Sympathize with your discovery of blackspot & your efforts to defeat it, Gardenlady48! Here in high rainfall humid central Virginia I've dealt with it, too. My first response is to remove sources of active infection. Snip off the spotted leaves with small scissors, dipping the blades in a jar of plain rubbing (isopropyl) alcohol between cuts to disinfect. (A quart of this alcohol can be found in the first aid section of any store & costs around a dollar. Pour some in a jar large enough to dip the blades of snippers & pruners.) Clean up any fallen leaves as well as those you remove & trash them (do not compost). Notice the location of the spotted leaves. In my garden they often start at the base of the canes. This can be from water splashback off the soil or mulch in heavy rains & humidity higher at the soil line especially if shaded or mulched. If you notice the lower leaves are spotted & have mulch beneath those roses, remove & trash it, too. Wouldn’t replace it until you’re sure the problem is gone. Sometimes the spotted leaves will be further up the canes where they branch. Crowded leafy growth at these junctions can prevent proper drying, light & air circulation to cause ideal conditions for fungal infections such as blackspot. You don’t mention the type of rose or how long they’ve been in your garden. Roses are usually pruned before leaf out to head off this type of growth. If your roses are new to your garden this year, they may not have been pruned this way & it may help to do it selectively now if you find blackspot in this type of location, basically thinning out to admit light & air. Sometimes the new tip growth, being so tender, will succumb to blackspot in excessively rainy weather. Cutting it back to the next set of unblemished leaves & waiting for the temporary weather conditions to pass may be all that’s needed. So what to do depends upon what an investigation reveals. If these measures prove inadequate, I’ve occasionally sprayed with old-fashioned mixtures like baking soda & non-GMO canola oil or sulpur temporarily. Fungal infections seem highly pH & weather dependent. Haven’t needed to spray anything for years now (knock on wood) so can’t give recommendations without digging up my old notebooks & the garden is calling to me. You might go over to the Organic Rose Growing forum here on GardenWeb & see what they suggest. When spraying had best luck in the early evening after wind & heat died down on a plant already well watered earlier. Fine mist spray applied with one of those long wand extensions that can spray the undersides of leaves as thoroughly as the top & spray the soil surface without disturbing it worked well. Clean the sprayer with soap & water & rinse thoroughly to eliminate any residue that may mix with the next stuff you may use in the sprayer. On former occasions where blackspot shows up suddenly & all leaves are showing infection, I’ve trimmed off all the leaves & flowers, removed any mulch & sprayed the bare canes & soil beneath the rose. Sometimes this was due to trying a rose in shadier or more crowded conditions than it needed. In those cases they were moved at the same time to sunnier or airier locations, or their neighbors were moved or thinned, or tree branches were trimmed to allow more light & air. A detective response to what might improve the situation & health. This often worked & the new growth was clean. Sometimes it didn’t & sometimes the rose was just young & outgrew its tendency to blackspot as it matured. Often at the end of the growing season with an Indian Summer & excessive rain, even mature roses here will spot a few leaves. I don’t hold it against them & simply remove the affected leaves, tidy the area when they go dormant & have no problems the following season. When a rose continually blackspots & fails to thrive over time even with these measures, it may be a poor specimen as an individual plant & I may try again with the same variety, sometimes successfully & sometimes not. Have learned to hedge my bets by planting (or transplanting) new roses into pots for observation before planting into the garden. Much easier to move a pot than a rose in the ground. Also research roses resistant in the area & shy away from those with poor reports. And buy the healthiest plants I can find to begin with. In early days of rose growing, took a while to realize I was starting with growth-forced plants that didn’t have a good chance of becoming solidly healthy without intentional coddling. Fungal diseases gain entry into a garden in so many ways, consider it impossible to eliminate. Like the common cold germs everywhere, some exposed come down with it & others don’t at any given time. Like to concentrate efforts on giving the garden what it needs to promote health. Let us know what you find & do to successfully intercede! Here is a link that might be useful: organic rose growing forum

Well, I also won a "completely restored" John Deere lawn tractor from the local Old Engine club a couple of years ago. It ran for about 15 minutes then blew up. LOL And now, the real prize. Elery and I went to a Taste of Home Cooking Show, he got tickets as a gift from his sister. One of the sponsors was a woman's shelter and a local builder donated a $1,500 island, beautiful handmade cabinetry with some kind of composite counter top that looks like granite. Raffle tickets were sold, proceeds went to the women's shelter. Elery bought 3 tickets, gave them to me. Yup, the island will be delivered to Elery's next week, we tried to sell it back to the builder because there's no place in either of our houses to install it. I think we've decided to keep it and put it into the new house when we build in a couple of years. It's a very, very nice prize but who the heck wins a kitchen island? Annie

I think it depends on where your house is. There are some city directories (with addresses in some directories) online at Ancestry, but it is more geared to focusing on human history than on old house history. As noted above the best source of accurate ownership history data is usually in your county or city deed record repository. There may be some states where the info may not be publicly available (Texas?), but in all other areas, that's where the mother-lode of data is. Although it may seem very confusing to search, at least at first, there is generally a pretty comprehensible organization to the files and often the office staff will be willing to give you a quick course. In most offices they will not do the searches for you, just show you how to use the data-bases and old ledger systems. Most areas only have computerized records going back a few years or decades. Anything older than that has to be located by using the grantor/grantee indices, then the individual deeds looked up in the ancient files. (Suggestion: plan on it taking way more time than you expect and wear easily-washed old clothes since the old records are often very dusty, or affected with red leather rot.) There is a very good book on "chaining" titles (doing a house history in general). I am away from home, but I can look it up for you if you'd like. There are different deed index systems around the country, but the principles are the same. The grantOR is the party selling the property and the grantEE is the one buying it. Most deeds (esp. early ones) are stuffed to the gills with long, seemingly repetitive words and have hefty boiler-plate preambles and closes. You'll quickly learn to focus on the main points: who, what, where, when, and how much - paid and number of acres sold. The Grantor (seller) is always the party of the FIRST part and the Grantee (buyer) is always the party of the SECOND part. There can be more than one person in any of these roles. And there can be more than one individual deed when there is more than one person in either of these roles, but especially when there are multiple sellers who for various reasons couldn't (wouldn't?) be gotten together to sign a single document. Some sellers only hold a certain percentage of the whole interest (e.g. if two brothers inherited property per stirpes, or equal shares, then each could only convey a half-interest; multiple generational heirs sometimes have tiny and uneven fractions of interest to convey.) When that happens it's not uncommon to find multiple partial deeds filed over long periods, many executed in far away places. There's another useful stream of info relating to any mortgages on the property, who gave them (generally the buyer, but could be someone who already owned the property, like the common HELOC of today) and who took them, i.e. the lender. (Don't be confused by the modern concept that you "get" a mortgage from a bank. It's always been, and still is, true that though the bank gives you the money, what is really happening in that case is that you really are giving/granting the bank an interest in the title of what you own in exchange for that money. That's why the borrower is the grantor in mortage matters. See also: Great Mortgage Meltdown 2009-2010.) That can be confusing because in the case of a purchase money mortgage the grantor of the mortgage is the buyer who is simultaneously the grantee in the deed transaction. Confused yet? Well, think about when the transaction involves a buyer and seller who are also entering into a loan agreement to cover the purchase price. In that case the "grantor" and "grantee" roles are both doubled, and reversed. You asked about the census records: in most cases they are not very searchable by address, which often is just a secondary census data category, and often in older areas the street or place names will have changed over time, rendering the search moot anyway. It may be better in well-developed cities with tighter control of space, but in rural or thinly settled areas addresses, at least as we use them today, were much more fungible. And many rural areas -like mine for instance in upstate NY - only got "real" street numbers as recently in the late 1990s when the 911 address systems came into vogue. Before that whatever address this farm may have had was geographical (west side of such and such road, beyond the old XXX place) or the rural delivery route (not street) box number. All that being said, I do use Ancestry quite a bit in my long-running research project on the farms in my town. But only to expand (or resolve confusing ownership history) by sussing out who the named buyers and sellers were - and with what relationship to each other, if any, - after I've pulled those names from the county deed (or probate) records. And there, census data (especially after the mid 1800's when realtionships began to be noted within households) is invaluable. Unfortunately there is a big gap in 1890, because those census documents were mostly destroyed for that year. Some states also did a census, especially in rural or farm areas, on fith year intervals, so that may be another source, usually held within the state records. I'd start with a simple buyer to seller search, working backward. If you get balked, remember each seller was also, once, a buyer. So if you can't find a particular person in one role, then look for him or her in the other role. This is helped by the fact that most deed books are arranged by role, in addition to name and/or period of time. This holds true unless a buyer later died owning the property, then the heirs would be sellers. That's generally where things get a bit sticky. Who were the heirs and what names did they, or their agents, use in the transaction as conveyors, grantors or sellers? Ancestry can help at this point by helping you figure out the decendents' names. And you can also get some of that info by checking the probate files where wills and estate dispositions are recorded. In many states you are entitled to see those records even if you're not an heir. I used to be shy about even asking that, but the clerks never batted an eye when I finally gathered my courage up to ask. In some areas, really old deed records have been transferred to the local historical society, which in my experience makes them somewhat less accessible than city or county clerks' offices which are open during most busines hours. Occasionally you'll find a deed room that's open in the evening, and often those hours are full of people doing exactly what you are. If you ask for help at those times, you'll almost certainly get a good steer to where (and how) to search. After you have some names, then I would take up Ancestry's try it for free for 30 days offer and see if you think it will be useful. For deed chain searching here in the US, you most likely won't need to purchase the expanded European records, so you can skip that extra fee, for now. Fair warning: this stuff is really addictive. If you get hooked, you'll have to give up your other hobbies. One other thing: if you find that purchase price info is not noted, that's not uncommon. Sometimes the deeds are coy about it. Look for tax stamp data on those deeds. Taxes were often based on the amount of money being paid. If that's the case, and you can find the tax rate, then you can figure back to purchase price. Have fun, and good luck!

Jane, thanks for the article. All I can say is there are a lot of weird people out there. I sent you an email, lmk if you didn't get it. I've never been a dog person, cat person instead (didn't hate them but didn't relate) until I met someone's standard poodle and really liked that dog, and of course now that we have our own dog I won't ever be without a dog again. People who don't know our collie (he is a sable/white smoothie so they aren't sure what type of dog he is, they are thinking Lassie with the long hair for collies) are also afraid of him because he is big. Hah, he gets along great with our cats and they have no problem with swatting his nose if he does something they don't like and he just backs away. Jen, Jane has offered to help me already - I live in north central NC about 15 miles from the VA border...I would love all the help I could get but don't know if you two would be stepping on each other toes and duplicating effort. So I will wait until I hear from Jane since I'm not sure where she is located. Thank you for your caring both of you. I will say however I am willing to drive this guy pretty far to find him a home. I just need detailed info on what to do from experts and I'll do it. The lab is energetic. He leaps straight up in the air when we first get him out of his fenced in area with dog house in the am. Too bad people don't realize that their dog can help them with their exercise program...my dog exercises first with my husband with his bike ride (my husband shattered one leg a few years ago and has pain with walking but can ride a bike) and then after that I walk with the dog at a fast pace. Helps us both with our hearts (my husband has high BP and I have high cholesterol, nearing menopause), hopefully avoiding osteoporosis for me also, and just feels good. We are lucky to be in the country and have woods to walk in near our house. Karen