Trick or Treat! It’s almost Halloween! To prepare for the festivities try this spooktacular quiz featuring photos from the stacks of the National Archives. Whether you’re a horror aficionado or just a fan of pumpkins, this quiz will help you scare and share some Halloween history with your friends! Test your knowledge and learn about the history of All Hallows Eve!
19th and Early 20th Century Federal Employees
Researching the career of a 19th or early 20th century federal employee requires delving into specialized records. Twenty-three years ago my article, “Documenting the Career of Federal Employees” was published in NARA’s Prologue magazine. The advice given then is still relevant today. There are still three basic steps in this research process. What has changed is online access to publications, finding aids, and–to some extent–records.
Step 1: Determine When, Where, and By Whom Employed. The Official Register of the United States is still the basic resource for this task. You can read more about it in John P. Deeben’s 2004 article. Fortunately, many of them are now online on Hathitrust.org. This important step enables the researcher to identify the federal agency or agencies that employed the ancestor. Knowing the agency means the researcher can then identify the appropriate Record Group(s) of interest in the National Archives and Records Administration.
Step 2: Identify Records Series that Might Provide Information. In the days before digital access, researchers had to consult inventories, preliminary inventories, and other finding aids onsite at the National Archives, or find them in a library, or obtain copies of them to peruse at home. Now, nearly every record series for every Record Group can be found in NARA’s online Catalog. Although using the Catalog can be daunting, it is accessible from home, and at your convenience.
Step 3: Examine Relevant Records. In most cases, the researcher will have to examine these records onsite at the NARA facility that holds the records. However, online access is slowly increasing through (1) enhanced description and/or (2) digital images.
- Enhanced Description provides detailed information to allow the researcher to decide whether the records will be useful. For example, each of the 22 files in the series, Records Relating to the Protection of Mail Transport by Armed Guards, 1926-1932 indicates which postmasters and post offices (primarily larger cities) are included in the series. Here is the direct link to the Indiana file as an example. The records can then be perused onsite in the National Archives Building, or specific records can be requested by mail. If your ancestor was the postmaster or a postal employee of that post office, the records will provide insight into some of the work processes involved at that post office.
- Digital Images of actual records will increase over time. One example of a currently-available digitized record about specific federal employees is the series Register of Civilian Employees in Field Offices, ca. 1890-1904 from RG 112, Records of the Office of the Surgeon General (Army), 1775-1994. The series actually consists of two items: the register and a copy of a relevant presidential executive order of March 1, 1904.
Learning more about an ancestor’s federal career will add biographical details to incorporate into their life story. You’ll get to know that person better.
National Archives Draft Strategic Plan for FY 2018-2022
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced a Draft Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2018-2022 in August, and has just issued its revised plan, based on public and staff comments. This is a process that every federal agency goes through every four years.
One of the goals is to digitize 500 million pages of records and make them available through our online Catalog. This is ambitious; there are about 37 million images in the Catalog currently.
The future: it will be interesting. Never a doubt about that.
Proving An Ancestor’s Birthday
Genealogists frequently have difficulty finding good evidence of 19th century (or earlier) ancestors’ dates of birth or death. As you’ll read in The Value of Knowing Your Birthday, it’s not a phenomena limited to poor obscure families in rural places: even Herbert Hoover had difficulty proving his birthday!
How to Research: Photographs Relating to World War II Navy Ships
My colleague, Kaitlyn Enriquez, from NARA’s Still Pictures Branch, has provided an excellent informational guide in How to Research: Photographs Relating to World War II Navy Ships. Previous blogs provided information about researching WWII Army photographs and WWII Air Force (Army Air Corps) photographs.
Library of Congress Webinars Will Discuss World War I
Our friends at the Library of Congress will highlight the Library’s World War I resources with a series of five free 40-minute webinars in Summer and Fall 2017. Registration is required for each event. After the webinars, the Library will make recordings of the sessions available at their site. Check back two weeks after the event to access the webinar.
Titles of the webinars are:
• Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I
• Over Here, Over There: Immigrant Veterans of World War I
• Woodrow Wilson Chooses War
• Lest Liberty Perish: Joseph Pennell and World War I
• Charles Hamilton Houston & World War I
Additional information, including how to register, can be found at https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/ world-war-i-american-experiences/events-and-resources/
Department of State Visa Records in the National Archives
My colleague, David Langbart, provides a great navigational guide to these 20th century records in his recent blog post: Department of State Visa Records in the National Archives.
Finding Nemo, Finding Amelia, Finding Your Family
In Finding Nemo, Marlin has many adventures in the big, wide ocean during his journey to rescue his son, Nemo, who was captured by a diver. The journey to his destination is neither straightforward or simple.
July 2017 marks the 80th anniversary of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan during their attempt to fly around the world. The public’s fascination with the mystery of their disappearance continues to spur researchers to explore the vast ocean of archival records for new clues, as well as to revisit records previously viewed by themselves or others for fresh perspectives.
Millions of people, including, hopefully, readers of this blog, search archival records for evidence of their ancestors’ lives. It’s a big ocean of records that’s getting easier to swim through. FamilySearch previously announced plans to digitize all its microfilm. Numerous commercial genealogy sites vie for your business. Publicly-funded libraries and archives continually add to their online records collections also. It pays to go back and revisit online collections for “new” information.
Have you tried the National Archives Catalog recently? There’s both a “basic” search and an “advanced search” function. Try them both. What will you find? There are now some 66 million entries in the National Archives Catalog, according to my best understanding of it. Those entries can be descriptions of governmental entities, record series, files from within those record entries, individual items, and digital images of actual records. There are also many bibliographic entries, such as persons, places, and subjects.
The journey to learning your ancestors’ life stories is often neither straightforward or simple. Like Marlin, you can’t stop in the middle of the ocean. Keep swimming, and keep searching in new places. Revisit what you’ve already found for new understandings.
The Story of the Video of the Famous Flag Raising
Everyone knows the famous photo, shown here. But have you seen the video, or know the story behind it?
When the National Archives investigated the true identity of the flag raisers in Bill Genaust’s footage of the first and second Flag Raisings on Iwo Jima and the iconic photograph by Joe Rosenthal, staffers discovered that the agency never received the original film shot on February 23, 1945. Supervisory Motion Picture Preservation Specialist Chriss Kovac provides information about Bill Genaust and how the film was shot, developed, assembled, and used during the World War II and throughout history in this YouTube Video, “The Winding Journey of Bill Genaust’s Flag Raising Footage”
Spanish-American War Nurses
It’s become a little bit easier to research Spanish-American War nurses. The National Archives Catalog now identifies 761 women for whom there are correspondence files, primarily for those who wanted to obtain government benefits based on their service. These files are in the series, “Correspondence Relating to the Service of Spanish-American War Contract Nurses, 1898-1939,” which is in Record Group 112, Records of the Office of the Surgeon General (Army). The files themselves are not online, but copies can be requested from archives1reference@nara.gov.
To search for a specific person in the Catalog, you have two options. One option is to click on the catalog link that says “761 file unit(s) described in the catalog.” The files are in alphabetical order.
Here are the first four files:
The second option is to click on the button that says “Search within this series” THEN replace the *.* in the search bar with the surname of interest. Then click on the magnifying glass icon to perform the search. (Yes, that is not an intuitive process.)
Additional records about Spanish-American War nurses in RG 112 include “Personal Data Cards of Spanish-American War Contract Nurses, 1898-1939” (NARA staff has a list of nurses included in that series) and “Registers of Service of Spanish-American War Contract Nurses, 1898-1900.”
The Twelve Key 