What is the history of your house

It is hard to put the whole history together. The house was built a little before 1750. The ruins opposite are older and the adjacent one about the same. There are remains of two other houses and one other house is built on the site of yet another. The hamlet was quite wealthy until the Revolution. The owner of the big ruin opposite was a royalist who vanished during the Terror. That house has never been properly inhabited since. The family who owned this house are still not so far away but no longer what they were originally. The whole area was dairy farming. Now there are only two in close proximity. When the family we bought from came from Italy and settled here in the 1920s they kept cattle and the entire farm not so small. By the time we bought there were no cattle for years and only two fields left. They built a bungalow on one.

They remember eastern European war refugees in the ruin after the Second World War who were eventually taken away in army trucks. The area went into decline after that.

In our region people believe that the people who are dead in your house are still living there as ghosts. If they turn against you, you had better have them exorcized!

Alex that is a little piece of history.

There must be thousands more out there.

Only eight people live permanently in my hamlet now, but in the same buildings, early last century, there were more than one hundred people living here. My best friends in the village, a Breton who married a girl from Perigord, live in the house that has been in his family for years and years although it was derelict before they moved in and renovated it. There is a smaller building in their garden where ten people and their animals used to live together, and they used always to use that as a holiday home before they moved into the big house.

our house, an old boulangerie was torched by the nazis because the baker was supplying the resistance with bread.

he was taken up the hill behind & executed!

I took a ceiling down & found the old beams all burned

I have a beautiful house that is rumored to have been a Knights Templar resting place. Realistically, I don't believe it is quite that old, but it does contain a number of stones from the Commanderie which was a Templar site. And I have many photos from back centuries ago of the property. The oldest living owner of the house lives across the street, but unfortunately my French is not yet good enough to ask the questions I would want to ask.

I would LOVE to learn more about anyone’s history of their house. This is an old thread; I hope someone might feel like adding more new info about their house, to this thread, please?

Cheers.

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Good idea.

Hi Mary… great idea… I’ve got an appointment elsewhere now… but I’ll check-in later…

I don’t know much about my house other than I’ve seen documentary evidence that it existed in 1643 and that the neighbour I had when I first bought the house had been born here when his parents and grandparents lived in two rooms of the house. The third ground floor room and the grenier had been used by the owner for storage.
I know more about my small hamlet of five dwellings as it was researched by a local historian for a lecture he gave a couple of years ago. The settlement existed during the Hundred Years War and was deserted, possibly burned, during that time. It was repopulated later, the first inhabitant was a man released from his tenure at a nearby chateau and granted the right to farm the land. Over time his relatives moved into the neighbouring properties and the hamlet’s name changed from its medieval name to reflect the family’s surname. Since the French Revolution a nearby chateau has completely disappeared and the doorway to a cottage I own Is far too refined for the rest of the building, I like to think it’s probably a bit of stonework recycled from the chateau ruins. That cottage is the oldest building here.
The research was particularly interesting because before that the locals were split on the origin of the hamlet’s name. Some believed it was named after a priest who had lived here while others thought the name reflected the root crops grown. Both camps were proved wrong. Detailed research using chateau records held in the departmental archives revealed the truth.

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Our house in the Clunysois was a fermette and is about 120 years old in the older part. We have one and a half hectares of land.
It was always in the Prost family.
We bought it from Christiane Barraud, nee Prost, in 2005.
She was born in the small fermette.
The newer part was built by Jean Barraud when he married Christiane in the 1960’s. It was very small at first, but he added onto the side when they had children.
It is built on a large sous-sol.
Jean died whilst we were in the process of buying the house.
We have extended the newer part of the house and joined it to some outbuildings which were in a rather sorry state.
The original fermette is now a luxury gite and Christiane is delighted that her house which she could not afford to renovate, is now such a beautiful building.
We have added a swimming pool and Jim has created a new orchard.

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what wonderful stories we have relating to our beautiful old properties.
The history flows through the garden on carpets of spring flower and
echoes in the corridors and attics where time holds so many secrets and memories
of those who walked or played there so long ago.

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Lot’s of history with our house - maybe for another time but just a quick snippet…

A couple of years ago a delivery guy tentatively asked me if I could clear something up for him. He asked me if our house had been used during the WW2 by the Resistance to lock up captured Germans in the cellar. He’d been told the story ever since he was a kid, as had most of his and subsequent classes at our local school!

I told him the house was built in 1962 - so no. He was devastated :slight_smile:

See - fake news goes way back :-:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I don’t know what the history of my house is, or of the adjacent old workshop I bought at auction. But what I found interesting was that just in front of the workshop, which I think was once a forge – it is called ‘La Forge’ – I found 2 old coins just under the roots of the grass, with my metal detector.

One of the coins is shown here – scanned in – and is a Double Tournois Copper Louis X111 1640’s coin. I wonder whether there was a forge here in those days, which conjures imagination!

Were 1640’s horses having their horse-shoes nailed on here at La Forge back then? Love to think so.

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Just remembered! I also found three military buttons in the back garden of La Forge. Two are Foreign Legion buttons and the third is of the ‘34th Brigade’…! Don’t know what the dates might be.

Military uniforms from past centuries were surely hung up to dry out in the back garden…!

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Suspect from our house’s architectural style (tall and narrow) and location in the village, highest point on rock above the Lot’s bank and closest to the C11th citadel, that it was built in the C14th. However, after ten years digging in the garden, I’ve so far found nothing older than a pair of overalls that may date from the early 21st century.

Why these were buried, one can only imagine, but I think it’s unlikely that they once contained a corpse…

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I’m sure our Cussy house is around 100-150 years old. I have little info on it, other than it was once a bar & cafe, and had some kind of shop operating out of the largest of the 3 cellars. Found a couple of postcards online, but without clear dates. It’s the house on the right with steps to the front door. It seems likely that the lower picture is the earlier of the 2.


It seems that Jean Coqueugniot, the photographer, may have died of typhoid in 1906:

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FWIW the house here in Oxfordshire is a bit older. There’s a local hand-drawn map dated 1769 with the house in place (and an additional building between us and the barn next door that’s now a house.

Originally it was a couple of 1 up 1 down labourer’s rubble built and thatched cottages. Later on they were modernised a little and used as housing for teachers at the village school (just down the drive - graves under the main floor, mentioned as a chapel in the domesday book apparently). My father in law knew someone who had been a teacher and lived in one of these when they were still thatched.

In the early 70s the row of 3 cottages were in bad condition, and were sold as a job lot with the house to Anne Shukman, mother of David Shukman the BBC correspondent. She had them re-roofed and the equivalent of a 4th cottage added to the end & they were turned into 2 X 3 bedroom houses. We bought from Anne in 1990 and have been happy here ever since. It’s a little scruffy, but has been a good home. Photo from 2015.

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