The National Register of Archives (NRA) is housed here on open access in the Open Reading Room. The indexes to the NRA, which form the principal means of access to the NRA, can be searched online on our website. They cover the records of organisations, families and estates, businesses and persons. The two indexes most likely to be of use to the house historian are the family and estate index and business index.

The entries on the family and estate index relate principally to landowning families, and the index notes where their surviving papers are held. Many of these collections include deeds, leases, maps, plans or estate surveys that might contain useful information about properties associated with the estate. If you know the name of the families who were the major landowners in your area (either at the time your home was built or since), check this index to see whether any of their papers are known to have survived. It is worth bearing in mind that this exercise can be as useful for those tracing the history of a house in a town or city as for those whose home is in the countryside, since many urban areas in the British Isles were partly owned or developed by landed families.

The business index can be searched by the name or type of business, town, county, date or any combination of these. It should be noted that a topographical search of the index will only retrieve businesses based in a particular town or place, rather than businesses based elsewhere but which had connections with the area. The index has around 600 entries for builders and approximately 300 for architects. (A further 500 or so architects are listed on the personal index). A search for builders or architects based in your area could bring useful results, as could a search for solicitors. More than 1,000 solicitors' practices are noted on the business index, and a search of the index could indicate which of the collections from solicitors' practices in your area include deeds and clients' papers.

Lists held in the National Register of Archives can vary considerably in length and detail: some may contain only a very brief description of a collection, but others can contain hundreds of pages of detailed summaries of deeds and papers. Almost all contain much more information than can be included in the online indexes. If you have the opportunity, it is worth visiting the Open Reading Room here to browse the lists, particularly if the collection that interests you is held a long way from home: a visit here might save you a wasted trip to a record office.

Go the National Register of Archives for full details about using the online indexes, search tips and more information.