Research the history of your home - tutorial six: Historiography

Once you’ve done some digging into the history of your house, you will want to place it into a greater context. To do that, you will need to learn more about the general history of Melrose. We hope that our posts have helped to do just that, but there are other sources readily available that can familiarize you with the narrative of our city’s history.

First and foremost, any research into Melrose in the 19th century or before should begin with Elbridge Henry Goss’s History of Melrose (1902). Goss’s volume is encyclopedic in scope and immensely detailed. He includes transcriptions of documents that in some cases have since disappeared, and gives oral history that would otherwise be lost. He was unabashedly most interested in the lives of the socially engaged, prosperous men of his day—i.e., people like him—so you will not find the full tableau of Victorian life here. Goss also had no interest in pondering the question of why things happened the way they did; for him, history was a collection of facts, documents, and anecdotes. Despite these weaknesses, he is indispensable: https://archive.org/details/historyofmelrose02goss.

In 1915 the newly-formed Melrose Historical Society published “Ancient Melrose,” a pamphlet written by Levi Gould and Franklin Shumway that can be read as a supplement to Goss. Most essential here is Gould’s hand-drawn map of Melrose in 1843, in which he recalled every house and its location in that year based on his childhood memories: https://archive.org/details/ancientmelroseso00goss/mode/2up.

In 1950 Edwin Kemp published “Melrose, Massachusetts 1900-1950,” which was written as an update of Goss. It is nowhere near as ambitious as Goss’s work, but is nonetheless a very helpful reference guide for major dates, events, and personalities in the first half of the 20th century: https://archive.org/details/melrosemassachus00kemp/mode/2up.

In 2000, a further update, “Melrose: Past, Present & Future” was published. It is not available online. It is more of a coffee table book with glossy photos of buildings and people than a history per se, and is of limited use. It is available at the Melrose Public Library.