Ground-truth history, documented in the field
We document place-based history through direct encounter: walking the land, reading the county record, gathering the lived account no textbook carries.
The land before the document
Most historical inquiry starts in the archive and works outward. We reverse that: fieldwork first, then the records that explain what we found underfoot.
The margin stories — county disputes, unrecorded transactions, oral accounts held in living memory — only surface when you are already standing in the right place.
From the current fieldwork
Township records, Muskingum County
Survey lines, Judith Basin
Oral accounts, Custer County
A set of contested survey markers in central Montana pointed to a homestead record that no regional history had acknowledged — until we walked the section line.
Six months in a single Ohio county surfaced a disputed land transfer that rewrites the settlement timeline of the Muskingum watershed.
Three family interviews in Custer County produced a corrective account of a 1910 range dispute that the written record had entirely mischaracterized.
Who is doing this work, and why
The collective behind this research is a small group of field-trained historians committed to patient, place-specific inquiry across two states.