Discover who lived in a house generations ago with address search

2-3 minute read

By The Findmypast Team | April 21, 2021

Exploring Findmypast's censuses and other property records can reveal house histories back in 1911 and beyond.

Our handy address search, available across all British censuses from 1841 to 1911, is the perfect tool for discovering previous owners of your property. It helps you to find out who was living at any particular address at the time each census was taken. Findmypast is the only family history website with this useful tool.

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Use this guide to research property records, find out who has previously lived in your house and get the most out of census address searches, ultimately, helping you discover the colourful history of your house.

How to use census address search

To start using the address search tool, select 'Search' from the site menu and then 'Census addresses'. You'll be taken to our census address search page where you can choose to search all British censuses at once or a specific year.

From this page, you can search by census, street name and location. Our smart spelling variants tool will help you overcome mistakes in the records while the search radius can help you narrow or broaden your search to pinpoint the place you're looking for.

As you type a place into the 'Location' search field, our clever predictive system will suggest matches for your search.

So for example, if you were to start typing in 'Weston' into the 'Location' field, you'll see a range of suggestions for places with 'Weston' at the start of their name.

If you were more specific, and typed 'Regent Road' into the 'Street name' search field, then that would bring up results for every 'Regent Road' in the census.

Then, by clicking on your results, you will be taken to a list of all the houses on that particular road or street.

From there, you simply select the house you're interested in, and you will be taken to a transcription of the census record for that property.

The address search tool also recognises abbreviations ('St' for 'Street', 'Rd' for 'Road' etc).

With Findmypast's intuitive search, you don't need to fill in all of the fields. Therefore, you can easily find all instances of a particular road name even if you're not sure of any of the other historical information. Watch this video for a quick recap on the steps for searching by address.

As well as UK censuses, you can also search by address with the following Findmypast record sets:

We hope these handy tools help you get even further with your family (or property) history research. If they've helped unlock an exciting piece of your past, we'd love to hear about it. Tag @findmypast on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter for a chance to be featured.