We fell in love with old houses, and the stories they keep.

A house is the longest-running witness in any family’s life. It was there before you, and it will be there after. It has watched a street get paved, a hill fill in with neighbors, children grow tall against its doorframes. Most of that story is recoverable, if someone takes the trouble.

We take the trouble. We go looking for the map that shows the lot still wooded, the census taker who walked past because the house was not yet finished, the old listing card that noted, with a certain dignity, that the dining room chandelier was not included. Those are the details that make a house unlike any other, and they are the details we live for.

Then we write them as a story and bind them in linen, in a book made to sit on a shelf for generations, with room left for the family to add everything the records miss.

We are researchers first. Every fact in a book traces to a source we list at the back. When we infer something, we say so; when a memory comes from the family, we say whose it is; when a picture shows another house, its caption tells you. We never invent a record, a scene or a feeling to fill a gap. A true story, told well, is more moving than anything we could make up.

We name the owners on the public record and the people a family asks us to include, and no one else. Your photographs, letters and memories stay private, seen only by you and the people making your book, and we never use them for anything else without your written permission.