There has been a lot of talk on our neighborhood email group about researching your house's history. One of the tips was to look at a set of maps that were made for fire insurance reasons. The Houston Public Library has them digitized online (accessible if you have a library card). We had heard that our house was built in 1929, but it shows up on the 1925 map, so it must be a few years older than we had thought. The next earlier map, from 1907 (I think) just has a blank strip two blocks high down the length of our street. The north side of the street has cross streets, but it doesn't show any buildings in the blocks, and the south side is in the empty space. It also shows a rail line just a few blocks away--that certainly isn't there any more!
Check your public library for "Sanborn Maps". At HPL they're part of the Proquest databases and only Texas maps are available online.
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