An antique mirror. Is it a place to check your hair or a window to the past?

Sharon Jones is one of those people who can't look into an old mirror without thinking about the people who saw their reflections there before her. She saw the first old home she and her husband bought in Inman Park as a reflection of the history of that area, and wound up developing what has proved to be a valuable passion for researching its history and that of other old homes in the area.

Mikki K. Harris / AJC (ENLARGE)

Sharon Jones sits in the parlor with (clockwise), sons Tate, 7, Grady, 9, Wilkes, 5, and husband, Craig.

Mikki K. Harris / AJC (ENLARGE)

Mark Edge stands on the front patio of his Midtown home, which dates to 1909 and was built by Georgia Gov. William Northen.

Mikki K. Harris / AJC (ENLARGE)

The original hardware in Edge's home has been removed and polished.

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She has used the documentation of her second historic home's story to take advantage of a special state tax credit aimed at encouraging owners of historic homes to restore them. And she has developed a set of guidelines for researching a home's history that she's shared with other homeowners.

In 1998, she and husband Craig bought their first old home, a pre-Civil War cottage in Inman Park. "We had been in the house a year or two when I met someone at a neighborhood meeting who had owned and restored the home in the 1970s. His stories of the house intrigued me so much I had to look into its history," she says.

Told that the house had been moved to its Ashland Avenue location about 1899 and confirming that its mortise-and-tenon construction meant it was built before the Civil War, Sharon Jones began her research.

The house originally might have been built on land that is now Edgewood Avenue. When Joel Hurt began to develop Inman Park in the 1880s, he created the road to connect his new neighborhood with the downtown business district, and probably moved the houses that were in his way.

"The oral history of the neighborhood says it was once a two-room schoolhouse," Jones said.

She dug back over almost two centuries to find the original deeds in the area, found the descendants of the families who had lived in the house and began to gather photographs and paperwork to document its history.

Six years passed, and she had a pretty thorough collection of documents on her Ashland Avenue home — though she never could confirm whether it had been a school or its exact age. She also had three little sons. "Three children later, we needed a bigger house," she said.

In 2006, the family bought a two-story duplex on North Highland Avenue.

The house was in terrible condition, but it called out to the family to be preserved. Conversion back to single-family and the addition of space across the back was part of the plan.

Jones' friend Regina Brewer, a preservationist who serves on Atlanta's Urban Design Commission, told her about the Georgia Historic Preservation Division's two programs for rehabilitated historic properties: a property tax assessment freeze and a state income tax credit of a percentage of the cost of the rehabilitation.

A homeowner must research the history of the house to determine its eligibility for the credits.

Brewer "did the paperwork for the tax credits and I documented the history of the house," says Jones. "To qualify for the state tax credit, you need to spend at least half the value of your house — not the land, just the house — on a renovation that is completed within two years."

Researching meant going to the archives of the Atlanta History Center and finding the building permit for the house. "We found that it was built in 1907 along with the house next door," she says.

"I went through many years of the Atlanta City Directory in the History Center archives to find out who had lived here. One family lived in the house from 1912 to 1927, and I used the Internet to find their descendants who now live in Florida.

"I also found this man who had the same name as the family who lived here in the 1930s, so I called and left a message on his answering machine, 'Hi! Did you live on North Highland when you were a little boy?'

"And indeed he called me back and was the most enormous help. It was his family that converted the house to a duplex in the 1930s. He knew where the doors had been, things like that."

"There's a thrill to doing this," she says. "This is the house you live in every day, the house you clean. It's wonderful to find a photograph of someone standing in a 19th century dress beside 'your' mantel."

Sharon's passion for this research led her to the Atlanta Preservation Center where she is now a member of the board of directors. And she's now co-authoring a book for Arcadia Publishing on the history of Inman Park. It will include 200 photographs and is due out in September.

"I was doing house histories for my friends and neighbors and this is just the natural outgrowth," she says.

Renovation work on the North Highland Avenue house continues, and the Joneses plan to have their home ready for next year's Inman Park tour of homes.

When jeweler Mark Edge looks at the door knobs of his house on Piedmont Avenue, he senses the many hands that turned those knobs. Carefully polishing each piece to restore its original brilliance, his painstaking attention reflects his passion for restoring what he thinks of as a jewel of a house.

Edge is working on the Northen-Edge House in Midtown. Listed on the Georgia and National Register of Historic Places, the house was the residence of one family for more than 90 years. Built by William J. Northen, governor of Georgia from 1890 to 1894, it was completed in 1909.

Since Gov. Northen was in his mid-70s at the time the house was built, perhaps he was looking for something smaller, with only a story-and-a-half to navigate, as a comfortable place to live out his life. After Northen's death in 1913, his grandson George T. Northen, a prominent Atlanta lawyer, occupied the house until he died in 1959. His widow Ruth continued to live in the house until she died on December 27, 2003.

Edge bought the house in 2007. "I was living in Buckhead and looking for a project," he says. "This house just called out to me. I was attracted to it the moment I saw its photograph in the listing. I equate it to the Titanic resting on the bottom of the ocean. It went down grand with its bones intact. We're just working to bring it back."

"At some point someone told me about Georgia's Historic Preservation Division tax programs and that got my attention," Edge says, and he hired Bamby Ray to prepare the paperwork. Part of that included documenting the home's history.

"Nothing in the house had been updated from its 1909 construction. When my Realtor brought me here, he said, 'Tear the house down.' And that's not surprising in a city that doesn't really value its history." Edge chose to restore it with minimal changes to the interior footprint.

He says, "The tax break gives property owners a chance to do the right thing. It would have been cheaper to tear it down than to do this work. Then you end up with an area that looks like the suburbs. We are keeping the things that make this house the prize it is."

IF YOU GO

Inman Park Festival and Tour of Homes:

DATES: April 25-27

WHAT TO SEE: Nine old and new homes in the Inman Park neighborhood.

TICKETS: $15 in advance, $20 on the day of the tour.

INFORMATION: www.inmanparkfestival.org, 770-242-4895.