I have a photograph of the man I think Frank met in Prague in September 1947. I know his job title, his career for a decade after, and even where he was standing five weeks after that meeting. What I do not have yet is proof he was in the room. That gap, and what I am doing to close it, is below.

First, two emails landed this week that I have been waiting on for a while.

The first was from the State Department. Case F-2026-21354, my request for anything they have on Grove Shepherd Wilson & Kruge and the Philippines contract Frank worked in the early 1950s. It has been acknowledged and placed on what they call the “complex processing track.” Translation: months, maybe over a year, before I see anything.

The second was from the Army Corps of Engineers, Seattle District. My request about Frank’s 1944 employment record had been sitting in a spam folder since I sent it. It surfaced this week. One person processes these requests for that office, and there is a real backlog ahead of mine.

So: two confirmations that the requests exist, and two long waits ahead. That is most of what a paper trail is, if I am honest. Not the finding. The waiting for someone else to go look.

I also put in a FOIA for myself. I have always wondered what the government had about me after being in the USAF, having a secret level clearance for nuclear weapons, and having been through initial screening for the USAF OSI. Interesting times. But not as interesting as what my grandfather was doing, from what I’m seeing.

And that is only…so far.

Which brings me to a different paper trail I have been chasing, one that does not run through a federal records office at all. It runs through a man named Lubomír Linhart, and it starts with a single letter.

In September 1947, Shirley wrote home that Frank had a meeting in Prague. She did not say much about it. Twenty-three years old, writing to her mother, she was recording what she saw of her father’s comings and goings, not conducting an investigation. But one detail stuck: the meeting was with someone connected to the film industry.

I have spent weeks trying to find out who that was, and Linhart is the strongest candidate I have found by a wide margin. Here is what I actually have, and where it still falls short.

Four separate sources now place Linhart as the central director, the ústřední ředitel, of Československá Filmová Společnost starting March 25, 1946:

• A Czech institutional finding aid says so.

• A set of press photos from Łódź, Poland, dated October 1947, five weeks after Shirley’s letter, caption him as “dyrektor naczelny,” the same job in Polish.

• An academic article from 2010, in the journal Historický časopis, independently confirms he became the first director of the nationalized Czechoslovak film industry.

• And a fourth, a Czech film journal’s retrospective on the nationalization decree, confirms the same title again, this time in the context of a real institutional conflict.

Two CIA documents, one from 1952 and one from 1960, fill in what happened to him after the Communist takeover in February 1948. He became Ambassador to Romania that October. He moved to the American Department, the desk handling the US and Canada, from 1951 to 1953.

Then Ambassador to East Germany from 1953 to 1956. A man who ran a nationalized film industry, then became a Soviet-aligned diplomat, is exactly the kind of person a diesel engineer working under a State Department contract might have reason to meet in Prague in the fall of 1947.

A fourth source turned up this week, and it adds some texture. A journal article marking the eightieth anniversary of the decree that nationalized Czechoslovak film describes a running conflict between Linhart, as director of the Czechoslovak Film Company, and Vítězslav Nezval, who ran the Film Department at the Ministry of Information, over which of them actually had authority.

The two men were fighting over control of the same nationalized industry Linhart supposedly ran outright. That conflict is documented in a 2016 book on the Barrandov studios by film historian Petr Szczepanik, published by the National Film Archive itself, which I now want to get my hands on directly.

I even have a photograph of him, from those Łódź press photos, taken five weeks after the letter. I know what this man looked like on a stage in Poland in October 1947.

What I do not have is Linhart in Prague, specifically, in September 1947. Every source above confirms the job. None of them confirm the location on that date. It is entirely possible Linhart was in Prague that month. His job would have put him there constantly. But possible is not documented, and I try to keep that line clear in my own head even when the pull to close the gap is strong.

The next places to look are the ABS archive in Prague and the Národní filmový archiv, the national film archive. If Linhart’s calendar or correspondence from that specific week survives anywhere, it survives there.

So that is where this one sits.

A name, a job, a photograph five weeks out, and a hole exactly where I need it filled. If anyone reading this has ever worked with Czech film industry records from 1946 to 1948, it would be nice to hear about that.

Na zdravie!

This one’s free. All of it. If you’ve stumbled onto this project for the first time, or if you’ve been getting these dispatches and losing track of where things stand, this is the on-ramp.

Seven dispatches in, here’s where things actually are, and what I know now that I didn’t know when I wrote each one.

Dispatch #1: Looking for Frank Ruman: The Passport in the Family Tree

I’d wanted a second passport for years. Irish, specifically. I had a great time there with my youngest, who had twice travelled Europe for nine months with a backpack, playing music, busking on street corners for money, giving dad ever more gray hairs.

However, my Irish side has been in America too long for that to work under Irish law.

Then, at a family gathering earlier this year, I found out there was another path open to me through my mother’s father, Frank, born in Czechoslovakia (or somewhere, Varín to be exact, now set in Slovakia, as that region in official documents is steeped in changes) in 1896.

That discovery added a second track running alongside the documentary build and research, a citizenship application built on the same research, the same documents, the same digging. An effort, as it turns out my cousin Sheryl, and our niece, my late older brother’s eldest daughter, twin to her brother, was also working on. And so now it is a part of this documentary, and there are three of us looking into it. I seem to be leading the effort, my mistakes and findings aiding their own efforts.

Dispatch #2: What It Actually Takes

This one’s become the best-performing dispatch of the series so far, and looking back, I think I know why. It wasn’t a story. It was just the actual, unglamorous mechanics: birth certificates I couldn’t request without other birth certificates, an archive email in Slovakia bouncing for weeks never making it through and then, being unnecessary in the end, and a plastic tub of decades-old film reels I had yet to catalogued.

No polish. Just the real weight of what this actually takes. Turns out that landed harder than anything more crafted might have.

Dispatch #3: Why “The Quiet Man?”

The title, explained: he doesn’t have a name that means anything to a reader yet, and “quiet” was already sitting in my head from the 1952 John Ford/John Wayne film I grew up loving with oddly a 91% rating on Rotton Tomatoes.

But there’s a family layer under the title, too.

My older brother, who we lost earlier this year, had told me he’d asked our grandfather directly more than once about his life. The answer was always the same: you don’t want to hear about that, it’s not interesting. We did not believe him. Still, as far as any of us knew, he was just a very well-traveled diesel engineer.

Looking back now, with the racing discovery in hand, I can see a piece of this that none of us connected at the time. My mother used to allude to Frank possibly having worked on cars for organized crime figures back in New York, something she said was hard to avoid entirely in that world, in that era, that location.

Meanwhile, my siblings and I grew up with old photos of him around the world. The ones of his sitting in and working on race cars, were recent finds. We never once put together that he’d actually driven them, raced them.

The mob suspicion sat in the family’s memory for decades as separate, disconnected facts from the man we knew growing up. As well as the contentions that he had once “ridden the range” and met Wyatt Earp. How in the world did THAT fit in?

It took this year’s research to realize they were pointing at the same guy. If you were racing on little or no money, you were also the one wrenching on your own car.

Not far-fetched at all. Just never assembled.

Dispatch #4: Never Dad’s

The detail that gives this one its title: at every border crossing on a six-country 1947 trip, customs searching my aunt Shirley’s bags, cousin Shefyl’s mom. Never his. Not once. This is also where I wrote about the job that might have made that possible, Grove Shepherd Wilson & Kruge, a real engineering firm building airfields and radio installations overseas under government contract, and about the private Prague meeting with a senior Czech film official (“the president of the Czech. movie film”), five months before the Iron Curtain closed for good.

It’s also where I wrote about the telegraph key and field telephone magneto Frank gave me as a kid, with little explanation, and how I grew up chasing an instinct toward that world without knowing where it came from. My mother’s suspicion about the mob-adjacent car work turns out to predate any of this research by decades.

I wasn’t the first one in the family to wonder about him. I was just the first one to go looking.

Dispatch #5: Field Notes

Three engineering field books, one dense with pay records and a suspicious Hong Kong contact and cocktail recipes, another almost purely technical with nothing personal in it at all except a medicine note and a camera model tucked in the cover.

Looking back, what matters most about these isn’t what’s written in them. It’s whose hand wrote them. Everything else in this project so far, the letters, the photographs, the address book, is someone else’s record of Frank. These notebooks are the first material that’s genuinely his own. And the pool of people who could have told me about him directly keeps getting smaller.

Uncle Tom, Sheryl’s dad, Shirley’s only and lifelong husband, who ran the diesel shop with him for years through the 1960s and early 70s, probably knew him better than almost anyone left, has been gone since 2010.

The films, still uncleaned and undigitized (such an effort I’m afraid I’m procrastinating), may be the next best thing to someone who actually knew him being here to ask.

Dispatch #6: Out of Order

I published this on our younger brother Kim’s birthday, five weeks after losing our older brother. Kim died decades ago in 1975 at not quite fifteen. It’s about how research actually arrives, not in the order a life was lived, but in the order documents survived, got found, or finally get answered.

A 1907 baptismal record referencing a 1896 birth and baptism, before a clear sense of his childhood. A photograph identifying a stranger before I had my own grandfather’s death certificate properly in hand. That disorientation was real when I wrote it, and honestly, it still is. The picture has filled in some since, the racing find, the field books, but I don’t think “out of order” stops being true just because more pieces exist now.

There are just more of them to keep reordering.

Dispatch #7: The Auburn Special

The newest and, fittingly, the most chaotic to get out into the world. The actual discovery: Frank raced cars under his own name in Washington State in 1923 and 1924, and the 1940 census places his whole family living in Hoquiam, not passing through, actually living there, years before they ever showed up in Tacoma.

That reframes something that never quite added up: a man supposedly building a life in New York, with two daughters born in Brooklyn, who was also racing on a small-town Washington circuit under his own name and calling it home. And likely in New York also, perhaps surrounding regions, but I’ve yet to find that information.

Getting this one published was its own story, one for some reason that Substack fought me publishing correctly on every step of the way. But it’s live, it’s real, and the discovery itself might be the one that reopens the biggest open question in this whole project: what really happened in those fifteen-odd New York years, and when did this family actually cross the country.

What’s actually next?

The citizenship track keeps moving in its own bureaucratic time, certificates requested, an embassy appointment still to schedule, an archive in Slovakia I’m still trying to reach. The documentary hasn’t shot a single frame yet, the production file on the video editing workstation still not started, on a machine really too old for this having been purchased in 2016 (physically now incapable of being upgraded to Windows 11) and utilized to produce some very successful films on the film festival circuit worldwide, that’s all still ahead.

Now, finally, the film reels themselves, more than thirty of them, some from my childhood, most from his life travelling the world, are all about to get cleaned and digitized for the first time in decades.

When I finish, when they are cleaned, conditioned and digitized, those of us still left in the family, now the family elders, will see films cleaner than we have ever seen them before, or remember them as being as clear as they will be.

Somewhere in that pile is a reel labeled Da Nang, Vietnam, possible from 1966-67. I remember seeing one that I believe was ladled Bombay (Mumbai), India in the 1940s, with a cow walking down a thoroughfare.

There was once a film of an Asian woman scantily clad dancing in a backyard. It was a film of Grandpa’s, I saw it in the 1960s in our film collection kept in our living room in an end table. One day it was just, there. Next time I looked for it, it was just—gone, and I assumed mom saw it and removed it, or maybe Grandpa asked for it back. I have no idea, just one of those odd things.

Nobody now alive has seen what’s on these. Except for me, and I’ve only seen one of them, decades ago viewing it in a room by myself.

It's been an interesting exercise in so very many things, and I'd rather not be doing it alone. You’re welcome to come along.

If you’re new here, this is where it started:

Dispatch #1: Looking for Frank Ruman: The Passport in the Family Tree

If you want the rest as it happens: paid subscribers get the full investigative dispatches, weekly, as the research turns up new leads.

Next up, Sunday at 6pm: a 1947 Prague meeting with the head of the country’s film industry, months before the Communist coup that would put that very man on a very different path.

Come join the search.

Na zdravie!

There’s a photo I’ve had for years of a car with “F. RUMAN” lettered on the side. I always assumed it was New York. I was wrong, and being wrong about it just cracked open a question I didn’t know I had.

Last week I found him in the Seattle Star, September 26, 1923, page 13. Signed up to race at Lynden. Not a maybe, not a namesake, an actual entry list with his name sitting next to men named Buttera, Coons, Barnett, Hutchins. A few days later, the Bellingham Herald calls him “Frank Ruman, of Auburn,” driving something called the Auburn Special.

Then Chehalis. Then a fragment in the Tacoma paper I still can’t fully read behind a paywall. Four newspapers, four towns, one racing season, all of it a decade before anything else in my grandfather’s paper trail even starts.

Here’s what makes this strange instead of just interesting: my family’s story has always had him in New York in the 1920s. His daughter Shirley was born in Brooklyn in 1927. His daughter Elaine, my mother, in 1929, also Brooklyn. That’s the fixed point everything else gets measured against.

So what was a man supposedly building a life in New York doing signed up to race cars in Whatcom County in 1923, under his own name, with a hometown listed as Auburn, Washington, a town he apparently had some real tie to?

For a while I thought it might just be a coincidence. A different Frank Ruman. It happens. Then I found the second car. 1924, same circuit, this one called the Hoquiam Special.

And then I found the family.

The 1940 census has them living in Hoquiam. Ward 1, Grays Harbor County. Frank as head of household. His wife Ann. Both daughters, Shirley and Elaine, listed right there with them. Not a man passing through on a racing circuit. A household. A real address, even if I don’t have the street number yet.

So this wasn’t a namesake, and it wasn’t a detour. At some point between two Brooklyn birth certificates and a 1940 census sheet, my grandfather’s family crossed the entire country and settled in a logging town on Grays Harbor, and nobody in three generations since ever mentioned it to me.

They didn’t stay. By 1942, his draft card has them in Tacoma. By 1950, so does Shirley’s own census record. Tacoma is the city I grew up hearing about, the one that was always “home.” Hoquiam never came up once.

I don’t know yet when they left New York, or why Grays Harbor, of all places, or what Frank was doing there beyond racing on weekends. I don’t know if the family’s fifteen-odd New York years were really fifteen unbroken years, or whether this whole Washington chapter was sitting quietly inside a gap I’d never thought to question. Or he was just jet-setting around the country racing cars or something. Still so much research to do.

What I do know is that a photo I’ve been looking at for years, a man in goggles, a hand-lettered car, a name I assumed was decoration, turned out to be a place. And the place turned out to be real.

I keep finding out that the parts of his life he never talked about weren’t small. They were entire towns.

Na zdravie!

I hope you all had a great 4th of July Independence Day celebration!

Today is the day my dispatches normally come out. It is also July 5th.

Our grandfather, the subject of my documentary, died 52 years ago on 14 March 1974. A few months ago, we lost our older brother on 6 April 2026. July 5th was our younger brother’s birthday who died 51 years ago, also on a Sunday, on 15 June 1975. A half month shy of turning 15.

That’s not how it’s supposed to go.

In a documentary, in a book, in the story you’d tell at a dinner table—a life runs start to finish. Birth, childhood, the big decisions, the ending.

Neat. Sequential. One thing causing the next.

Real research doesn’t work that way. Real research is a pile of papers in no particular order, and you pick up whatever’s on top. You make order.

The following explores the current and actual sequence, the one nobody sees in the finished film:

I had Grandpa Frank’s naturalization certificate—the paper proof he became American—long before I had any solid proof of where in Slovakia he was actually born. I had a photograph of him standing in a doorway in Poland in October of 1947—a man I couldn’t yet name—weeks before I found the letter, written five weeks earlier, describing the private meeting that photograph turned out to confirm. I found his father-in-law’s pocket journal—birth records, wage slips, a description of a massacre the man had lived through—before I fully understood whose father-in-law he even was.

Massacre?

It would be easy to mix this up with the Molly Maguires (made into a famous film in 1970 with Sean Connery and Richard Harris), the secret society of Irish miners whose story played out in the same Pennsylvania coal country a generation earlier, in the 1870s. But this is a different event entirely. The Lattimer Massacre happened in 1897, and the miners involved were Slavic and Eastern European immigrants, not Irish, shot by a sheriff’s posse during a labor strike.

The two do share a thread, though. Mary Bango, John Kvasnak’s wife and Anne’s mother (my grandmother, grandpa’s first wife), was born in Eckley, Pennsylvania, the same town where the 1970 film The Molly Maguires was later set and filmed. Same coal country, same hard immigrant world, but two separate stories.

I found out he’d been baptized in a small parish church in Varín, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia today) in 1896 before I found out how he died in Tacoma in 1974.

None of that is how you’d choose to learn a man’s life, if you were choosing. But nobody chooses. The documents choose. They surface when they surface—in a cousin’s closet, in a bounced email finally answered, in a field notebook somebody scanned upside down twenty years ago and nobody looked at again until now. In my grandfather’s own engineer’s field books, I recently scanned myself. You don’t get to pick the order. You just get to notice, each time, that the last piece you found just changed what the piece before it meant.

That’s the part I want people to understand about how this actually gets made. The finished documentary will run in order—birth to death, like it’s supposed to. But right now, today, I know things about the last five weeks of his time in Prague that I still don’t know about his childhood. I have a stranger identified in a photograph before I have my own grandfather’s official death certificate in my hand (I have a scanned image but that’s not good enough), this time as evidence rather than as grief.

It’s disorienting. It’s also the only honest way to do this. You don’t get to research a life in the order it was lived. You get it in the order it survived—in the order someone kept it, or forgot they had it, or finally answered an email. You learn something, then something else, then you put that together and it changes a previous thing, and you begin the round robin again, over and over until you have coherence, veracity and a timeline of a man’s life.

It’s fascinating. It’s infuriating. It’s bittersweet.

So, here’s where the pile actually stands right now, out of order, exactly as it came to me:

• A 1896 parish record request from 1907, the earliest solid proof of who he was before he was anyone’s grandfather. Or husband, or father.

• A marriage record from that same 1907 request, documenting his own parents’ wedding in 1888, eight years before he was even born.

• A photograph from October 1947, taken in Poland, of a man I can now name—five weeks after a private meeting in Prague my grandfather never mentioned to anyone.

• A pocket journal, written in phonetic Slovak, kept by a man I never met and barely knew of until I was most of the way through reading it. I met his brother once long after he was gone, in Philadelphia, when I was a little kid in the early 1960s.

• Three field notebooks, diesel calibration numbers, engineering drawings of a meticulous nature, next to cocktail recipes next to a name obliterated by a scribble of blue ink, on purpose, by someone.

• A scan of death certificate, the most recent document I’ve received, describing the end of a life I still don’t have the beginning of.

What I don’t have yet: the piece that connects the private Prague meeting to anything before it. A meeting with the “head of the Czech film industry.” An odd meeting for an engineer. One who own rather sophisticated film equipment.

What was he doing in the fifteen years he spent in New York before any of this? Who scribbled out his own name in his own notebook, and why? I know he had been a mechanic. I know he had worked on racing cars; I have some very cool photos of that. Mom alluded to his possibly having worked on the cars of some organized mob figures.

There was so much of the older family who would allude to but seldom admit to things. But then, as she’d also said, it was hard not to do business there and back then without coming into contact with some kind of organized crime, sooner or later.

I used to think the job was simply building a timeline.

I’m starting to think the job is just staying honest about how much of it is still missing—and which piece, found next, might reorder everything once again, that I think I already know.

Na zdravie!

That’s how it started—not with a revelation, not with some dramatic archival discovery, but with three battered engineering field books that had been sitting in storage since Frank died in 1974. Keuffel & Esser survey notebooks, the kind surveyors and engineers carried into the field. Except Frank wasn’t a surveyor. He was a diesel injection specialist. So why the mining transit format? That question is still open.

I’m still looking.

The first book is the Africa book. Roberts Field, Monrovia, Liberia, 1961. Raymond International (Liberia) Ltd., a foreign subsidiary out of 140 Cedar Street, New York. Roberts Field was a Cold War strategic airfield — built by the Army Corps of Engineers in WWII, used as a refueling and staging point throughout the postwar years. Frank was there July 28 through December 31, earning $3,129.62 gross for the assignment.

The book is meticulous. GMC Series 71 engines, Caterpillar railroad locomotives, Cummins, Murphy, Bosch. Injector calibration specs written in a careful, precise hand. Hand-drawn flow diagrams. Parts lists with prices. Surveying calculations—curve reduction tables, stadia diagrams—which is interesting because Frank was there to fix diesel engines, not run survey lines. But the calculations are there.

On pages 22 and 23, between the injector specs, Frank wrote out cocktail recipes. Whiskey Mint Julep. Frosty Silver Cooler. Waikiki Cooler. Continental. Mutiny on the Bounty. Kentucky Derby. Same careful hand. Same meticulous attention. A man who brought the same precision to a mint julep that he brought to a fuel pump calibration.

I plan eventually to make every one of those cocktails he once liked to drink. I have photos of him at parties around the world like at Halloween in 1952 Philippines, or 1961 in Hong Kong,

In the margins: a contact in Hong Kong. Tsang Fook Piano Co., General Manager, 19 Queens Road C, Marina House. A piano company.

Frank repaired diesel engines. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know that he played piano, or any musical instrument. His instrument was a micrometer. Or calipers for diameter measurements.

The home address he listed in the Africa book is the house on 116th Street in Tacoma—Grandma Anne’s house, his first wife. He helped her buy it after their divorce. A few houses down from Shirley and Tom, and my cousin, Sheryl. He was gone most of the time, bouncing between continents, but when he listed a home address in a work notebook in 1961, he wrote down his ex-wife’s house.

The second book covers 1963–65. Fort Lewis, Washington—a Cold War staging hub—and his own independent business, Tacoma Diesel Pump and Injector Service. Financial records, client work, Army purchasing contract records. Inside the book, tucked between pages: two receipts from The Mayfair Shop in Twin Falls, Idaho.

Women’s clothing. December 1962. Frank’s second wife Tula surfaces almost nowhere in the record—but we have photos, a confirmed presence in Spain in 1958 (I remember her there), or before that at a confirmed address in Twin Falls in January 1956. The receipts may be hers. Or they may be someone else’s entirely. I can’t prove it either way.

The third book is the strange one. Labeled “66,” inferred as 1966. Fifty-nine pages of pure technical reference—Cummins, Caterpillar, IHC, Ruston-Hornsby (British, new in the record, suggests Commonwealth work), Alco, Gardner. No name. No address. No employer. No Social Security number. Every other book Frank put his name in. This one has a heavy blue scribble across the inside front cover—exactly where the ownership information would go. Idle pen-testing, maybe. Or something else.

In among the personal items noted on the inside cover—eye drops, a Canon Super 8 camera, a Keystone projector—is the notation “Great Bay Dye.” It is not a medication. Not a diesel product. Not a place that maps to any confirmed Frank location. Great Bay exists in New Hampshire and in the Philippines. “Dye” could relate to film development—consistent with the camera noted two lines away. I don’t know. Professional camera equipment.

The only personal name in 59 otherwise impersonal pages is “McKinley Stand”—a custom-fabricated injector test fixture, named for a person rather than a manufacturer. Who is McKinley? A colleague, a contact at a specific installation, someone who built it? The name appears nowhere else in the Frank Ruman record.

Here is what I’ve come to believe about these books: if Frank had intelligence-adjacent work—and I’m not asserting that he did—the notebooks themselves aren’t where it would be. Nothing reads as a deliberate code. What the books show is a man with legitimate, unremarkable access to Cold War strategic locations: a refueling airfield in Liberia, an Army base in Washington, installations that point toward the British Commonwealth, Southeast Asia, Vietnam.

His cover, if it was cover, was real. The diesel work was real. The cocktail recipes were real.

The vector, if there was one, would have been presence. Access. Conversation. A quiet man in a room with the right people, holding a field book full of injector specs and mint julep recipes, drawing no attention at all.

That’s the thing about Frank. He never drew attention. Except by those who knew him. As family. As a powerhouse engineer, a builder, an inventor. A quiet man whose power was in his actions.

What was he doing in that room in Prague in September 1947 with his 23 year old visiting daughter during their European travels? Leaving to do business with the “head of the Czech film industry.”

That’s next…

Na zdravie.

There is one detail in my aunt’s diary that I can’t stop thinking about.

She mentions it matter-of-factly, the way you note weather or the price of a meal. Customs, she writes, always looked through her suitcase at every border crossing on a trip that took her through six countries in postwar Europe.

Never Dad’s.

Not once. Not at any border. Not in France, Switzerland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, or anywhere else. A twenty-year-old girl from Tacoma got searched every time. Her father walked through.

I’ve been turning that over for days now.

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He doesn’t have a name yet. Not in any way that means anything to you, anyway.

That’s not an accident, and it’s not me being coy. It’s the whole reason the dispatches are called what they’re called. Working title has been, “Looking for Frank Ruman.” But I was concerned no one knew that name so maybe, another title?

The Quiet Man Dispatches — where the actual investigation lives — are $7/month. If you’re curious where Frank’s story goes, that’s the door.

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Before a single frame gets shot, before a single interview happens, a documentary like this one lives or dies in the research phase. Welcome to mine.

The Films

In a plastic tub in my spare room filled with my artworks (those not hanging on my walls), books and papers, my file cabinet, film and lighting equipment, and so on, sits decades of family history on celluloid. Super 8 cartridges, Super 8 with sound, older standard 8mm reels, metal tins. There is a slightly acrid smell of old acetate when I open the bin. Not so much I need to panic, but enough that my cleaning and digitizing it all is a good thing.

I haven’t fully counted or cataloged them yet — that’s one of my first tasks — but we’re looking at somewhere north of 30 reels spanning the 1940s through the 1960s.

Some are mine. Family films from when I was a kid, summer vacations, holidays. Grandpa is in some of those. My family films from when my own kids were growing up are all already digitized, having been on either VHS tape or MiniDV digital tape recording, if not direct digitally recorded to SD cards.

Some are his. Grandpa Frank traveled — Asia, possibly Africa, in the 1940s through the 1960s. What’s on those reels I genuinely don’t know yet. I haven’t seen them. Nobody has, probably since he threaded them through a projector decades ago. When I was a kid, once a year or so we’d pull out the ancient movie projector, I still have it, and run our silent 8mm films from the 1950s and early 60s.

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Welcome to the inside of my new documentary project, Looking for Frank Ruman!

I have roped my cousin Sheryl into this project on the periphery, a docent at her local museum, and so far we are working some of this research stage together. I’m the older of us (by eleven weeks), and ended up starting grade school a year before her because of my end of August birthdate, same as my mom’s birthday. As mom put it, “I had the opportunity to start him in 1st grade and I was not going to miss out on that.”

Her mother was my mother’s slightly older sister. Both of our parents are gone now, which makes this project something more than research — it’s the two of us piecing together a man neither of us ever fully knew while, we still can. Sadly, we’re the elders in the family now. There is no one older to ask question about “the old days.”

She’s been holding onto a significant collection of documents and artifacts from her parents. I have the same from mine. Going through them has already produced extraordinary finds. Most remarkable: a 1907 parish document from Varín, Slovakia — Frank’s baptismal record. His name written in his homeland’s hand: Franciscus. Not Frank. Not yet. Not until Ellis Island in 1901 when he was five.

That document is now part of an active effort to acquire Slovak passports through a 2022 Slovak citizenship law, updated further in 2025, that allows descendants to claim citizenship going back through great-grandparents. Grandpa qualifies us.

It’s a daunting document chain.

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