If you’re interested in your house’s history, you can find past residents of many Portland-area houses in two ways:
- Look in old city directories (which are similar to phone books)
- Search for the house’s address in digital newspaper archives
To get started, gather some basic facts about your house and your neighborhood. This will help you plan your research.
Was your house in a city when it was new?
Is your house in Portland, Gresham or in another Multnomah County city? Every city’s boundaries have changed over time. To find documentation about your house, you’ll need to know if it was in an incorporated area when it was built. If it was, you’ll need to know which one.
Portland’s boundaries have changed a lot over the years. Many neighborhoods that now seem like they've been in the city forever were annexed fairly recently. The Portland Bureau of Planning & Sustainability has a map of historical annexations to the City of Portland which shows when each part of the city was added.
- If your house is in the city of Gresham or in unincorporated Multnomah County, learn about the tools for researching houses outside of Portland.
- If your house was inside Portland city limits during the time period you’re researching, you can use Portland city directories to find the names of previous residents.
- If your house is between I-205 and Gresham, or in the Portland neighborhoods of Cully or Brentwood-Darlington, it was probably outside city limits until the 1980s. You can try checking both Portland city directories and Gresham or East Suburban directories for past residents of your house.
If your house is in Portland, was it built in 1933 or earlier?
Do you know the date your house was constructed? If your house was built in Portland before 1933 and you want to find its early residents, you will need to know the original address. If you’re not sure, check the city of Portland’s property information database, PortlandMaps.
Knowing the build date is important, because Portland completely revised its addressing system in the early 1930s. Portland grew enormously in the early 1900s. Each newly-added bit of land had its own street naming conventions and address numbering system. Then, in 1931, five-man crews began walking the entire city and assigning new addresses to every building. The crews finished their work in July 1933. Nearly every building in the city got a new address number and directional, and many street names were changed.
This is how Portland got the five quadrants: NW, N, NE, SW and SE. In 2020, part of SW Portland was re-addressed again, and now some streets are designated S for south.
Finding your house's pre-1933 address
Check the Directory of Street and Name Changes published by the Crane Direct Mail Service. You can use it at Central Library, or download a digital copy from the City Archives catalog, eFiles (it’s a large file: 43.4 MB / 243 pages). If your house was built before 1933, and it was within the city limits in the early 1930s, it is probably included in this cross-reference directory. The directory is designed to convert old addresses to new ones, but it works both ways. Ask a library staff person how to use the directory to find your house’s old address.
Once you know both your house’s old and new addresses, you’re ready to start looking for past residents in Portland city directories.
Dig a little deeper
If you can’t find your house’s past residents using city directories or rural directories, try these suggestions for other creative ways to research who lived in your house.