Prompt: In some countries, more and more people are becoming interested in finding out about the history of the house or building they live in Ċ What are the reason for this? Ċ How can people research this?

The need for housing is higher and higher due to the constant growth of the population. It is reasonable for many people to have a place to live. However, others are even concerned about the historical traces of their accommodation buildings. This essay will discuss some key reasons behind this tendency and suggest a multitude of ways to uncover a property’s past. Ċ There are two possible factors contributing to people’s inclination towards such investigation. From a spiritual perspective, people in some countries heavily practice feng shui, a pseudoscientific traditional practice originating from ancient China and this is the first reason for their curiosity about their housing history. They are concerned about which directions their accommodations are facing and the owners’ happiness even rests on the arrangement of everything in their living space, including trees. They believe anything that is misplaced is to blame for people’s mishaps. To illustrate, Vietnamese people frequently visit a feng shui master before deciding how to construct their homes. If any family refuses to follow this custom, their neighbours may all have a sense of schadenfreude if there is any misfortune that happens to so-called stubborn householders. From a practical perspective, the reason why homeowners want to discover the architectural history of these accommodations is rooted in the fact that they want to evaluate their condition for better preservation. Any long-lasting building may need a lot of refurbishments such as repairing a rundown roof or cracked walls, a dangerous electrical system or an ineffective sewage system. Ċ There are probably three main ways that real estate owners use to find out the historical facts of their houses. The most directed method to adopt is asking former landowners who can supply a source of abundant and reliable information about the building. No one can know as well about the architecture as the people who used to settle in it. Nevertheless, in case one is not able to contact previous settlers, it is possible to query dwellers living around the house. Information namely when the house was constructed, what happened to people living in the place before can be obtained in this way. The last but not least, it is the library that can possibly offer an assortment of estate records in the region. Those are land ownerships, rehabilitation records and untold stories that may be found in these materials. All one needs to do is to spend a couple of days in the regional library to seek relevant documents when precise information cannot be retrieved by the former two methods. Ċ In conclusion, it can be seen that those spiritual elements and cultural values are the two main reasons that draw people’s interest in investigating the past of the space they live in.