Houses outlive the people who know their stories.

Most houses in Garfield Heights are older than anyone living in them. Developers promoted the area for homes in the 1920s, and it grew fast after World War II (Encyclopedia of Cleveland History). The people who could say who built a back porch, or which family lived upstairs in 1940, are getting harder to find, and what they knew is rarely written down.

Gablebook is a notebook for that work. It does three things and tries to do them well: it keeps a house’s timeline and its people in one private book; it makes you say, for every line, whether it is a record, something you were told, or your guess; and it points you to the places where the records are.

What it is not

• It is not affiliated with Garfield United (Garfield, NJ), the City of Garfield Heights, its schools or council, Cuyahoga County or the National Archives.
• It does not look anything up for you, sell records, or know anything about any address.
• It is not a title search, a survey, an appraisal or proof of ownership.

Who runs it

Gablebook is built and run by WeldonPC, a computer services company in Northeast Ohio, at the address garfieldunited.com. It runs on its own: no staff read your book, and there is no one to moderate because nothing in a book is public.