Bubbler Talk receives a lot of questions about historic properties and neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Some people are curious about how their neighborhood came to be, others want to know more about an unusual home they’ve seen, and some, like Brian Mikeworth, are curious about their own home’s history.
Brian lives in the Town of Lake neighborhood near Bay View, in a dutch colonial home that dates back to 1913.
There are a lot of places to start this kind of research, but for former librarian Nancy Torphy — there’s one that beats them all.
"809 N. Broadway and it’s where building permits are. And you just march in, go to the desk and say, 'I’m looking for, you know, 231 E. Superior — whatever.' And they will give you microfiche and you can look at the original building plans," she explains.
Torphy was a Milwaukee Public Library manager and now leads a course through Historic Milwaukee, teaching people to do this kind of research. So I took her advice and headed to 809 N. Broadway, the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, where I was greeted by Laura Avila, a friendly employee who found the microfiche of Brian's address and led me through how to use the special machine that reads them.
The microfiche covers whatever the city has on the property before the year 2000, everything after that can be found online through the City of Milwaukee’s Land Management System. It was amazing scouring through these old records and I got a lot of information, like the names of several former owners who lived there in the '40s, '60s and '80s. But we were still looking for more. So Brian and I met up at the Milwaukee Public Library’s Central Branch, the go-to source for information on older homes.
The library has plenty of resources, including some digital databases, but most of these resources are only available in the library itself. The best place to find them is the Frank P. Zeidler Humanities Room where you can find things like premises records, plat books, city directories and the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. These maps show in-depth information about homes and their construction. Reference librarian Heather Smith led us through navigating these maps.
"This is a great overview of how the city grew and it’s just where populated areas grew up, where there were buildings close enough together that the fire insurance company wanted to be able to offer insurance to insure them for people. You can track the urbanization of the Milwaukee area by this," she says, as we thumb through the maps looking for familiar cross streets.
Finally we found it on the map: the house, garage and his neighborhood. The maps cover decades of changes and as new homes were built or streets were created, Sanborn would paste on these updates — creating a kind of collage that mapped the growth of the neighborhood.
We also explored some older resources: plat maps that show more rural areas in the 1800s. These maps are available to everyone, but you’ll need to ask for a librarian’s help to see them. Heather pulled out a stack of large, old books — all of which might include the Town of Lake.
These maps look different than modern maps — fewer streets and familiar landmarks, but some things stay the same, specifically the shape of the land and waterways. We pulled up a modern map on our phones and after a bit of maneuvering, we found it: the plot where his home was and the name of the person who owned it.
His name was James Corydon (J.C.) Howard and he's the namesake of Howard Avenue. I used Wisdex, a binder in the Zeidler room that has citations for names of more than 90,000 prominent Wisconsinites and includes 250 sources, and I found several books that referenced Howard. I learned that Howard was part of a wave of Yankees who settled in the lands around Milwaukee as the city was first developing. He arrived in the Town of Lake in the 1830s and cleared timber to create his farm, where he grew apples, peaches and pears. After Howard’s death, his son John took over the farm and lived there until his death in 1911, just two years before Brian’s house was built.
With just a bit of digging, the old Town of Lake was coming into view.
For Nancy Torphy, that’s what this work is all about. She says, "Doing the research is something kind of mysterious to people and it is a kind of tedious process and it’s not that complicated, and if you introduce the steps to people, you can watch as they being to see they now have a sense of what the neighborhood was like."
There are still a lot of questions about Brian’s home that we could ask and a lot of answers to be found. But where you go next in this kind of research really depends on what you want to know.
If you are interested in learning more about the people who lived there, at the library you can access Ancestry Institution on your computer. That’s where I found census data, marriage and birth records for one of the first owners of Brian’s home: Katerina or Catherine Lazewski, a Polish-German immigrant who came here in the early 1900s.
Or, maybe you’re interested in knowing the name of everyone who has ever lived there? At the library, you can go through old city directories or in the periodicals department, you can find the City of Milwaukee tax rolls.
Are you interested in learning more about the construction and architecture of a building? Check out the Wisconsin Architectural Archives or the Milwaukee Architecture Index, also available in the Zeidler Room. Everyone does this research for different reasons, but the goal is often the same.
"People are curious about where they live, they’re curious about what it was like there. They just want a sense of the neighborhood and you get them started and then it’s like the world opens up to them and they think of all other sorts of questions," says Torphy.
So what are you waiting for? Get digging with these tips on starting this research.
Tips for researching historic Milwaukee properties
If you're looking into an older property, there may already be some information collected by the Wisconsin Historical Society. Just head to WisconsinHistory.org and put the address into the search bar. You may find a property record with information like the construction date, style of the home, or even bibliographical information on who lived or worked at the property.
To find most of this information, you need to get up and go places. There's some information you can find online and remotely, but most of the best resources can only be found in-person and there's no replacement for holding history in your hands.
Some of the best places to go are:
- Milwaukee Public Library Central Branch (specifically the Frank P. Zeidler Room on the 2nd floor to find premises records, plat books, city directories and the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps), located at 814 W. Wisconsin Avenue
- Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee (for building permits), located at 809 N. Broadway
- Milwaukee County Historical Society (appointments are required), located at 910 N. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive
- City Records Center in the basement of the Zeidler Municipal Building, located at 841 N. Broadway
Every time I asked a question to someone, they may not have known the answer, but they always had suggestions on where to go next. I wouldn't have been able to do most of this research without the help of librarians and city employees.
History comes to us in bits and pieces and you may not find what you're looking for initially, but if you grab onto what you do know, it may lead you to the information you're hoping to find.
I was able to find a lot of information about one of the families who lived in Brian's home, and initially all I had was one woman's name and the date she lived there. I went to Ancestry Institution (can access at the library) with her name and approximate area and after some educated guessing, I was able to find her census records, birth records, immigration papers, and even a photo of her gravestone.
Sometimes we go into this kind of research with a mission, like: finding the blue prints of a property. But focusing too much on a single goal may lead you away from incredible information.
For example, I wasn't that interested in J.C. Howard and wasn't sure how much I should look into his life, but if I hadn't done some digging, I wouldn't have found out about his son John, whose death was the precursor for the development of the land where Brian's home is now. I learned a lot about the history of Milwaukee through looking at their lives.
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