HOW much do you know about the people who lived in your home before you? Or the people before them?

Unless you do some research on previous occupants - and not many of us take the time to do that - chances are you know nothing about those who called your place home long before you did.

I recently visited a house in Shipley where the first television broadcast was received outside London. It was the home of Sydney Wright, manager of the wireless department at Christopher Pratts. A leading name in radio, he was known to John Logie Baird’s company .

It’s a fascinating story, published this week in the T&A, and I felt privileged to be standing in the room where this historic transmission was received - a scowling, laughing human face emerging from orange dots on a Model ‘A’ portable televisor - on October 8, 1929. It was a privilege too to be there with Iain Logie Baird, grandson of the man who invented television.

Lynn and Joel George, who live in the house with their three daughters, knew little about the previous occupants, apart from Christian scientists who’d lived there for 40 years before them. They were fascinated to learn about the television history that unfolded in their back bedroom nearly a century ago.

Visiting their lovely house (I had serious home envy), I was struck by how transient we are in our own homes. We are just passing through. Lynn and Joel have lived in their house for over 20 years. Sydney and Dorothy Wright were there 10 years, until 1932. Possibly several families lived there in the 30-year period between the Wrights moving out and the Christian scientists moving in. And who lived there before the Wrights?

We are a nation obsessed with home ownership. We’re kings of our castles; we guard them with walls, fences, gates and doorbell cameras. We’re fierce protectors of our wheelie bins and garden sheds. But, even in a ‘forever home’, we are only temporary occupants.

Unless you live in a new build, you’re the latest in a long line of inhabitants coming and going in your home. When Bradford World War 1 Group was commemorating the centenary of the conflict and researching properties to see who lived there at the time, I supplied details of my house, built around 1880. Turned out six men on my little street went to war. In my house lived a couple whose young daughter died and is buried in the churchyard across the road. I sometimes think of her.

I have lived in 19 properties altogether, including student digs and flat-shares, and the house that felt most like home was the one I grew up in. It was the house I always came back to. My parents lived there nearly 50 years and when the time came to clear their things, accumulated over a lifetime, it felt like an intrusion. Records and books collected over the years, wedding present crockery, nick-nacks and keepsakes that all had a story. I imagined them as a young couple, setting up home together. I thought of the November day we moved into that house, when I was five, running my fingers over the yellowing keys of the old piano the previous folks had left behind.

It was our happy family home and now it belongs to another family. And they too are just passing through.