Practical Preservation Podcast featuring Kevin Shue of Lancaster History

After our Practical Preservation event in June at Lancaster History I reached out to our contact to see if they would have someone share their resources for researching house histories on the Practical Preservation Podcast.  Kevin Shue joined the podcast and shared his more than 30 years of experience working with the collection at Lancaster History.

There are many resources to help you find the history of our home.  The two areas of concentration most people are searching for are the year the house was built and/or the history of the people who built and subsequently lived in the house.

Resource options:

  • Tax records
  • Deed recordings
  • Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County – individual property records from county surveys
  • Census records: population, manufactures schedule to show craftsman and trades, and agricultural schedules to show crops, livestock, and acreage
  • Estate Inventory’s
  • Countywide maps
  • Fire Insurance maps
  • Photos

Photos of the Lancaster History Collection:

Bio:

Kevin worked at LancasterHistory for thirty years.  He has helped thousands of researchers over this time period.  He has help authors of numerous books, and given lectures on various topics here in Lancaster;, as well as, Dublin, Ireland, Belfast, Northern Ireland; County Tyrone, Northern Ireland; and Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

Contact:

Lancaster History – lancasterhistory.org (research) or 717-392-4633

Hours: Monday-Saturday 9:30am-5pm

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning in to the Practical Preservation Podcast. Please take a moment to visit our website practicalpreservationservices.com for additional information and tips to help you restore your historical home. If you’ve not done so, please subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud, and also like us on Facebook. Welcome to the Practical Preservation Podcast, hosted by Danielle and Jonathan Keperling. Keperling Preservation Services is a family-owned business based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, dedicated to the preservation of our built architectural history for today’s use as well as future generations. Our weekly podcast provides you with expert advice specific to the unique needs of renovating a historic home, educating by sharing our, from-the-trenches preservation knowledge and our guest’s expertise, balancing modern needs while maintaining the historical significance, character and beauty of your period home.

Speaker 2:

So today on the Practical Preservation Podcast, we have Kevin Shue. He has worked at LancasterHistory for 30 years. He’s helped thousands of researchers over this time period. He has helped authors of numerous books and given lectures on various topics here in Lancaster, as well as Dublin, Ireland, Belfast, Northern Ireland County Tyrone, North Ireland and Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. So thank you for joining us on the podcast. And we’re going to talk today, and know a little bit about history and how to research stuff, but tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to be… Are you like a librarian? Are you a preservationist? How do you classify yourself?

Kevin:

Well, yeah. I guess, basically I worked at libraries during college for income. And so, I worked at libraries during college days, and then I went into actually about a little bit over a decade with advertising media and what have you. And after about a decade of that, I thought, “I’m going to sort of try and take another route.” So the other route was something I was familiar with, which was working here.

Speaker 2:

Working in the library, yeah.

Kevin:

The library, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Well, very interesting. I find that as I’m doing these podcasts, people find their way into preservation and history, kind of a circumvent way. So tell me a little bit about LancasterHistory and what you do here with the mission is?

Kevin:

Well, LancasterHistory is the current name for LancasterHistory. Before that we were LancasterHistory.org, and before that, we merged with the home of President James Buchanan Wheatland and before we merged, LancasterHistory was actually Lancaster County Historical Society. And then, the other organization was President James Buchanan’s home, Wheatland. So once we merged them we kind of have a unified name. But as far as Lancaster County Historical Society goes, we were publishing journals way back in 1894. So we have a long history here. And the building that we’re now working in, or where we’re talking is actually the original building of the Lancaster County Historical Society, which was built about 1962, ’63.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Okay. Well, very good. Thank you. I know we had our event here, I guess, at the beginning of June now. And we did a tour of Wheatland and I’m just impressed with the facility and everything you have, you can really serve the community.

Kevin:

Yeah. But what’s nice about it. I always mentioned this to people when they come in and they’re wondering about the building itself and that is it’s green technology. So it’s solar panels on top and we’re geothermal. And I usually tell people that if they go out this one particular door, just like old faithful, that the guys, or if they just happened to go out the door at the right time, they’ll see the steam coming out.

Speaker 2:

Oh yes.

Kevin:

From the geothermal [inaudible 00:04:38].

Speaker 2:

That’s very interesting. So what are the two house history questions you’re asked the most?

Kevin:

Well, the two would be mostly, people want to know when the house was built or how old the house is? And the other one is the people who want to know more about the people who live there at their house. So those are the two main questions.

Speaker 2:

So they want to know when it was built and who lived there and their story?

Kevin:

Right, hm-hmm (affirmative).

Speaker 2:

And so, why is it important to know who owned the property?

Kevin:

Well, that’s dependent on, I mean, both questions need that. And so, the reason why it’s needed for the first question is you need to pull in other records and look at them and I’ll tell you which ones they are in a minute, to try to determine when a structure is built. So one of the records would be the tax records. I always mentioned this story, because I always find it’s just, there’s always an exception, but basically people say, “I want to know when my house was built.” And I usually tell people, “You won’t get the exact date. You’ll get a general idea from…”

Speaker 2:

A timeframe.

Kevin:

A timeframe. And one time in the tax record, there was a new house built and gave the date. But generally speaking, the tax records, what happens is you have to know the owners, so you can look at the right entry that will tell you when there was a significant spike in the valuation of the property.

Speaker 2:

That makes sense. So before it’s land, it’s then improved, and then once the property is built, it makes it, the tax is more.

Kevin:

Right. And so, that’s why you need for that question, that’s why you need to have the owners. And the other thing is that with a spike, you have to be sure to canvas all the people in that particular area, in that tax book to make sure it wasn’t a general hike in taxes.

Speaker 2:

Right. That they weren’t just trying to raise money.

Kevin:

Right. And the other thing too, is you have to see if there’s a acreage difference between these too-

Speaker 2:

Oh, that make sense, yeah.

Kevin:

So, but if everything is constant, then that’s generally a good sign that something, there’s an improvement as far as a building or structure.

Speaker 2:

Right. Okay, that makes sense to me. And then, I guess either way, you need to know that for the owner so that you can research who they were or when it was built. So, and then you can use the deeds then to search also, who owned it subsequently. I was trying to try to remember that word.

Kevin:

The more current deeds, about 99% of the time will tell you the exact record to look at for the previous transaction. Generally speaking, the deeds follow a format, which would give you the buyer, seller. And it will tell you the location and it’ll be then, giving you a surveyor’s description. Now in Pennsylvania, I’m not sure how, if there’s anyone researching in the Midwest-

Speaker 2:

Right, outside, yeah.

Kevin:

But in Pennsylvania, in the colonial states, it’s what they call metes, M-E-T-E-S and bounds. And that’s where they say, “By the stream, by the tree [crosstalk 00:08:22].”

Speaker 2:

Oh yes.

Kevin:

All that. And of course, there’s a problem there, because not all the trees back in 1750 are going to be here.

Speaker 2:

Right, yeah. We’ve been doing some research and we keep finding the property is across the street from this person. It was like, “Well, we don’t know where that person is either.”

Kevin:

Well, last year I was waiting for this to happen. And one of the deeds, if I happened to one of the deeds that we were researching for someone. And that was, they gave a [inaudible 00:08:52] description, and one of the descriptions was, “Under a rock.”

Speaker 2:

Oh, goodness.

Kevin:

It depends on how big that rock is, but that’s the metes and bounds. In the Midwest that some people call it, expansion states, they do township and range and quarters and quarters [inaudible 00:09:11]. So you can really know exactly where it’s at.

Speaker 2:

Right, yeah. I’ve driven in some of those, the prairie in Nebraska and my dad’s sister lives there, and it’s just every corner is an acre.

Kevin:

Yeah. So a lot of times when people come here, there’s a lot of people coming in from out the area. And so, there’s a little bit of an instruction curve if they’ve never experienced metes and bounds. So I always sort of give them the comparison.

Speaker 2:

Do they have those descriptions in the modern deeds been updated? And can you go backwards and then see that? Or do they pretty much stay consistent throughout the same property? Do you understand what I mean?

Kevin:

Do you mean, do they still use the metes and bounds?

Speaker 2:

Hm-hmm (affirmative).

Kevin:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

They do. Okay.

Kevin:

Now, one thing in Lancaster, I think in Northern states is that there’s a matter of terminology too. You have to be looking out for in the deed, a word called messuage. And what messuage means is a house. Okay. In the Southern states, a lot of the deeds I think have a term called curtilage. It doesn’t mean a house, it means grounds surrounding a house. Little fine difference there. So, if anyone’s working on something in the Southern states, they might come across curtilage, that’s a good way of knowing that there was a house there.

Speaker 2:

A house around it. Or a house, it’s around the house.

Kevin:

And here it will be messuage. Then you have to sort of watch out for the boiler plate type of thing, like a stream, and rates and water privileges, website water rates and such. And if they keep naming that, you can’t be serving that, even if they say a house or outbuilding that there’s anything there, if they keep having it-

Speaker 2:

It was that kind of copy paste. Yeah. Okay. So where can someone find the deed records? Do you have some of them here or some of them?

Kevin:

Well, yeah. For Lancaster County Research they have, well, I suggest is they Google, just in the search term, just Lancaster recorder of deeds, and it’ll take you there, make sure it’s Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Okay. But usually somehow Google it.

Speaker 2:

It knows where you are.

Kevin:

So the top find will usually be Lancaster recorder of deeds. And then, you have to sort of step your way through it a little bit. It’s free. It’s government records, it’s public records. And then, you’d have to sort of sign in to what they call info decks, and you acknowledge you’re a guest and then you get into an info decks. Well, then the info decks is pretty, pretty exhaustive. They have all sorts of deeds from 1729. Deed indexes from 1729, to eight… Try this again, to 1980.

Speaker 2:

  1. Okay.

Kevin:

So the big gap is if someone doesn’t know who owned the property after like 1981 to now, okay. There is a way to get there. I attempted it right before we did this or doing this. And for some reason, the cookies got in the web-browser and when I backed out it won’t let me back in, because they think that the session is still open it. But there is a way to do that. There’s a backup plan if your listeners don’t really want to, if they have issues with that portion of it, then they would have to go to either the public library or here and check into the city or county directories.

Speaker 2:

Oh yes. Okay.

Kevin:

And the only proviso is, the directories usually don’t reference if the person owns a property or just living there.

Speaker 2:

So okay, so you just know that the person who lived there, you don’t know actually who the owner is.

Kevin:

Right. I mean, it could be the owner, but may not be, especially in Lancaster city, if someone’s in Lancaster city, there were a lot of investment properties for apartments and stuff. So that’s the only proviso with that. And they also use older information too.

Speaker 2:

Okay. And the more recent deed searches are from 1981 on, is that also available online?

Kevin:

Well, that’s what I was [crosstalk 00:14:05].

Speaker 2:

Oh okay. Okay.

Kevin:

And so within the recorder of deeds website-

Speaker 2:

There should be a link to-

Kevin:

It’ll say, “Search public records.” They won’t specifically say, “Deeds.” But you can get, if you click into that they’ll give you a wide variety of public records, including deeds, so you have to sort of de-select everything and then just select deeds, and then search there. So, yeah, they can do that.

Speaker 2:

It’s still available. Okay. Very good. Are there any other local organizations that you would recommend people visit? What kind of information that people could provide or what the organizations could provide if they’re searching for their house histories?

Kevin:

I’d say the Historic Preservation Trust.

Speaker 2:

I know they have survey records.

Kevin:

Yeah. We have their printed material here. Lancaster’s heritage and, or present past that was done quite a while ago now a number of decades ago. But that would let people know if their property was researched.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Oh, so this is their baseline of when they initially did the surveys.

Kevin:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Kevin:

If the people don’t find their property, there doesn’t mean that they don’t have information on file. And so, the actual contact-

Speaker 2:

Reach out to them. Okay. Okay. Very good. And I know that LancasterHistory is more usually focused on the people and the Preservation Trust is more focused on buildings. Would you say that’s probably the distinction?

Kevin:

They’re more interested in historic architecture, the particular architectural styles that are prevalent in particular timeframes. We’re research-focused and helping researchers so that if anyone wants to come in to do any sort of research genealogy or house history, we can help them.

Speaker 2:

Okay, very good.

Kevin:

Well, the one thing I wanted to mention while I’m thinking of it is when I’m talking about taxes, there’s two taxes that might be of use and very interesting for people. The first one’s 1815 U.S. Direct Tax. So I usually say that if people can follow their deed and ownership back to 1815, and know who owns the property, it’ll tell you what, they’ll describe dimensions, the size, the measurements, the building materials of the houses, the barns, the outbuildings, all that. So it really gives you a really good snapshot of what the property looked like in 1815 if you can get back that far. If you can go back even further, there’s a certain portion of Lancaster county, not all of it, that’s survived and it’s called the Glass Tax, or the 1798 Tax, Direct Tax. And that usually gives who was on the property, whether it’s the owner or someone else, then it also give you a description of the property, just like the 1815 Tax. So those two tax, I just want to [crosstalk 00:17:19].

Speaker 2:

Oh, definitely. Yeah. And do you have both of those here?

Kevin:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Okay. Very good. And I was just actually reading about the Glass Tax two days ago. I’m preparing for a window presentation. I was reading about the Glass Tax. So that’s interesting. So after you’ve determined who the owners are, what would your next step be?

Kevin:

Well, again, it depends on the question. If someone is looking for the age, that would be one thing, which we discuss. If it’s trying to find out the people, then you would want to use the U.S. federal census, the population schedule. Now I’m going to sort of differentiate. Population schedule will be the people. Now the complete run of the census is from 1790 to 1940 now. And so, the first census that names people in the household as far as not the head of household, but everyone in the household is 1850. And then, they keep refining by narrowing the ages for example. And the questions they asked, depended on what was going on in the country. So in 1940, they were asking about employment and such. In 1930, for some reason they were interested to see who had a radio set.

Speaker 2:

That’s funny.

Kevin:

And 1900, 1910, when there’s a big influx of immigration, they wanted to know if people were nationalized, what stage they were naturalized? When did they come into the states, where were they’re born? Things like that. But that sort of gives you a little bit about who was living at the property, once you know that they owned the property, okay? 1840 and before it’s only the name of head of household and age ranges and the gender of the people in the household. There were other schedules besides population. There was the agricultural schedule. So if someone’s owning a farm, they’re doing research on the farm, they might want to look into the agricultural census, I believe it’s 1850, 60, 70, and able to tell what was raised, what crops were raised, what livestock, acreage and things along that line. So it’s sort of [crosstalk 00:19:55].

Speaker 2:

It gives you some more information.

Kevin:

Yeah, more information about what they were doing. The other thing would be what they call the manufacturer’s schedule. And people think, and I understand why, because of like industrial revolution and such, but manufacturers took the schedule at that point meant anyone who created items that were, I think the income was 500 or the number of units was 500 and above. So a shoemaker-

Speaker 2:

Okay. So any type of somebody who had a craft, a craft-person, yeah.

Kevin:

So, it could be a shoemaker, it could be a blacksmith, could be, oh, I’m not sure.

Speaker 2:

Cabinets. Yeah.

Kevin:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Any kind of manufacturing.

Kevin:

Any kind of manufacturing. So, people sort of sidetracked it, because they went away, they think factories and smokestacks and that’s not necessarily what they were recording back then.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Very interesting.

Kevin:

Yeah. I’m trying to think what else here. Oh, I know. Any time that you have an owner and especially, you know the owner’s name, you might want to find out if they died there. Not necessarily to see if it’s haunted.

Speaker 2:

Do you do that too?

Kevin:

If we have questions, we address those questions. But if the person died there, they usually have an estate inventory for the person. And so, it’ll tell you what the people had in the house, and it might describe a sideboard. It might explain that there was a quarter cupboard or a particular portrait, or anything like that that might give people information about the interior of the house.

Speaker 2:

And how it was furnished. And yeah.

Kevin:

How it was furnished.

Speaker 2:

And would that also, would that be, is that just part of the house records that you have, or is that something that would have been recorded with the county?

Kevin:

Well, it’s a county government record, but we have them here for Lancaster county up until a little bit over a little bit after 1900. So, but before that, you’ll find lots of interesting stuff. A lot of times they’ll tell you the occupation. If people are researching mostly rural people, they might come across the name, Yeoman, Y-E-O-M-A-N. And some people think it means someone who’s a sailor. Back then that was a farmer. But might tell you the occupation, even if they don’t tell you right up front, right up top, just looking at the tools that people had for example.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that makes sense.

Kevin:

Might give you an idea of what the people did and you can write a narrative about at this particular time, “This house, so-and-so was a blacksmith or that so-and-so was a weaver.” So, yeah. And that’s all sort of interesting I think.

Speaker 2:

That’s very interesting.

Kevin:

I’m trying to remember, there was one other thing about, oh, about the taxes. Oh, one other thing about the taxes. In Pennsylvania, there’s three categories of taxpayers very early on. And it’s so followed through too. The first one will be freeholder and freeholder would be landowner. So, after the revolutionary war, a little bit later, anyone who would have been designated as freeholders before is now known as a landowner. The second one would be inmate. And inmate is not a prisoner, okay? Inmate is a tenant or a renter. And the third category and I sort of jerked, but at the same time, I really don’t know this. I don’t know it, so I really should take some time to find out why. They separated the single men, 21 and over. And, but sometimes people come in, even if they’re doing genealogy and they say, “Well, my family was really poor that they wouldn’t be in the tax records.” If you owned a pig, if you owned a sow-

Speaker 2:

They were taxing them.

Kevin:

They were taxed. It wasn’t land necessarily. It was more personal property. So you’ll see in the earlier records, those three categories, sometimes the tax collector at the time lumped the freeholders and the tenants together. And other times they delineated the three, but that’s your way of getting a timeline. And hopefully, that’s your way of filling in the years between the census.

Speaker 2:

Right, yeah, because the census only gives you a snapshot every 10 years.

Kevin:

So, I just wanted to let you know the categories.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, with the research we’ve been doing I kept seeing inmates, so then I had to go figure out why there were so many inmates.

Kevin:

Yeah. It could be a problem, if it really meant what it-

Speaker 2:

Yes. What we assumed. What other sources does LancasterHistory have in the collection to search for house history?

Kevin:

Well, one thing that we have one category of record we have are maps. So in Lancaster county we have three atlases and then within the atlases, each townships will have names of owners and they are the owners and numbers, besides the name. The numbers are the acres. But you’ll see a little smudge right next to the name of that means there’s a house there. So for the dates would be first, the earliest atlas for Lancaster county is 1864, it was called the Bridgen’s Atlas, B-R-I-D-G-E-N, Bridgen’s Atlas. The next one was 1875. And that was Everts & Stewart. So that would be E-V-E-R-T-T-S or something and Stewart. That’s 1875. The last one was 1899, and that was Graves & Steinbarger. I’m giving the names of the publishers. And so, that’s 1899. And then, we might have some earlier county-wide just the entire county.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So these were more broken, more narrowly. Okay.

Kevin:

Right. And so, the earlier ones with the county, you had to have a really mega amount of land to show up. And also they were mostly interested in not necessarily where the houses were, but basically where the mills were, where the [crosstalk 00:27:06] houses were, where the taverns were, stuff like that. So that’s why you won’t see that much. You might sort of see what it looked like a little bit, but that’s the primary purpose of those. Now, and that’s mostly the outlying areas of the city. I think ’89, gives more detail about the city. They show the street map and the wards and such. Now, if someone’s in a town in Lancaster county, there may be what they call the Sanborn fire insurance maps. And what they do is it’s the fire insurance company was interested in the building materials and the structures of cities, I guess, for fire reasons.

Speaker 2:

Right, to see what their risk or exposure is. Yeah.

Kevin:

So, but they were mostly interested in cities and towns and no rural area, just the towns. So within Lancaster county, I think, of course, Lancaster city. And then they did it periodically. It wasn’t just what’s it done to that.

Speaker 2:

And they kept updating.

Kevin:

Right. And so, we had Lancaster city from 1886, I think they began 1886, every place. So we have Lancaster city 1886, but I think it was the one in 1903, was 1912. And then it’s color-coded, pink would be brick, yellow would be wood, blue would be stone, and it would show you a neighborhood. So a lot of times people, if they live in a city or a town and they look at the same format. They want a copy of where the house was to show what the neighborhood looked like. And it also would give you a timeline. If your property, if your house isn’t in 1886 was in 1903-

Speaker 2:

You know at some point yeah, you can kind of narrow down.

Kevin:

Yeah. And then, you can start refining tax searches and all that stuff. So some of the towns that you remember it’s covered, would’ve been from Lancaster county would be Lancaster, Marietta, Columbia, Lititz, I believe I’m not sure about [inaudible 00:29:28] and Washington Boro too. So, I mean, that’s sort of a new thing to have, because people can take pictures.

Speaker 2:

And they are colorful. They’re pretty.

Kevin:

Yeah, they are. Well, here’s the thing though with our collection, it’s only the city that we can have hard copies of. We do have the others on microfilm, but they’re black and white. Now there’s other places that people can get hard copies or look at the hard copies. I think it was probably going to be some online. I know Penn state has a lot of them.

Speaker 2:

Oh, do they. Okay.

Kevin:

And so, maybe there’s a way of getting an image from that. I’m not sure about that, but yeah, they are nice if you can get the color-coded ones. I’m trying to think of what I was going to say here.

Speaker 2:

They’re different maps, they’re different sources.

Kevin:

Oh yeah, different sources. Well, yeah. I did want to mention that anyway. They wanted to sure that we have the hard copies only of the city and then the other towns I mentioned were on microfilm.

Speaker 2:

On microfilm. Okay. Okay. Very good. And we kind of talked about what information you can find out from the… At least from the Sanborn maps, you can see the construction and different things.

Kevin:

I’m sorry. One of the thing is if you do the Sanborn maps and you see your house, you might see if you suspect that there’s an extension, you might see the extension happening between two different dates.

Speaker 2:

Oh. So you can see when that occurred too.

Kevin:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, because the other maps just kind of show you that it was there. It doesn’t show you what it was. These give you more detail. Okay. So how can someone contact LancasterHistory or should they go to the website?

Kevin:

Yeah, that’d be the first step, would be website. Our website is www.lancasterhistory.org. Once they’re on the first page, there’ll be words on the top. And one’s called research and they click on the research. That’ll take them to the second page, which will offer different selections, like research services, which they’re fee-based services. But that’s one option. The other option is to be able to just click on the word collections, and there’s different collections. So there’d be library catalog, there’d be an archival search for county level government records, which could include, which does include inventories. If someone has an old hotel or tavern, there’d be a tavern license. They’d also have what they call mechanics leads. So if someone wasn’t paying up the contractor, that’s the other question is, and that’s even more difficult and rare to find is someone who is or who exactly built the house.

Speaker 2:

Oh, the actual builder.

Kevin:

The actual builder.

Speaker 2:

Okay. That would be hard to uncover, especially before building permits.

Kevin:

So, mechanics liens [inaudible 00:32:51]. If the owner didn’t pay up-

Speaker 2:

If there was a dispute at the end-

Kevin:

And there’s a dispute at the end, they might find out who built the house. So that’s in the archives’ collection, there’ll be a search for other county documents, but you have to know the owners. The museum, again, just giving this as a possible example. Again, if someone has had a tavern or hotel, we may have a hotel sign, for example. Or if you know some people who own the property, we might have the corner cupboard that was listed in the inventory.

Speaker 2:

Oh, yes.

Kevin:

Okay. So, they want to look at all the different collections with the information and the knowledge of the owners beforehand. We also have a photo collection. Now let’s see [crosstalk 00:33:41] thing too. We have thousands and thousands of photos, and a lot of times people say, “Well, I want to see if you have a picture of my old house. It’s 123 North, whatever.” The photo’s still usually [crosstalk 00:33:52] that. They might just say, North President, or they might say, North Shippen, or what have you. And you sort of, and I usually sort of suggest that if people are looking at the photos, they can look at the streets and even if the house isn’t photographed, it would still give them a snapshot of what the neighborhood was.

Speaker 2:

Right, yeah. What it looked like. Yeah. Yeah. The photo collection it’s great. I mean, there are so many pictures on there.

Kevin:

Right. And if they do find something that they want, people want, then they can go to the research services part of it, fill out the request. We need the object ID number. That’s one thing they’ve going to ask for, and then it’ll be a fee. And what we normally do. I think the fee’s like, this is for personal use, not for publication, or not for exhibit, but for personal use. I think it’s like $10 and then $5 per week or something like that more, but we put it on a disc or we send it by file. But mostly we send it by file. And then people can make it any size that they want.

Speaker 2:

Right. They can print it out themselves. Yeah.

Kevin:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And yeah. So the website is, it tells you how to come in and look at, come in and use the research library if you’re inclined and in the neighborhood. And then, I guess that kind of leads us to how can someone support LancasterHistory, would be memberships?

Kevin:

Yeah. I mean, there’s different ways of supporting the organization. There’s different levels of membership. If there’d be individuals at $50, a family at 75, I think the lowest, I guess they would call it corporate, I don’t know the exact term. I think it would be corporate, excuse me, like a business, I think it’s $100, and then there’s different levels. But yeah, you come in. If you’re not a member already, we would ask for $7 per researcher per day. And if senior status applies, it’s $5 per day. Come in, if you think you’re going to be here a number of times then, and you decided to become a member, then we’d apply whatever you paid that day to the membership.

Speaker 2:

To the membership, okay.

Kevin:

There’s also the store here.

Speaker 2:

Oh, yes, yeah.

Kevin:

We have like different books on different topics. Some are dealing with historic architecture and gardening. So yeah.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Well, very good. Is there anything else that you thought of that you want to share? I think we covered everything, but if you think of anything.

Kevin:

No. I guess I want to say that if people attempt to use the website and they’re having difficulties, just give us a call and we can try to step people through enough to help them navigate it. And so, our phone number is 717-392-4633. And our hours are Monday through Saturday, 9:30 until 5:00 each day, no evening hours. So if they do need to call us, they should call us-

Speaker 2:

During your regular hours. And I’ll make sure that the website and the phone number and your hours are on our website when I do this, the post for this.

Kevin:

It’s all good.

Speaker 2:

Okay, well, thank you very much.

Kevin:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the Practical Preservation Podcast. The resources discussed during this episode are on our website at practicalpreservationservices.com/podcast. If you received value from this episode and know someone else that will get value from it as well, please share it with them. Join us next week for another episode of the Practical Preservation Podcast. For more information on restoring your historic home, visit practicalpreservationservices.com.

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