How to research a house in Boston
The Suffolk Registry of Deeds and statewide masslandrecords.com, the City of Boston assessing data, the Boston Public Library's superb map collection, and Sanborn maps — how to trace a Boston house back to the beginning.
By The Plot Team · May 24, 2026 · 4 min read
Boston is one of the oldest cities in America, and its records run correspondingly deep — in some neighborhoods the chain of title reaches the 17th century. Whether you own a Beacon Hill rowhouse, a South End bowfront, a Dorchester triple-decker, or a Jamaica Plain Victorian, here's how to trace it.
Start with the parcel: City of Boston assessing
The City of Boston publishes parcel data on its open-data platform and through the Assessing Department's property-assessment search. Look up your address and you'll get the parcel ID, the land-use group, and assessment details that anchor the rest of your research. Boston's parcel records key to a street number and street name rather than a single combined field, so search by both.
Trace ownership: the Suffolk Registry of Deeds
Here Massachusetts is unusually generous. Deeds are recorded by county Registries of Deeds, and the Commonwealth runs a genuinely good statewide portal — masslandrecords.com — that lets you browse and search recorded documents for free. Boston sits in Suffolk County, so choose the Suffolk registry and search by name or by address/book-and-page.
Massachusetts registries also digitized deep into their historical books, so you can often follow a chain back well into the 1800s, and sometimes far earlier, without leaving your desk — a rare gift among American land-records systems. Read oldest-first to see the original grant, the subdivisions, and each transfer.
See the block: the BPL and Sanborn maps
The Boston Public Library's Leventhal Map & Education Center is one of the finest free historical-map resources anywhere, with thousands of digitized, georeferenced maps and atlases of Boston you can overlay on the modern city. Pair that with the Sanborn fire-insurance maps (via the Library of Congress), which show your block building-by-building and material-by-material across multiple editions. The G.W. Bromley and G.M. Hopkins real-estate atlases — many digitized through the BPL — even print owner names on the lots, an extraordinary shortcut.
Find the people: census and directories
The federal census (public 1850–1950) names everyone in the household — essential in a city shaped by Irish, Italian, Jewish, and later Caribbean and Latino migration. The Boston city directories, many digitized on the Internet Archive, list residents annually by name and occupation. The New England Historic Genealogical Society (American Ancestors), headquartered in Boston, is the premier collection in the country for this region.
Read the papers
Search Chronicling America (Library of Congress) and the Boston Globe historical archive for your street name in quotes. New England papers covered real-estate transfers, building, and neighborhood news closely.
Landmark status
Boston has multiple local historic districts administered by the Boston Landmarks Commission, plus statewide listings through the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MACRIS) database and the National Register. MACRIS is freely searchable and often already contains a building's architectural and historical description.
A Boston quirk: made land and the triple-decker
Two things make Boston house history distinctive, and both show up in the records. First, much of the city is made land — the Back Bay, parts of the South End, and the waterfront were filled in during the 19th century, so a "lot" there did not exist before a certain date. The earliest deed for a Back Bay parcel often begins with the Commonwealth selling newly filled land, which dates the whole block precisely. Second, the triple-decker — the three-family wooden house that defines Dorchester, Roxbury, and much of working-class Boston — was built in enormous numbers between roughly 1880 and 1920. If your house is a triple-decker, the assessor's land-use group and the Sanborn footprint will say so, and the census will usually show three separate households stacked under one roof, often related or from the same home country.
Going back the furthest
Because Massachusetts registries digitized so deeply, Boston is one of the few American cities where an amateur can sometimes trace a downtown or Beacon Hill parcel back to the 18th century without leaving home. When the online index runs out, the Suffolk registry's older bound volumes and the Massachusetts Archives hold the colonial-era records, and the Bostonian Society / Revolutionary Spaces and neighborhood historical societies hold deeds, photographs, and house files that never made it into any database.
Let Plot assemble the Boston record
Plot resolves a Boston address against the City's parcel data and the broad public record automatically and writes a cited history. Massachusetts is one of the better states for following a deed chain yourself — Plot points you to masslandrecords.com for the Suffolk registry — while it handles the parcel facts, press, maps, and imagery for you.