How to find your original drawings.

Find the construction year first — the county assessor has it, and so does any decent listing history. Then work out the architect, which is largely a function of the year: between 1952 and 1960 Eichler used only two firms, Anshen & Allen and Jones & Emmons. Before that, in the very early tracts, the drawings came from elsewhere entirely; Stanford Gardens here in Menlo Park was drawn by a draftsman recorded only as Castor. From 1960 onward, much of the work is Claude Oakland's.

That single determination decides which archive you write to, and whether the drawings are likely to have survived at all.

The Oakland & Imada Virtual Collection at UC Berkeley is the one to start with. It contains images of all the site plans in the collection, with the house model numbers marked on them. Find your development, find your lot, read off your model number — and there is a downloadable spreadsheet listing every project in the collection so you can check whether yours is there before you write to anyone. virtualcollections.ced.berkeley.edu

Calisphere hosts a digitised collection called Eichler Homes, Inc. Plot and Neighborhood Plans. It includes an item catalogued as Lemon St. & Stanford Ave. Houses — which is to say, Stanford Gardens, here in Menlo Park. Others in the set cover Los Arboles Addition, Foster City, Saratoga, Willow Glen and Walnut Creek. calisphere.org/collections/28433

Individual sales plans are online too. Berkeley's exhibits site holds, for instance, the sheet for model HPO-15 — a Claude Oakland plan from the Oakland & Imada Collection — as a viewable image. These are the actual documents buyers were handed.

One trap worth knowing. The California State Archives has digitised a large collection of drawings by an architect named Eichler. It is Alfred Eichler, a state architect, and he has nothing to do with Joseph Eichler the developer. Almost everyone searching for Eichler plans finds it and loses an afternoon.

The Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, in Wurster Hall, hold the Claude Oakland papers — and within them the Oakland and Imada Collection, which contains site plans for thirty-six Eichler developments across six regions of California.

The site plans are the key that unlocks everything else: find your development on their map, locate your lot, and the site plan gives you your model number. With a model number you can ask what drawings exist for that model.

The collection runs to fifty-seven linear feet and spans 1942 to 2002 — files, photographs, slides, and architectural and presentation drawings. It is open for research by appointment, Monday to Thursday, 9:30 to 4:30. Research and digitisation fees apply, and they will digitise individual plans on request even though digitising everything is not practical. Reach them on 510-642-5124 or at designarchives@berkeley.edu.

One thing to know before you plan to use anything you find: the material is held by the Regents of the University of California, and any request to publish or reproduce has to be discussed with the Curator. Looking is free. Putting a plan in a listing is a conversation.

For a house by Jones & Emmons, UCLA Special Collections holds the A. Quincy Jones papers, and that is where the drawings will be.

For Anshen & Allen there is no real archive. The early files from that office have disappeared, and no institution holds a comprehensive set. Some material survives in private hands, but there is no single place to write to.

This is the single most important thing for a Menlo Park owner to understand, because Oakdell Park contains work from both firms. Two houses on the same street can have completely different odds of their drawings existing.

Your city building department holds the permit file, and a permit file frequently contains far more than people expect — the original application, subsequent alterations, sometimes drawings. If you are in unincorporated Menlo Oaks, that file is with San Mateo County rather than the City of Menlo Park, which is a distinction that trips people up constantly.

The county assessor holds the basic property record: dates, sale amounts, recorded square footage.

And then the least formal and frequently most productive source of all — the neighbours, particularly any original owners still on the street. Sales brochures were handed out by the hundred and a surprising number survive in garages and filing cabinets. They carry the model number and the architect, which is exactly the information the archives need from you.

Sketch your floor plan before you contact anyone. Every archive and every helpful stranger will ask for it, and having it ready turns a vague enquiry into an answerable question.