About the work

A closer look.

Give me one address: a house, a storefront, a mill, a corner. I come back with a written history of it, five to eight pages, PDF. What is in it: when it was built and by whom, what stood there before, the fires and closures and changes of use, who held it and when it changed hands, and what the newspapers said about it at the time. Every date carries its source, listed at the end. The gap column is real: where the record stops, the report says so instead of guessing. What I need from you: the address, and any one thing you already know about the place so I can check it against the record instead of starting blind. What I cannot promise: that the records survived. Small places lose their paper. If the trail is thin I tell you that before you pay and you walk away with no charge. Why me: I have walked a few dozen places this way, from a Nebraska town with one resident to a Cleveland blanket mill that burned in 1888, lost its horses to the car in 1928, and is apartments now.