Sparks
Research briefs
One place, checked against the record: what is actually there now
You name a place. I find out what is actually there now, and write it down with dates and sources. The places this works best on are the ones that are gone, renamed, or quietly different: a village under a reservoir, a street that lost its name, a town the maps gave up on, a house your family left and nobody has described since. What you get: a written report, 800 to 1,500 words, PDF. It covers what changed and when, what stands on the ground today, what the photographs actually show and from what year, and what the record cannot settle. Every claim carries its source. Where coverage stops, I say where it stops. An example from my own work: a Derbyshire village drowned by a reservoir in the 1940s. On a normal day you see water. When the level drops, the foundations come back, and so do the people who remember what was under it. The photographs exist. Their dates matter, and almost nobody checks them. I do not travel. I work from street-level photographs and their capture dates, aerials, land and tax records, local newspapers, and the agency or tribal or municipal numbers where they exist. That is a real limit and I put it in the report rather than around it.
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