The Work
Anyone can pull records from the National Archives.
What I do is not just records retrieval, it is full-scale reconstruction and a methodology built over a decade of research, relationship, and devotion to the archive.
My work takes me into the documents, the morning reports, casualty files, the OMPF, the letters, the photographs, the unit histories, and I find what the documents cannot say directly. Beneath every fact there is a frequency, and beneath every record there is a human being the archive could not fully hold. Psychological interiority gets reconstructed from evidence. The factual rupture is followed and I stay inside the questions until the story breathes again.
My work is not genealogy and it is not a database search. It is archival biography at the highest level of rigor and the deepest level of human truth, and it requires a particular 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 weight on the page, you have found her.
The archive holds the fact.
I find the human inside it.
Narrative Wartime Biography
Full-scale reconstruction of a military, Holocaust survivor, or civilian's war and its aftermath. I pull every available primary source across American and European archives, reconcile contradictions, and build a complete narrative that honors the documentary record and the human inside it. Work at this level is substantial, long-arc, and treated with the seriousness it deserves.
Documentary & Film Research Consulting
As a documentary filmmaker, I work with other filmmakers and production teams who need a researcher who understands not just the historical record but the human story inside it. I find what standard sources miss, and translate archival complexity into narrative clarity without losing the truth. I make the archive legible without making it smaller.
Institutional & Commission Research
For museums, foundations, and cultural institutions requiring deep archival reconstruction of multiple lives, units, or historical moments. If you need someone to go into the record and bring back the full human picture - not a summary, not a timeline, but the real, human story - this is my work.
How I Work:
Every project with Fortitude Research is shaped by the specific demands of the work. There is no template because this work does not allow for one.
Weapons, strategies, tactics, and movements matter, and they are the architecture of what happened. But the human being inside them is always the centerpiece of my work. The soldier who held the position. The family who waited. The civilian who survived. That is where the work lives.
Stories entrusted to me are treated as sacred and confidential. They are not turned into social media content. They are lives, and they are handled accordingly.
My approach is forensic: every claim sourced, double-checked, and cross-referenced. Every discrepancy investigated until it resolves. There is no guessing, no speculation, no filling of silence with fiction. If the record does not support it, it does not go on the page.
And when the trail goes cold, such as in the case of the 1973 fire at NPRC, that is not the end. It is where the real work begins. Every available avenue will be pursued until the story breathes again.
Let’s Begin
Fortitude Research works with a small number of clients and projects at any given time, and this is intentional. This work requires full presence and I protect that.
If you are a filmmaker, publisher, institution, or family with a story that deserves this level of attention, reach out.