Ab Initio Archives Research, LLC

01/12/2026

This is a Minuteman SM-80 guided missile with a nuclear payload in its silo prior to launch at Cape Canaveral, Florida in 1963. This comes from the US Air Force photo collection at the National Archives where I regularly do history research.

01/12/2026

This is a nighttime photo of New York City in the 1930s that I found years ago in the New York Times photo collection at the National Archives in College Park, MD. I have 35 years of experience as a photo archivist, photo researcher, and photo editor. Drop me a line if you need someone to search photo collections in the Washington, DC region!

01/12/2026

Hey, all.

I am now taking clients interested in seeking documents in pursuit of their family's genealogy.

I am familiar with the following kinds of documentation relevant to family history research:

soldier pensions (18th and 19th centuries)

military service records (18th and 19th centuries)

muster rolls (18th, 19th, and 20th centuries)

land records (19th and 20th centuries)

US Navy/Coast Guard deck logs (19th and 20th centuries)

US Army/Marines/Navy after-action reports and war diaries (20th century)

Native American tribal rolls (19th and 20th centuries)

Captured German records (World War II)

Military courts martial (19th century)

Census records (18th, 19th, and 20th centuries)

Prisoners of war records (20th century)

04/28/2021

Well, friends and clients, it's now almost May, and I'm hoping that archival repositories all over the Washington, DC area will be opening soon. I look forward to getting back to research again!

01/08/2020

Just found this interesting specimen of a Chinese seal stamp among the papers of the Library of Congress. https://abinitioresearch.net/2020/01/behind-the-scenes-with-the-library-of-congress-chinese-manuscript-collection/?preview_id=962&preview_nonce=109ee4c745&preview=true

12/31/2019

So familiar, yet so strange...an interesting find at the Library of Congress from yesterday, and some thoughts about happy accidents in historical research. https://abinitioresearch.net/2019/12/a-lucky-accident/

12/20/2019

I just found this image of a bedouin intelligence agent in Sinai working for the Australians during World War I.

Just a few days ago, I found this image of an armed bedouin intelligence agent in Sinai during the World War I era. When I saw it in Yigal Sheffy’s book British Military Intelligence in the Palestine Campaign, 1914-1918, it piqued my curiosity, because you don’t commonly see images of the bedoui...

12/13/2019

A couple of days ago, I found this North Korean propaganda poster while doing photo research for a military history magazine. Some thoughts about visual propaganda.

Most military history narratives confine themselves to the dry recitation of the facts of battle. With this style of historical story-telling, you get the blow-by-blow of moving lines on the map, the killing and being killed, the who, what, when and where of human warfare, but you don’t get the wh...