People often ask how I ended up founding the Office of Special Collections, and honestly- it's been quite the journey.

It started when I was a teenager and landed a job as the youngest employee at a small historical society in Ohio. I was thrilled to be working in a beautiful historic home, but I quickly realized something troubling: the way institutions told stories sometimes erased the very people they claimed to be preserving.

From there, life took some unexpected turns. I graduated from the University of St Andrews and then began my career in Washington D.C. at National Defense University. I spent six years working with SEAL Team VI as their academic liaison, then several years at the Library of Congress designing exhibits. But I kept coming back to the same question: whose stories are we telling, and whose are we missing?

So in 2024, I founded the Office of Special Collections. Now I get to do what I love most: find the voices that got buried in official histories and bring them back to life. I'm currently working on a WWI documentary built from actual battlefield communications, collecting oral histories from immigrant communities, and helping organizations tell their real stories—not just the polished versions.

The work takes me everywhere from the Imperial War Museum in London to community centers in flyover states. I love that one day I am tasked with combing archives in government offices, and the next I'm sitting in someone's kitchen listening to their grandfather’s stories.

Do you have a story that needs uncovered? Reach out to me at staylor@oscarchive.com.