Why Use Us?

Why Pay You Instead of Going Myself?

The cost of visiting archives yourself is astronomical! Flights, hotels, and rental cars have become prohibitively expensive. Archives around the world have limited their opening hours, so there are fewer working hours to spread the costs over. The current costs to visit an archive start at around $70-100 per hour.

High-quality scanning equipment and the powerful computers needed to save and store documents in high resolution represent a considerable financial and time investment.

And once you arrive at an archive, it can take days, weeks, months or years to understand how to find and get the files you need, and the rules constantly change.

Many of the archivists employed by national archives who organized or had deep knowledge of the WWII collections are long-since dead, replaced by young and less experienced archivists with specialties in other wars and eras.

Because we understand how each archive works and what their collections contain; have over a decade of experience diving into their catalogs, finding aids, and record groups; know how to structure our research spreadsheets efficiently; and prepare thoroughly for every visit; we hit the ground running and keep up a blinding pace when we are there.

Some Other Researchers are Cheaper.

Some researchers offer more of a copy service than research expertise, and don’t always use high-resolution, quality scanners in their work. Other professional researchers may have broad experience with civilian and military files spanning hundreds of years.

We do nothing but World War II. Our knowledge is deep and specialized. We are tenacious, inquisitive, communicative, and high-performance.

We travel to a variety of different archives which house WWII documents, in the US and throughout Europe, and we are multilingual. We know and understand not only which documents exist in the US collections, but which documents exist in Europe. If a document cannot be found in one archive, it may exist in an archive where you might least expect to find it.

While no researcher can know or find everything, and we cannot control which files got destroyed during and after the war, we often find files that other researchers cannot.

Will You Keep My Search Confidential?

We never divulge your research topics or name without your express consent.

Will You Ever Resell the Files I Paid For?

We occasionally have overlapping client research requests. In that case, we ask you if you would like to share files with other clients in order to reduce your costs. Both clients must agree, and your name and research topic are kept strictly confidential.

Otherwise, we don’t share or resell your files. Not now. Not ever.

If you are interviewing other professional researchers, it may be worth asking them if they do.

What is Your Working Style?

Heather is a Chicago MBA, has run large corporate product lines, and has founded and run a successful non-profit working with law enforcement. She is a hard worker, extremely professional, highly ethical, a master at Excel spreadsheet production and organization, and a strategic conceptual thinker.

She has conducted quantitative and qualitative research in order to develop new products in the corporate world, and mined hundreds of social science research papers to become an expert national speaker in the field of child exploitation.

For over a decade she learned about what living through the war was really like directly at the feet of World War II veterans and has extensively researched World War II topics in three languages in archives, on battlefields, and at historical locations all across Europe.

She works with integrity and collaboratively. If she can’t help you in a specific request, she will tell you, and if possible, refer you to another researcher who can.