Have you ever really stopped to think about the long and storied history of your Santa Clarita home?  What was the story of the family who lived there before you? What about the one that lived there before them? How many children were in the house at one time? People have undoubtedly spent years making incredible memories in that home that they will never forget. What were they? What were the highs and the lows?  Every one of these stories has the potential to be fascinating. Once you start to think about just how many people have lived there since its original construction, you begin to get a sense of just how many stories you’re actually talking about.  It also underlines the idea that there is a veritable treasure trove of information hidden inside the most unlikely of sources: Santa Clarita property records. Those records can be used to put together the puzzle that is a family’s narrative – which can even include your own. You can uncover past residents who have lived in the same house you do, ownership timelines, potential connections to the land you now call home, and so much more – all with publicly available information that you can dive into at any time that you want.  A Story Begins  For the sake of example, say you’d always heard that your family had been in the Santa Clarita area for “generations,” but you have no idea the extent to which that is true. Up until now, it’s just been something vague that people say at family reunions. Thankfully, techniques like real estate skip tracing can shed a bit of light on the reality of the situation.  Leverage skip tracing techniques like public records databases to look up the history of your father’s house. Soon enough, you’ll uncover past addresses, which likely include the home he grew up in with your grandparents. Dive a little deeper into both of their personal histories, and you’ll soon find everywhere they’ve ever lived in and around Santa Clarita.  More importantly, you’ll see who owned those properties – uncovering names, addresses, and other bits of contact information for past generations that may have been previously unavailable to you.  Soon enough, you’ll start to hit on addresses outside of Santa Clarita – which gives you a pretty clear understanding of exactly when certain parts of your family arrived on the scene.  The impressive thing is that you were able to get to this point without so much as picking up the phone and making a call to that aunt you’re never really that excited to talk to but who seems to know everything. You’ve started to paint a pretty clear picture using only publicly available information and, of course, skip tracing.  Uncovering Your Family Tree, One Branch at a Time  The fun part about all this is that whether you’re a seasoned researcher or are just starting out sketching your family history, you’ll essentially be using the same resources. Everyone has the same basic set of tools available to them. It’s just that as time goes on, you’ll naturally get better at using those tools and getting the most from them in every situation.  Based on the information you find during your focus on property ownership, you can plug certain contact information into things like phone number databases. This can also help give you an indication of how long someone has lived in a particular area or how they’ve traveled the country throughout their lives.  Those larger public records searches will take you in other directions, too. You’ll be able to see marriage and divorce records, addresses that someone had even if they didn’t own the property in question, and so much more. If your interests are still specific to reconstructing your family history, you’ll start to learn not just when people may have arrived in Santa Clarita. You can develop an overview of what they were up to and what types of people they were while they were in the area.  From there, you can expand into social media and online searches to find out as much as possible about these people you’ve started to identify. Is this going to help you turn up data on your great-great-great grandmother? No – she wasn’t exactly around at the dawn of the century when Facebook launched, and social networking took off. But it will let you go back a generation or two, at which point you might uncover some Santa Clarita cousins or close family associates that you were unaware of. Nothing stops you from reaching out to these people and learning more information.  Uncovering Your Family History Through Local Real Estate Transactions   These are all tools that extend beyond what straightforward property records will tell you, and also start getting away from real estate altogether. This is why skip tracing is valuable in a wide range of different professions. But whether you’re a business trying to recover an unpaid debt, law enforcement trying to assist with an investigation, or just a business trying to conduct a thorough employment screening,  Note that even going beyond your own personal history, property records can also be valuable tools for genealogists who may be out to learn more about their Santa Clarita roots.  But you don’t have to be a skip-tracing professional to take advantage of these resources. You might just be a homeowner who is curious about the past or a descendant of someone who is now seeking to learn more about your ancestral connections.  Regardless, Santa Clarita’s property records hold the key to unlocking a deeper and more genuine understanding of not only this vibrant California community but your family’s place in it. It’s the type of fact-finding mission that would have taken months or even years to complete, even as recently as a decade ago. Now, with all the technology at your disposal and the skip tracing tools that virtually anyone can use, you can put together this complete portrait in a fraction of the time. But more importantly, you’ll soon find that you’re having quite a bit of fun while you do it.  The post Santa Clarita Property Records Hold Promise for Reconstructing Family History  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.