Like much of my millennial generation, I grew up doing my fair share of casual cyberstalking: digging into an old friend’s fingerprint or snooping through the social media profile of a distant acquaintance. (When it comes to socially discouraged activities, this behavior is only slightly less common than nose picking or lying.) Nowadays, a scant biographical information and a few clicks can conjure up someone’s educational background, their entire employment history, and recent beach selfies.
But unlike the superficial information we find about each other online, family stories entangle us in a broader web of connections, something deeper than ourselves. Our homes are the place of the daily acts that make up our days and the most special events that transform them. They not only contain our lives, but embody them. As the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard said, the home “seems to have become the topography of our intimate being.” And not just ours: they contain countless layers of these personal stories, like so many layers of an owner’s white paint. These files remind us that everything we do and feel there is just the last layer.
Digging deeper into this information can reveal stories both funny and scary. While I once discovered that my childhood home in California was robbed for “three bricks of ice cream and a tray of cake” a century before I was born, I also discovered that an ex-girlfriend’s apartment in Brooklyn was built on the ashes of a building burned down by neglected children. She was less happy with her past lot than another ex was with his, since that apartment had belonged to a mid-century beauty queen. A friend in Queens lives in a building that was once home to a prize cat, and he’s liked having guests compare his grainy old photo to the look of his own tabby. Another friend in Missouri lives in an old mob hangout and immediately sent her an old clipping I shared with her upstairs neighbor; They discussed installing a commemorative plaque.
Of course, these files don’t track a lifetime. Instead, they tend more towards various regularities: births, weddings, crimes, obituaries, announcements. They are also socially blind, disproportionately covering wealthier areas and whiter people. But all historical documents are incomplete, and what we can extract from them still teaches us something about the infinite details that remain undiscovered. They remind us that people are born, fall in love, transgress, die, try to sell furniture. And they did it in the same rooms where we do those things now, and where others will do them after us.
Knowing that people lived where we do, experiencing the same emotions of life, we also remember that the silent, passing rituals we perform every day are what make up our lives, not the digital detritus that supposedly describes who we are. Our living spaces are coated in these stories, like ornate parquet floors trapped under gray laminate tiles. All it takes to uncover them is a little research, a process I’ve come to think of as a digital seance: bringing out ghosts from behind the walls and between the floorboards and letting them live among us. Yes, reflecting on your home’s past can feel a little like being haunted. You may also feel like you have company.