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Has anyone had any problems with writing local history if other books already exist on the topic?[/QUOTE]
Um, yes.
I write historical fiction. I try to use as many real characters and situations as possible. I decided to write my MA thesis as a novel. It was about the German occupation of the Channel Islands during WWII. I worked on it for several years, failed to attract an agent or publisher, and then published it myself. Little did I know that the late, great Mary Ann Schaffer was working on "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society." My work turned out to be its "prequel"! It actually did attract a publisher, and Duckworth has it out in hardcover in the UK and Kindle edition in the US; a paperback is planned this summer. But that is an example of bad timing.
My second book, about an excruciatingly obscure Dutch settlement in Colonial Delaware, sat on my hard drive for a year. Then I finished it and uploaded it to Kindle. I did one last Google search (I hadn't done one in the year the ms was sitting on the back burner) and found that a Dutch guy had written a Ph.D. dissertation on the same topic. I contacted him, read the dissertation, and found that I had my elder protagonist married to the wrong wife, my junior protagonist doing the wrong handicraft, and other errors. His knowledge of Dutch was a big advantage. I wound up changing the names of the characters and saying it was "loosely based" on the historical settlement! It sounds like you are doing 20th century history, so you don't have to travel to Europe to do research, but I hope my experiences are illustrative.
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