The history of any house or block
Your house has been here longer than you have. Plot researches and builds the history it deserves — who built it, who lived there, the deed chain back to the 1800s, the press, the photographs. One address or a whole block, anywhere in North America or Europe.
The opportunity
The sources just opened up
Deeds, census schedules, fire maps, and a century of newspapers are now digitized and public — but scattered across a dozen archives that don't talk to each other.
The memory is aging out
The people who remember a block's real history are in their eighties and nineties. Every year one passes, an archive that was never written down goes with them.
The work is finally tractable
What used to take a historian a year of microfilm now takes a structured pipeline weeks. Plot does the assembly, the cross-referencing, and the storytelling.
What Plot builds
Property spine
Every house, every deed, back to the original transfer. ACRIS chains, PLUTO lots, 1940s tax photos.
People & census
Who lived here, decade by decade — federal census 1880–1950, city directories, a searchable people index.
The press
Tens of thousands of newspaper mentions catalogued — births, marriages, obituaries, the block in the news.
Visual archive
Photographs and maps from DPLA, NYPL, Wikimedia, the Library of Congress, and Sanborn fire-insurance atlases.
Oral history
The things the neighbors know that never got written down — recorded, transcribed, and woven in.
The narrative
All of it synthesized into a living, searchable site — a timeline, house pages, family threads, and the wild stories.
Every layer comes from primary sources, and every claim is cited. See the full methodology →
The flagship: windsorpl.nyc
62
houses, each with its own page
203
property deeds traced through ACRIS
78,802
newspaper mentions catalogued
518
people indexed across sources
368
archival photographs & maps
31
“wild files” — the stories worth retelling
Pick your depth
☀ Summer Block Party pricing shown — 50%+ off through Labor Day.
Starter
Deed chain, block timeline, interactive house map. The foundation.
Standard
Adds census, a newspaper sweep, and a curated photo archive.
Deep
Adds oral histories, the full press catalogue, family dossiers, and the wild files.
Landmark
Printed heritage book, historic-district documentation, or a documentary cut.
And choose how you want it delivered — web, book, poster, or film. See packages & formats →
Four ways to hold it
Web archive
A living site like the demo — searchable, shareable, always online.
Heritage book
A printed hardcover of the archive, designed to last generations.
Map poster
A framed deed-and-era map of the block, ready for the wall.
Film cut
A short narrated documentary built from the archive's photos and voices.
Yours to keep — and easy to run
A Plot archive isn't a service you have to keep paying for. We hand you the finished thing and a plain-English playbook, and one person on the block can keep it growing — no developer, no agency, no monthly contract.
If you can use Claude Desktop, you can run it
Adding a new oral history, fixing a name, or dropping in a found photograph is a plain-English request to an AI assistant — Claude Desktop or any equivalent. No code to write.
Basic tools, nothing exotic
A free GitHub account holds the archive, a shared folder holds the photos, and the site updates itself when you add to them. We set it all up and write down exactly how it works.
We stay on call
You own the data and the site outright. When the block wants a bigger update — a new wave of research, a printed edition — we're a message away, but the day-to-day is yours.
Who it's for
Block & neighborhood associations
Give your members a living document instead of a PDF nobody opens.
Historic preservation
Primary-source archives that outlast the people who built them.
Real estate
The story of a block sells a home better than the square footage.
Family & legacy
Document the house your family held for generations, before the memory ages out.
Plot
Look up your address, or tell us your block. We'll scope the archive and send back a plan — no contract, no sales call. Just tell us what you know.