How the work is done
Originals, in the original language
Official records are ordered from the archives that hold them and read in full. Summaries lose the one line that matters.
Every figure attributed
Period press is read in the original editions, and every number is carried as the paper printed it, never converted, never averaged.
Gaps recorded as gaps
Family papers are checked against the official record. Where the two disagree, both versions stay in the register with the disagreement noted.
This case is sixty years old and spread across three continents. Rebuilding it means reading court records in Switzerland and Venezuela, period newspapers from Washington to Caracas to Zurich, and the family's own letters and photographs, then checking every claim against a primary source before it is written down. What is found stays in the case file until it is published in the book. What can be shared now is the method: how one private person, without a law firm behind her, reads three countries' records and keeps them straight.
The five lessons
Day 1
Start with the newspapers, not the bank
The free archives in four countries, how to search a name the way old type was set, and how to date a clipping from the page itself. A clipping without a date is a rumour; with one, it is a document.
Day 3
Government records keep what families lose
Arrival records, probate files, cantonal archives and official gazettes: what survives, where it sits, and the one-paragraph letter that gets an archivist to answer.
Day 5
Dormant accounts and unclaimed property, the honest version
The Swiss sixty-year list and the one-year window, the Ombudsman's central search, the American state registers, what a claim needs, and the letters you should never pay for.
Day 7
The register: one line per document
The nine columns, including the one most people skip: whether the document helps you or hurts you. A register with both is believed. A register with one is a brochure.
Day 9
Before you sign anything
Heir-hunter contracts at twenty to forty percent, the fixed-fee alternative, how lawyers may be paid in Switzerland and the United States, what to send first, and what never to send.
Lesson 1 arrives the minute you sign up. The rest follow every two days.
You are in. Lesson 1 is on its way: where to start when the paper trail is sixty years old.
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