Frequently Asked Questions
FAQ
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There is no required research on your part. We do ask that you provide us any information that you already have on your veteran. This includes scans of all photos and documents, as well as pictures of any uniforms or patches in your possession. Even the smallest document may end up being a clue to connecting the dots of the past.
If you’ve already done some of your own research, we would love to use that as our baseline of knowledge. Typically, our customers who have done some research have only used online resources such as Fold3, Ancestry.com, and Google. These online resources only include a small portion of the billions of records available at the National Archives.
If you have done a records request from the National Archives, they will usually only send a couple of documents to you (discharge papers, medical records, etc). These documents are still a great start, but usually leave families with little to no new information on their loved one.
These first research steps are a huge help for us to get started as it allows us to jump right into the more advanced researching, without needing to spend any time tracking down the basic information on your loved one. Our research goes much deeper than the two methods listed above. This is because the vast majority of the billions of paper at the National Archives (or NPRC) are not digitized and require our researchers to manually photo copy each page of your veteran’s timeline as we track them down.
If you have done a records request from the National Archives, they will usually only send a couple of documents to you (discharge papers, medical records, etc). These documents are still a great start, but usually leave families with little to no new information on their loved one.
This first research step is still a huge help for us to get started as it allows us to jump right into the more advanced researching, without needing to spend any time tracking down the basic information on your loved one.
We offer three different research options which can be viewed on our PRICING page.
We price our popular Veteran Storybook package for each one of our customers on a case by case basis. This is for the simple reason that the amount of time needed to research each project varies from veteran to veteran. The time is dependent on the amount of available information we estimate we will find on each veteran. Veterans of higher military ranks as well as veterans who participated in high-profile battles or served on high-profile ships tend to require more hours of research due to the higher volume of available documents/information.
The price for a Standard Veteran Research package (pulling all files and a brief write-up) is $695.
The price for completing our popular Veteran’s Storybook package ranges from $2,000 – $3,500+.
The price for our private overseas tours depend on a lot of factors but range from $5,000 – $10,000+ per person not including flight.
We also offer custom research projects on entire Units (Company), Ships, Airplanes, and Battles. These projects vary from $3,000 – $10,000+ depending on the complexity and size of project.
To get a quote, please fill out the form on our Get Started page.
We are currently experiencing a high volume of requests and are processing them as fast as possible. We will never sacrifice the quality of our end product in order to speed up delivery, therefore our typical turn-around time for our Standard Package is 1-2 months and for the full Veteran Storybook is between 2-4 months. The estimate for our Veteran Storybook takes into consideration many time-consuming steps within the project such as:
- Interviewing you and other family members
- Reviewing your initial documents
- Researching your veteran’s story in-depth using newspaper archives, and other historical documents and photos
- Our visits to the National Archives to photocopy documents that mention your veteran or your veteran’s unit
- Interviewing living veterans and/or family members of veterans who served with your loved one (when possible)
- Writing your veteran’s story in a chronological and exciting format
For our popular Veteran Storybook Package, the final story that we research and write is delivered to you as both a hardcover book and as a digital page that you can share via email, Facebook, and other social media sites. The book itself is a coffee-table style book that will feature both the story in text format as well as integrate historical photos, document scans, as well as any photos that you provided us during the research phase.
You can see some examples of our Heirloom Storybooks on our Research Examples page here.
The Standard Veteran Research Package includes a custom webpage with your veteran’s story narrative, a custom map, a timeline of their service, and a photo gallery. We also send you a scan of all the files we found (as a PDF) at the archives.
Here are four examples of our Standard Research Package:
- David Mickelson Fights Kamikaze’s in the Pacific
- Ernest St. John Fights the Nazi’s with the 70th Infantry Division
- James Gray Transports Thousands of Troops to Across the World to Fight for Freedom
- William McCarthy Defends the Panama Canal
We also archive all of our projects so that you can order more copies later on as gifts for family members or to replace missing or damaged copies.
You can learn more about the difference between our two packages on our PRICING page.
We ask for a 50% deposit after you approve the quote and we require full payment before we deliver the final product.
The deposit is necessary since our researchers will spend hours on your project and we need to pay them for that time. This is to protect our researchers in the event that a customer changes their mind about the project after they have spent hours of time on it.
Once the full payment is made, we send your book to production to be printed and mailed to you as well as send an instant download and e-version of the book ready for sharing!
We accept all major credit cards.
We offer two main package options:
- Standard Veteran Search
- In-Depth Veteran Storybook Creation
The details of what is included in each package can be seen on our PACKAGES & PRICING page: https://footstepsresearch.org/pricing/