The Quiet Man Dispatch #12 — Turn the Tools on Yourself

I spent decades learning how to chase down a topic, a concept, a product or a story. For work, for my job. Especially when I was a Senior Technical Writer. How to track a source, verify a claim, see if we should consider a process, a product, a concept. To keep pulling a thread until it either resolves or reaches an honest dead end.

That’s also just non-fiction writing, really, and filmmaking. And the way I write fiction, it’s that too. Even in my fantastical writings, I try to base them in logic, or reality, until finally perhaps I have to break with that, but I do always try to minimize that break.

Regardless, nobody hands you the finished narrative. You go find it, piece by piece, and you get comfortable with not knowing yet.

It never occurred to me for a long time to point any of that at my own family.

Until now…

I think a lot of people have some version of this.

A skill they spent years, sometimes a whole career, sharpening for somebody else’s benefit. A boss. A client. A cause. There’s a real resistance to the idea of ever turning it toward your own life instead:

“It’s what I did for a living, why would I do it for myself?”

Or simply, “Ugh, I did that for a career, I’m not doing it by choice.” Maybe that makes sense, maybe not. But don’t just knee-jerk a reaction away from it; at least give it the consideration it’s due.

It can feel almost indulgent, like the skill only counts if someone else is paying for it, or if it’s in service of something bigger than you.

Plenty of people do put their expertise to work for nonprofits, for volunteer causes, for their communities, and that’s genuinely valuable. I don’t want to undersell that. But it’s not the only legitimate use of what you know how to do. You’re allowed to just use it for yourself.

Or, for your own family. And if you or the people you love are the ones who benefit, that’s not a lesser outcome. That’s the whole point.

I didn’t turn my research instincts toward my own grandfather until fairly recently, relatively late, considering how long I’d had my skills. Though I had considered researching him for decades, I had never really thought I’d actually go through with it.

Maybe.

What changed wasn’t the ability. It was deciding the story was worth chasing down for its own sake, not because anyone was going to pay me for it or put it on a festival circuit. But because I really wanted to know more about a guy our family knew little about in his world travels, over decades, very interesting decades. I just wanted to get to know him better.

One of the tools I came late to considering using, was the Freedom of Information Act and FOIA requests.

FOIA has a reputation.

It sounds like journalist territory, or lawyer territory, adversarial, bureaucratic, not something you’d reach for to find out about your own grandfather. But a lot of the records that matter most in a life like Grandpa Frank’s government contract work, project assignments, employment tied to a specific agency, all that never made it into Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.com.

Those databases are built on birth certificates, census records, ship manifests, and limited newspaper reporting information. However, they don’t know what my grandfather was doing for the Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska in 1942, or which contract number tied him to Subic Bay, Philippines, a decade later. For that, you have to go straight to the agency that made the record in the first place.

The process itself isn’t complicated, but it takes patience, and it helps to know a few things going in. Part of the problem is that the effort to find records about just him can be massive. Daunting in considering starting the search, or finishing it.

You have to figure out who to write to, and that can be intimidating if not problematic. Then you write to those specific agencies (as it’s likely more than one), not a general portal, and you cite the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552.

You name who you’re asking about, what you’re asking for, and why, and family history research counts as a legitimate reason. You agree to pay a reasonable fee, usually capped at a small amount unless they contact you first. I limited mine to $25, a reasonable amount. If it’s to be more, then I have to agree to that increase.

Then you wait. Sometimes months. Sometimes over a year, if the request lands on what one office called a “complex processing track.”

You also learn quickly that different pieces of a person’s record live in completely different places. Personnel and employment records go through the Office of Personnel Management, not the agency itself. Contract records often don’t survive at all, most get legally destroyed within six and a half to ten years. Project-specific records might sit with a regional district office, if they were ever digitized, or they might have been shipped off to a federal records center decades ago and require a referral to track down.

And the requests themselves have to be specific. You want some initial anchor first, a Social Security number, an official ID card, a passport, something the government can hook into to find your subject amid the masses of citizens in their archives.

I learned this the direct way, from a FOIA officer who wrote back, kindly but firmly, that a search as broad as I’d first written mine wasn’t something her office could legally run.

What actually got things moving was going back to Frank’s own 1942 draft card and pulling an exact detail off it, an employer name, a work location, a year, and handing that back to her instead of a general request to search everything they had.

A vague (or too massive) ask gets you a polite no. A specific one gets you an actual search.

Or nothing, due to misplaced records. It happens. I once worked in Radiology Records at University Hospital (now UW Medicine, Seattle), and became the go-to guy among the filers for records lost among the thousands of folders we had stored in open shelf filing, shelf after shelf, bay after bay. I just had a knack for finding misfiled X-ray report folders. So I know how that can happen, and inadvertently.

There’s no guarantee at the end of any of this. Records get destroyed on a schedule. Offices lose things. Sometimes a request just comes back empty, and you’re left exactly where you started, except now you know that door is closed.

But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes a stranger in a records office finds the one thread that connects a job to a place to an entire chapter of a life nobody in the family ever fully understood.

I don’t think I’d have known to try any of this if I hadn’t already spent a career learning how to chase a story that doesn’t want to be found easily. It just took me a long time to turn that particular set of tools toward the story that was mine all along.

If you’ve got a skill like that sitting around, whatever it is, I’d say don’t wait as long as I did.

So what is an interaction like with a FOIA request after you file it and get a response? To be clear, I filed five with various agencies, I head back so far a month later from two.

Here’s what I’ve done so far, all from the same filing sweep on July 3, 2026:

• U.S. Department of State — submitted via the foia.state.gov portal, confirmed with case number

• Army Corps of Engineers, Seattle District — emailed to FOIA-NWS@usace.army.mil

• National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) — emailed to cpr.center@nara.gov

• Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) — emailed to nhhc-foia-pa@us.navy.mil

• CIA — printed and sealed that day, mailed the following Monday (since CIA doesn’t take FOIA requests by email)

• FBI - Not FOIA or filed yet for my grandfather yet toward getting a Slovakian passport as I’d detailed in previous Dispatches here. It’s called, an Identity History Summary Check (sometimes called a “rap sheet” check), goes through the FBI’s CJIS Division directly, not through the FOIA/Privacy Act process. I’d always wanted to do one for myself, considering my Secret clearance in the USAF (what might they have on me?), so I filed one for myself along with these FOIA requests, but holding off on one for my grandfather until it’s necessary.

This is a real example:

I’d filed a FOIA request with the Army Corps of Engineers Seattle District, hoping for anything on my grandfather’s 1944 employment. The reply I got back wasn’t a stonewall, it was worse in a way, but it was honest.

Personnel records, she told me, weren’t even hers to give, that’s the Office of Personnel Management’s job, not the Corps’. Contract records, if he’d worked as a civilian contractor rather than a direct employee, were likely destroyed years ago on a routine retention schedule, purged decades before I was born. The only door still open was project records, and only if I could tell her what project.

That’s the part that stings a little.

My original request had a line in it asking for “anything else you might come across.” Reasonable-sounding to me. Useless to her. She can’t search “everything,” she needs a record type, a project name, a location. Without it, my request just sits there, technically open, functionally dead.

So I went back through what I actually had. My grandfather’s own 1942 draft card, sitting in a folder for months, listed his employer as “U.S. Engineer Dept, Seattle,” and his place of work as Annette Island, Ketchikan, Alaska, home to a WWII-era Army Air Base built after Pearl Harbor.

That was the anchor she needed. Not a Social Security number this time, but close enough, a name and a place the government could actually search against.

I sent it back to her.

The next day, she wrote to say she’d check with the Alaska District.

That’s really the whole argument, wrapped up in one exchange with a records officer.

I spent a career sharpening tools I never thought to point at my own life beyond my writings and now my filmmaking. But now I’m using them to chase down a man my own family barely knew.

Nobody’s paying me for this. Nobody has to. If you’ve got a skill sitting in a drawer somewhere, one you built for a boss or a client, a cause or a career, consider what happens if you finally aim it at yourself or your own people instead.

You might be surprised what it’s capable of when the client is you.

As for grandpa Frank, the Alaska thread is still open.

Virginia’s checking with the Alaska District, and I won’t know what that turns up until she gets back to me. I’ve heard from another request, two actually. I’m looking forward to what they turn up, where this will lead now, as so much of what I’ve uncovered on my own is really quite fascinating.

Next dispatch, I’ll tell you whether that lead goes anywhere, if I’ve heard back from it or others, or whether it’s yet another door that quietly closes.

Just remember on that whole door-closing thing, what they say is true. When one door closes, another opens. You just have to know that, find it, and see it when it presents itself.

Sometimes, that is the hardest part, recognizing what’s important.

Either way, if any of this interests you, you’re going to want to be here for it.

Na zdravie!