Your house has a history.Most of it happened before you got here.
Lake Norman was filled in 1963. Before that it was a river valley with farms, mills, churches and roads in it — and the government photographed the whole thing from the air first, so it would be on record before the water covered it.
We have been finding those photographs, and putting them back where they belong.
Look at your own ground, year by year.
Type an address and step back through every survey the state has flown over it — and where the old photography reaches, past the shoreline to the valley that was here before.
Covers homes within half a mile of the Lake Norman shoreline — about 35,000 of them, across Iredell, Mecklenburg, Catawba and Lincoln counties.
111 photographs of a valley that isn’t there any more.
90 of them were flown in 1951, the rest in 1956 — years before the dam closed. Each one has been placed against the ground it actually covers, by eye, frame by frame, checking road junctions and river bends that still exist today.
It is slow and it is not finished. The archive does not yet cover the whole lake, and where it does, some frames sit better than others. We would rather say that than stretch an image to make a map look complete.
Where the pictures came from
- Federal and state survey flights, held by public archives — and in several cases scanned by hand for us by a geologist who went looking through the rolls himself.
- Placed against the modern shoreline and the old river channel, then checked against landmarks that survived the flooding.
- Nothing is generated, enhanced or invented. If we cannot place a frame honestly, it stays out.
A house outlasts everyone who lives in it.
We talk about our homes like children — ours to look after. It is closer to the other way round. The house was here first, it will be here after, and every family that has it hands something on to the next one: a wall moved, a dock built, a tree planted by somebody whose name nobody wrote down.
A home profile is where that gets kept. The county record and the permits are the skeleton of it — those are public, and they were public long before we existed. What makes it worth reading is what an owner adds: the photographs, the work they did, the reason the kitchen is where it is.
The public half
County record — what the assessor holds, what has sold, what was permitted. Public information, presented plainly.
The owner's half
Photographs, projects, documents and the story. Added by whoever holds the house, and private to them unless they choose otherwise.
What carries forward
The improvements belong to the property, not to the owner of the moment. Sell the house and the record goes with it, to the next family.
It starts with a postcard.
Anyone can type an address into a website. So we do not take your word for it: we post a card to the owner of record at the address the county holds, and you enter the code from the card. If you are not the owner, the card does not reach you.
It is deliberately old-fashioned and deliberately slow, and it is the only step that makes any of the rest trustworthy.
How to start
Claiming happens in the LKN Life app. Find your house on the map, tap Own it? Ask to claim it, and we post the card.
Download for iPhoneFree · Android coming
Already claimed your home? Open your home.
What we will not do
- What an owner adds is theirs. We will never publish it, sell it, or hand it to a lead-generation service.
- We do not invent facts about a house. Where the county record is wrong or thin, it says so rather than guessing.
Something about your property listed wrongly? Tell us and we will correct it.