Initials carved into the brick wall of an 1880s house in Canada.

Children’s height chart tucked into a doorjamb

The practice of leaving behind material evidence of our existence and experience in the home is a phenomenon that has emerged in multiple forms and contexts from antiquity to the present. Hidden in and around the structures of private domestic spaces is material evidence of human activity, which can be read as usefully as any historical document or text. What I refer to as domestic marginalia is a type of annotation: initials, names, dates, and messages carved in surfaces, children’s heights recorded on door frames, hand or footprints in wet cement, secret messages behind wallpaper, and other types of evidence of a person’s presence in a domestic dwelling at a given time. These traces are not without intention, and they serve to transform ordinary dwellings into living archives of the past, and repositories of artifactual evidence of human habitation at a given place and time.

The practice of making these markings and the significance of the markings themselves as historical artifacts is the primary focus of my masters thesis, and will be concentrated on domestic marginalia from 1800-2000. I will be posting more here as my research progresses.