Work with Me | WWII Archival Research and Reconstruction with Erin Faith Allen
Anyone can pull records from the National Archives.
What I do is full-scale reconstruction, a methodology built over
a decade of research, relationship, and devotion to the archive.
My work takes me into the documents, morning reports, casualty and personnel files, letters, photographs, and unit histories. I find what the documents cannot say directly. Beneath every fact there is a frequency, and beneath every record there is a human being that a document cannot totally describe. With me, psychological interiority gets reconstructed from evidence, and any factual rupture is followed. I stay inside the questions until the story breathes again.
My methodology is archival biography at the highest level of rigor and the deepest level of human truth, and it requires a kind of devotion that cannot be systemized or rushed.
If you are looking for a quick turnaround on a name and a date, this is not the right fit. If you are looking for someone to take a life, or a collection of lives, and return them to their full story, you have found her.
"Erin Faith Allen is both a tenacious, detail-focused researcher and a wonderful storyteller who possesses a unique eye for the human condition. Her years of devoted work have helped keep alive the memory of WWII's "Rainbowmen" -- the soldiers of the 42nd "Rainbow" Infantry Division, US Army.
It has been my personal privilege to collaborate with Erin on several history-themed projects. I can say that she relentlessly pursues the facts wherever they lead -- even to the hellscape of a Nazi Concentration Camp. Erin knows what's important, and always explains why it's important."
- Patrick J. Chaisson, 42nd Inf. Div. Combat Veteran (OIF III) and Historian Emeritus, Rainbow Division Veterans Foundation
The archive holds the fact.
I find the human inside it.
Narrative Wartime Biography
The full reconstruction of one life's war and all it set in motion. Every source pulled, every contradiction reconciled, the human being kept at the center. The deepest work I do, reserved for the lives that earn it.
Documentary & Film Research
For filmmakers who need more than a date and a name. I find what standard sources miss and make the documentation legible without making it smaller, so the story holds up to scrutiny and still moves people.
Manuscript Development & Editorial Reconstruction
For the manuscript that already exists, or the box of papers that could become one. I carry it to publication through research, structure, archival fact-checking, and editorial reconstruction, and I have taken raw material all the way to a printed book in a family's hands.
Institutional & Commission Research
Deep reconstruction of multiple lives, units, or moments, for the institutions charged with remembering them. The full, sourced, human story, carried past summary and timeline.
How I Work:
Every project is shaped by its own demands. There is no template, because the work does not allow for one.
Weapons, strategy, tactics, and movement matter, and they are the foundation of what happened. The human being inside them is always the centerpiece: the soldier who held the position, the family who waited, the civilian who survived.
My approach is forensic. Every claim is sourced, double-checked, and cross-referenced, and every discrepancy is pursued until it resolves. Stories entrusted to me are treated as sacred and confidential. And when the trail goes cold, as it does at the 1973 fire at the NPRC, that is where the real work begins.
Stories entrusted to me are treated as sacred and confidential. They are not turned into social media content. They are precious lives, and they are handled accordingly.