Why You Should Be Authenticating Sears Roebuck Houses with Mortgages and Deeds

Regular readers know that I've spent a lot of time locating, documenting and authenticating houses from Sears Roebuck (and McClure and Montgomery Ward) using mortgages and deeds. To date, I've documented over 4,000 Sears Roebuck homes for the National Database of Sears Homes and a significant percentage of those were located by researching mortgage records. It's a method frequently used by myself and my fellow contributors to the National Database of Sears Homes and it's a big reason why we've been able to locate and authenticate so many homes. Because it's such an important part of the work that I do, I want to explain why I consider it the gold standard for authenticating houses from Sears Roebuck. 

Washington DC Area Sears Houses by the Numbers

One of the most researched areas of the country for Sears houses is in and around Washington DC. That research took another big step forward this week with the completion of a comprehensive survey of Sears Roebuck mortgages in the City of Alexandria and adjacent Arlington County, Virginia. My fellow kit house researcher Judith Chabot spent about 3 months researching over 200 mortgages from Sears Roebuck (and a couple dozen from other kit house companies). That work fills in a big gap in our knowledge of how many Sears houses were sold in the Washington DC region. Although not every Sears house was financed through Sears Roebuck, where we've been able to do comprehensive surveys, like Arlington County and Washington DC, we've found that they represent a significant number of the Sears houses built. With Judith's work completed, I wanted to share some numbers. Let's take a look!