Matthew DuBois' 115-year-old Victorian home in Echo Park came with a wraparound porch, secluded gardens and a number of intriguing tales.
Old-timers from the neighborhood told him the home had been moved there from a different part of town. In another story, cash was discovered hidden behind the wainscoting in one of the rooms. DuBois even heard the place was haunted.
A segment on National Public Radio about uncovering the history of a home inspired DuBois to begin sleuthing.
"I just started doing research to find out what the real answers were instead of all the stories," said the computer support manager, who bought the home five years ago for $325,000.
It's a quest that can bring breakthroughs, dead ends and unexpected twists. But historical facts won't necessarily translate into a higher price when it comes time to sell.
Typically, a home's history is only likely to boost the market value if it was designed by a noted architect or someone famous lived in it, said Jim Hamilton, president of the California Assn. of Realtors. Still, a house doesn't need big names to yield interesting stories.
For amateur home historians, the search for facts from the past can become an obsession.
"Be careful: History is addictive," said Michael George, a Torrance reference librarian who gives talks on researching a home's history. Clues to the past can be found in old documents or sometimes within the house itself, hidden away under floorboards or in the rafters.
DuBois' research began at the Los Angeles Building and Safety Department, where the last name "Chatard" kept coming up in the records for his address. But those documents only went back to the 1930s.
He next turned to the Los Angeles Public Library, where old fire insurance maps took him back a few more decades.
Then he hit another wall.
The home didn't appear on the fire insurance map for 1912, even though he knew it was likely the home had been built before then. Paging through old city directories, which contain names and addresses of residents, he found that the Chatard family had lived there since 1913.
So where was the house before that date? Dubois solved the mystery by undertaking the tedious task of looking through old building industry publications. One showed that a home had been moved from Towne Avenue to his current address in 1913. Again, the Chatard name surfaced.
