There is no official playbook for this.

When you take on a historical renovation, nobody hands you a binder with the original drawings, the builder's notes, and a tidy timeline of every change made to the house since it was built. It happened to me once, on a pretty Victorian in Arlington, and it was so awesome that I still think about it. It has never happened again.

What you get, most of the time, is a building that has been lived in, modified, neglected, and occasionally gutted by well-meaning owners who dealt with problems the only way they knew how. When something broke or looked bad, they removed it. When a style went out of fashion, they covered it up. When a wall got in the way, they took it down.

In Italy, the archive is usually the easy part. Buildings have been standing for five hundred years and someone has been writing about them for four hundred and ninety of those. I may be slightly spoiled. Massachusetts, it turns out, has a different relationship with paperwork.

What remains is a puzzle. Your job, before you touch a single thing, is to figure out what the original picture looked like.

I am currently working on exactly this kind of project, a Tudor-style residence in Lancaster, Massachusetts, designed in the late 1800s by the Boston firm Sturgis and Brigham. It is a significant house, by a significant firm, and it has suffered what I can only describe as decades of well-intentioned demolition. Things that were inconvenient were removed. Things that were damaged were not restored, they were simply gone. My goal is to establish what was there before, so that every decision I make during the renovation is grounded in evidence rather than guesswork.

Here is how I am doing it, and how you can do it too.

Start with what the building is telling you

Before you open a single archive, look at the building itself. The bones, the moldings, the hardware, the transitions between materials, will tell you a great deal about what has been removed or altered. Ghost marks on floors where walls once stood. Asymmetries that suggest something is missing. A detail that appears on one side of a room but not the other. You are looking for clues, and the building is your first and most reliable witness.

Talk to the neighbors too, especially in older neighborhoods where families have lived for generations. Someone's grandmother might remember what the front porch looked like before it was enclosed. A neighbor might have a photograph from a church picnic in 1962 where your house is visible in the background. You would be surprised what survives in people's shoeboxes.

The MACRIS Database

Your first digital stop should be the Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System, known as MACRIS, maintained by the Massachusetts Historical Commission.

Go to macris.mhc-macris.net and search by address or property name. If your property has been surveyed, and most properties of any historical significance in Massachusetts have been, you will find a form with a physical description, a construction date, an architectural style, and often a note about the architect or builder. It will also tell you if the property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places or if it contributes to a historic district, which matters enormously for what you can and cannot do during a renovation.

For the Lancaster house, MACRIS confirmed the Sturgis and Brigham attribution and gave me a baseline description of the property as it stood at the time of the survey. It is not exhaustive, but it is a starting point.

Your Town's Historical Society

Every Massachusetts town of any age has a historical society, and they are almost always run by people who are genuinely passionate about local history and remarkably willing to help. Call them. Show up in person if you can.

For the Lancaster house, the local historical society had a couple of old exterior photographs, enough to confirm some details about the roofline and the original fenestration that had since been altered. Two photographs. That was it. But two photographs are infinitely more than nothing when you are trying to establish prior art. I learned that the volunteers at historical societies are remarkably knowledgeable about their local archive in ways that go well beyond any database. In Lancaster, they were invaluable. Bring them whatever you already know about the property and let the conversation go where it goes. These people know things that are not written down anywhere.

The Registry of Deeds

The Registry of Deeds for your county holds the complete chain of title for every property, every sale, every mortgage, every transfer going back to the original grant. This will not tell you what the house looked like, but it will tell you who owned it, when, and sometimes what was on the land at the time of transfer.

More usefully, older deeds sometimes include descriptions of structures, boundaries, and improvements that can help you date additions or changes. A deed from 1923 that mentions the recently constructed garage tells you something. A deed from 1955 that makes no mention of a structure you see in a 1940 photograph tells you something else.

Search at masslandrecords.com.

The Building Department

Your town's Building Department holds permits for any work that required a permit, additions, alterations, electrical upgrades, plumbing work. For older properties, the records can be incomplete or nonexistent for work done before permits were required, but for anything from the mid-twentieth century onward, this is worth checking.

A permit record will not tell you what was demolished, unless you are lucky enough to find a demolition permit on file, most of the time it will tell you what was built, when, and sometimes by whom. It can help you sequence the changes the building has undergone and identify which modifications were permitted and which were not, a useful thing to know before you start opening walls.

Local Libraries and Town Archives

Your town's public library, especially if it has a local history room, can be a goldmine. Old maps, town reports, directories, newspapers, and photograph collections are often held here and nowhere else.

The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, available through many library systems and through the Library of Congress online, are particularly useful. These maps were produced for insurance purposes and show the footprint, construction materials, and sometimes the height of buildings in American cities and towns from the late 1800s through the mid-twentieth century. If your property was in a mapped area, you may be able to track changes to the building's footprint over several decades.

MIT and Harvard Libraries

If your property was designed by an architect of any significance, the architecture libraries at MIT (the Rotch Library) and Harvard (the Frances Loeb Library at the Graduate School of Design) hold significant collections of architectural drawings, office records, and professional papers. Both have finding aids available online and are accessible to researchers by appointment.

The MIT Libraries also hold the Historic American Buildings Survey collection for Massachusetts, which includes measured drawings and photographs of significant historic structures.

The Boston Athenaeum

For properties designed by notable Boston architects, the Boston Athenaeum is an extraordinary resource. Its special collections include the personal and professional papers of many of the most significant architects who practiced in New England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the case of the Lancaster house, I knew that the Athenaeum holds the J.H. Sturgis Papers, a collection spanning 1853 to 1909, which covers the entire period of the firm's activity. I reached out to a senior reference librarian there, who directed me to the online catalog at catalog.bostonathenaeum.org and the finding aid for the Sturgis collection, which lists the contents of the archive in detail.

I have not yet made my appointment to view the collection, but the finding aid suggests there may be drawings and correspondence related to residential commissions outside of Boston. Whether the Lancaster house is represented in those papers, I do not yet know. But this is exactly the kind of lead worth following, the possibility that somewhere in a box in a reading room on Beacon Street, there is a drawing of the house as it was meant to be.

The MFA and Other Collections

The Museum of Fine Arts Boston holds architectural drawings and decorative arts collections that occasionally contain relevant material, particularly for high-style properties. Less likely to be useful for a specific residential commission, but worth checking if the architect was prominent enough to have work represented in their collection.

How to Use What You Find

You always go in with an idea, and your client always comes with needs. But sometimes your original idea is not really native to that house and needs adjusting. That is what the research is for.

What you find shapes what you do, and your job is not only to build a case for what you already want to do but to understand the building deeply enough to make decisions that are honest, informed, and coherent with its history.

When you find something unexpected, a structural feature, an original configuration you did not anticipate, that discovery becomes part of the project. Your skill as a designer is not in ignoring it but in integrating it, finding the point where the building's history and your client's contemporary life can meet without either one being falsified and with both being satisfied.

You are not reconstructing a museum piece and you are not inventing a history. You are making a living entity. The difference between good historical renovation and bad historical renovation is not how much you preserve, it is how honestly you engage with what you find, and how intelligently you weave it into something that can actually be lived in.

Integrating history does not mean recreating it wholesale. If the original plans reveal that a room was once a garderobe, I will certainly not start googling "moat excavation services".

Be honest about what you know, what you are inferring, and where the gaps are. A historical commission, a preservation board, or your own professional conscience will ask you to justify your choices. The justification has to be real.

Sometimes the research turns up very little, and you have to work with that honestly too. For the Lancaster house, I was remarkably unlucky. Beyond the two exterior photographs at the historical society, I found nothing. Not a permit, not a deed description with useful detail, not a newspaper mention, not a drawing. The Athenaeum appointment is still pending, and it remains my best hope for finding anything close to original documentation. In the meantime, the building itself and those two photographs are what I have, and I am using them.

A completely different kind of discovery happened on another project I am currently working on, a historic residence in Harvard, Massachusetts. The question on the table was whether the current living room floor was original, or whether something older, most likely wide plank pine, might be hiding underneath. Wide plank pine floors were standard in New England homes of that period, and finding one intact under layers of later work is not uncommon. Rather than lifting boards speculatively, I asked the owner to look through whatever records or correspondence had survived with the house. She came back with old letters from previous owners. In a letter dated 1972, one of them described having the entire floor package redone from the basement up. That was the answer. No original floor, no point in lifting anything. One letter in a shoebox saved us from a costly and disruptive investigation and told us exactly what we were dealing with. It is a good reminder that the archive is not always in a library.

When the research is complete and you are ready to proceed with work on a property that falls under historical jurisdiction, the next step is applying for a Certificate of Appropriateness from your local historical commission. That process deserves its own post, and I will cover it in detail shortly, including how to frame your application, what commissions are typically looking for, and how to present your research in a way that supports your proposal. Stay tuned.

A Quick Reference Guide

-MACRIS, macris.mhc-macris.net, property surveys and historic designations.

-Registry of Deeds, masslandrecords.com, chain of title and deed descriptions.

-Town Building Department, permit records for alterations and additions.

-Town Historical Society, photographs, local records, oral history.

-Town Public Library and Local History Room, maps, newspapers, directories.

-Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, building footprints over time, available through the Library of Congress at loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps.

-MIT Rotch Library, https://libraries.mit.edu/rotch, architectural drawings and the HABS collection.

-Harvard Frances Loeb Library, https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/library, architectural papers and drawings.

-Boston Athenaeum, catalog.bostonathenaeum.org, architects' personal papers and professional records.

-MFA Boston, https://www.mfa.org, architectural drawings and decorative arts collections.

---But first, always look at the building. Talk to the neighbors. Follow every lead, however small. Two photographs in a shoebox at the historical society, or a letter in a box of old correspondence, might be everything you need.

If you have made it this far, you are either very thorough or you have a very complicated house. Either way, we should talk.

Ciao.

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