't really complement those those plaques that we would pick a design that was much similar  it turns out that the town of lenox out in the berkshires also has this same design for plaque so i guess this we be known as the lenox in the belmont example we then tried to decide what size should these plaques be there are three sizes one was quite small and we thought that would be right for us because we want people to see these plaques but you know in looking at town and looking at houses around town and properties you know they come in all sizes and they also come from different set backs from the street so you know a larger plaque may be appropriate for a larger building or building set back from the street a smaller plaque for a house you know depending on  scale and its location to the street because again we want to make sure people can see them so they're currently offered in two sizes we have the standard twelve by sixteen which is what i think most people are going to receive and all of our plaques that will be distributing tonight are that size but there is a larger size sixteen by twenty four that is available and again that would be for a larger building perhaps a school town hall again depends on the size so where should these  plaques be located ideally we would like them located between the first and second stories again houses and buildings come in all special sizes so it's really a case by case decision that will work with the property owner on the  cost how much does it cost we have sort of a scaled system depending on your membership if you're a member of the historical society it'll cost one hundred dollars if you're not a member it will cost one hundred twenty five dollars and then you get an annual membership free and then property owners that already have those existing plaques seventy five dollars so if you have an old plaque that's peeling or if you have an old plaque that you want to update you can do that at a discounted seventy five dollars rate so eligibility i know everyone sitting here is going to want to know how to get a plaque how you know how do we decide who gets a plaque again we have a committee that will work with we have an application and we have applications available at the back of the room will ask for property owners interested in applying for a plaque to complete an application form your house has to be at least fifty years old retain integrity of original construction and has to be well preserved that doesn't mean if your house had had some changes you're not possible to get a plaque but again it's a case by case basis that our committee will want to see images of your building or maybe even do a site visit from the street to see how well preserved  building is there are two real necessary cases for getting plaques one we've decided to look at if you remember the demolition delay ordinance that was passed is based on existing survey forms with the massachusetts historic commission back in the early one nine hundred eighty s boston university conducted a survey of belmont and the green belmont book the town of holmes book was a product of that survey during that survey there were probably at least two hundred or two hundred fifty houses that were surveyed and have survey forms so if your house has a information system and if you're going to the web site this is what you'll be faced with i just wanted people to see this so you're not startled it's not an easy website unfortunately it's  bureaucratic it's a governmental agency so it's a little complicated but basically you'll be asked what town you live in and what type of form you're looking for their area forms a building forms a burial grounds except you want to look for a building for and this is what these building forms look like this is a thirty six sycamore tree it's the floor welling's house it's the reverend daniel butler house and these survey forms are really kind of a snippet of historic information on your property usually includes a photograph that shows the house was black and white basic information the date of construction the original owner names of owners the current owner and then also has a section on the second page of an architectural evaluation the butler house here is the gothic revival house where the explains gothic revival architecture and then to find the historical significance of this particular building so what happens if you don't have a survey form so i have a case study here that i would like to prevent someone who submitted an application who did not have an application form and that c owners of thirty six harriet avenue that you see here a nice kind of craftsman style house so what we ask if you don't have a survey form is for a chain of title to be completed and what i'm going to explain tonight is a little bit some pointers and how to do architectural historian so i can kind of identify this as a craftsman style house or maybe even a sears roebuck catalog house although i couldn't confirm that so we have this basic information that the homeowner has and we live in a wonderful age there's a lot of research we can do sitting on our desks or you know in our in our living room wherever we have a laptop and the tax assessor's records are all available online if you go to the town of belmont plug in the street address in the street number and you'll have the property card of your house so here's thirty six harriet avenue you have a color photo you have a footprint of the house and this also  lists down below and again this is small i just wanted you to see what you're going to see on line the can date of construction as one nine hundred twenty so this kind of you know now we have a range of one nine hundred twenty to one nine hundred thirty five for this house so how can we better nail down the date so the next place i went was to the home or building and to the building inspector of the building department the community development each property has a folder so every property has a folder with building permits in it so if you did a new roof recently there's a building permit for that and that's in this file so i pulled the file for thirty six harriet avenue name and we have miss biola e mcneil living on cutter's street we have the name of the builder which is a mr mills who lived on harriet avenue and then we have all sorts of information we have dimensions of the house we have the original roof material which was asphalt and we have an estimated price for constructing this house in one nine hundred twenty two do we have anyone that wants to guess how much it cost to build this house in one thousand twenty two six thousand dollars so with that information i then decided to do some deed in probate research and this is what we're going to ask people to do who don't have a survey form for their house and the way you do that is to start with the current owner so that's you and to trace back looking at past deeds and i'll talk a little bit more about that but what we can do is try to go back as far as we can until the deeds no longer reference the structure on the property on the premises some properties also as you probably know transfer when someone dies so you may have to go through some probate records to do  that doing indeed research can also include information such as mortgages in la times when someone buys a house or mortgage but if someone is doing a large improvement that may need a mortgage also so that can start to tell you a little bit more about the evolution of your house  so with thirty six harry avenue twenty fourteen i decided to start with the current owners and you can see bill and nellie and their family here and their house and to work backwards so you can do this again starting from the comfort of your own home or your office by going to the website of the registry of deeds belmont registry of deeds in cambridge it's two hundred eight cambridge street it's the middle six south registry of deeds and when you get to the website there are you know options for you to start to select how to search land records so you want to select the land records in doing this  s the original builder of the house you might wonder why nine hundred fifty two why was that such as a short period of time for these two people to own the house john mcneil and florence mills were the brother and sister to so when she passed away they inherited the house and then they sold it to ever and ruth westcott so since i was at the registry of deeds i thought it might go back a little bit further so i was able to find the next deed from one nine hundred twenty one bought it from john the mccarthy and harriet mccarthy so also at the registry of deeds you never know what kind of information you might find recorded with this deed in the process of my research i was able to find the hundred two subdivision for harriet avenue in that neighborhood thirty six is right here lot number one eighty three here this is a road and this is belmont street just as a fun fact again you never know what you might find at the registry of deeds and this is something i borrowed from some other research i did on the belmont est which everyone probably knows that's what belmont is named for and looking at the original deed of that house it included the name of the owner j p john perkins coaching the mason l wallace and the architect asher benjamin so that was you know some interesting information that was included with the deed that you might not ordinarily be able to confirm if you're doing probate research in some of the older houses and more so in the eighteenth century in one thousand nine hundred three probate records would include inventories of houses so when someone would die it would be customary for an appraiser to go through the house and identify furniture and other goods that had value in trying to evaluate the estate and what's interesting about those records if you can imagine if you're doing an inventory you would move from room to room to room so it tells us a lot in reading these i'm in tory's how different rooms were used in houses so you may know you know a room that's currently used as a living room in seven hundred fifty was used as a bedroom so you know there's a lot of interesting information you can find at the registries so in continuing my research thirty six harriet avenue i looked at the poll list and the director that we have at the society's claflin room here in the library i was able to find out the viola in the neo previously lived on cutter street she was single she was a bookkeeper and she was born in eight seventy one and the couple she her estate would sell the property to every a wescott he was an artist born in one thousand and three and his wife ruth was a little younger she was born in one thousand eleven and she was a housewife so you know you have all these little goodies that you can find in the claflin room so i encourage everyone you know if you're doing research or if you're just interested in belmont history really to try to set out some time when that claflin room is open or make an appointment to come and  we have there it's really a great collection and looking at local histories we have local histories in the claflin room there are several copies available to take out through the library and i think we also have some available tonight for sale if anyone wants to take something home with them too in valuable research pieces the belmont town of the home books that i mentioned was done in the one nine hundred eighty s through the boston university survey of the town and the updated the streets of belmont and how they were named by richard betts and this is really i think probably the bible for doing research in belmont and our collection is off also a wealth of historic images and photographs some of those have been published in these two publications through arcadia press but they're really just a snippet of what we have in our collection we have photographs stereo views postcards from the turn of the century really we really have such a great photographic record of our town in the classroom paintings paintings are a great source of research sometimes you have to be a little careful we have a wonderful collection of nelson ch watercolors of historic sites and belmont but again you have to remember sometimes artists take a little artistic license so you know if you see a paint color or you know maybe a window that doesn't seem to be historic it could have been something that was added just to make the picture look a little better but we have some of these available i think this is one over here it's here a great resource that we have in the classroom are our collections of atlases and fire insurance maps at the end of the one nine hundred centuries and early twentieth century a company called the sanborn map company mapped most communities throughout the united states and these maps were used for insurance purposes so they're very specific in detail this is an image showing the historic belmont estate right here and these maps have great detail and their color  you can tell important information about the construction of these properties pink as in the belmont a state house means brick yellow most of the houses you see wood frame stables are representative here with x s green houses and even stone walls and stone buildings are also identified in these snaps and again they were meant to be used you know if you were insuring a property you want to be able to had to make sure you had the most up to information about the footprint of the house who owned it and what it was made out of and again we just have a whole cache of items in our collection bills letters diaries journals and countless other items so again if you're doing research that's really an important place to stop so my summary of the of the history of thirty six harriet avenue of all my research i sort of pick here in sort of an outline format that consists of six streets so you probably know those streets on belmont street they have names there's frederick street jonathan allen harriet jeannette they're named for mr mccarthy's wife harriet and their children is or why she purchased the property my guess is that she probably bought it as an investment and then quickly sold it in one thousand or three to charles mills who was a local builder so the law stays vacant  almost ten years until one nine hundred twenty one when charles mill sells a lot to his sister in law by all of the mcneil and we know she lived that cutter street at the time cutter street is over near st patrick's cemetery so it's kind of in the border not far from this this neighborhood and again we know at that time she was fifty years old single and a bookkeeper in one nine hundred twenty two she applies for a building permit and she hires her brother in law to build the house she dies in  two in the house is inherited by her brother john mcneil and her sister florence mills in one thousand fifty two the house was purchased by everett westcott a forty one year old artist and his wife ruth was who's thirty three years old and the house wife ruth expect someone to do that level of research when they're coming to us for a plaque but instead you know to do or at least start a simple chain of title research that we can help you with in the community can help you with we envision this plaque program again tonight is our kickoff event we're distributing five plaques but we really see this as an event that will do twice a year once in december we usually have a holiday event in december and then also this time of year at our and our annual meeting so we'll be taking applications for plaques throughout the years but we figure those read the two times that we actually be distributing plaques