Nancy Wing: Good morning. I’m Nancy Wing, one of the librarians here at the
National Archives and I’m here to welcome you today.
We are so pleased that you have expressed an interest in the
Know Your Records program. Know Your Records
was designed to inform the staff, the volunteers,
researchers, and the general public on the records of the National Archives
and how they can aid in historical research.
We offer not only the weekly lecture series, but also genealogy workshops,
symposia, the annual genealogy fair, a book discussion group, and a
researcher newsletter. If you would like more information,
contact the KYR information that you have in your program.
Today we’re going to be hearing about the history of the National Archives
from the War Department fire in 1800 to the establishment of the
National Archives in 1934. Archivist Constance Potter
looks at why some records did not survive
and how others just made it to the National Archives.
Her focus is on records of genealogical interest.
Constance Potter is a reference archivist at the National Archives in
Washington, D.C. specializing in federal records of interest in genealogists.
She worked on the release of the 1920 and 1930 censuses, and is a regular
speaker at the Federation of Genealogical Societies, the National
Genealogical Society, the National Institute on Genealogical Research,
as well as local genealogical groups in Virginia and Maryland.
Today’s program will be just less than an hour long, I believe,
and we certainly hope you enjoy it. Please help me welcome Connie.
Constance Potter: Thank you, and thank you for your patience.
How many of you have worked in reference?
And you know the person who looks at you and their eyes are pleading, and
they say, “But that record has to exist.” And you say, “No it doesn’t.”
And now I’m giving you some more ammunition as to how you can nicely
tell them, “No, it does not exist.” This is more a history of
records in the Archives, and it’s divided into
two periods: 1776 to 1926, and then 1931 to about 1934.
In the Declaration of Independence – I think this is item thirteen – they wrote,
“He,” that’s King George III, “has called together legislative bodies at places
unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their records for
the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
So as early as 1776, the people who were going to start the federal
government were interested in the whole issue of what was going to
happen to federal records. There were a series of fires –
the first, and a very bad one, was November 8th, 1800.
The War Department had moved into a townhouse in Funkstown.
Who knows what Funkstown is now called? It’s Foggy Bottom.
It went from one really good name to another really good name.
They’re not quite sure how the fire started. There’s a wonderful article
in Prologue by Howard Wehmann about the origins of the fire.
Someone who was in the building next to the War Department – there was a
wake that day, and they think it might have been because people
were partying, but they don’t know for sure. Anyway, there was a fire that
started and everyone ran through the building opening all the windows.
Not a good idea. So lots and lots of things burned including our registers
and stub books, court-martials, information on pension files.
If you look at the pension files on microfilm, for some of them you’ll see
there’s just one page that will have the name, the state, and at the bottom
is a lot of text. And the gist of this text is these records were destroyed by
the fire in the War Department in 1800. So even if you know somebody had a
pension in 1798 or 1799, it was probably destroyed in the War Department fire.
They also destroyed the records of the Board of War.
So for years, the War Department had no official records.
They looked at records from the Department of State, the Department of
the Interior, the Treasury. But late in the 19th century, they began
collecting records. And as you know, federal records are generally not
a collection. But this is one record group that is a collection of records.
They got a lot of records from Timothy Pickering, from the
Quartermaster Office. And when these records were consolidated and
brought together, Fred C. Ainsworth – who started the compiled military
system and is a great person to study if you want to build a bureaucratic
empire because this man knew how to do it – he used the records
collected in Record Group 93 to start the compiled service records.
And these records included muster rolls, pay rolls, and other records
relating to military service. Now not all of the records survived, so if you look
in Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer, in the back it gives the
order of battle. And in some cases, for example St. Claire’s, they simply say,
“We don’t have the records. They no longer exist.”
So there were lots of fires, again the War Department fire. In 1801, one of
many fires in the Department of the Treasury. One of the people who
helped put out the fire was the president. John Adams had just moved
into the White House. He heard about the fire, he grabbed a bucket, and
tried to help put out the fire. In 1814 the British, as you know, burned
Washington in the War of 1812. And one of the places you can read about
what they did to the records is the first annual report of the Archivist
of the United States. And I want to give a plug here for early annual reports.
In the 19th and early 20th century, annual reports are narrative.
They tell a story. You can find out about a tornado in Georgia, and it
describes what happened on particular farms. You can get a good history of
your agency. You can find out about the Army Corps of Engineers doing
construction on rivers in Florida. It’s not what it is now, a nice little PR piece.
So go see Jeff Hartley in the library and ask to see early annual reports,
because they’re great. So the British carried away the records, they
destroyed the records, and worst of all they disarranged the records.
In 1851 there was a fire at the Library of Congress that destroyed a lot of
Thomas Jefferson’s collection that was the foundation of the library.
In 1877, the top floor of the Patent Office burned and we think that the
Declaration of Independence might have been there at that time.
1911, the Coast and Geodetic Survey. But two that really continue to affect us
today are the Commerce fire in 1921 that damaged the 1890 census.
Now that census wasn’t destroyed until the 1930’s.
And at that time the appraisal process would go through the Librarian of
Congress, and he would look at what was considered were useless papers.
He said, “These are useless papers. Destroy them.” And that was about
the same week we laid the cornerstone to the National Archives building.
And a lot of people, people you probably know, are still affected by the 1973
fire in St. Louis, Missouri that destroyed the World War I and World War II
Army and some of the Air Force records. But even recently, although it was
not primarily a fire, think of Katrina. That destroyed local, state, and federal
records in Louisiana and Mississippi. So fires
and natural disasters are always a problem.
How many of you recognize this gentleman? If you go into Archives I,
you’re going to see his picture as you come into the Archives.
This is J. Franklin Jameson. Although I talk about the destruction of
records, the government was creating a lot of records.
And the numbers that I’m giving here, I’m not sure where they got these
numbers, but in 1860 it was estimated that the government had
about 180,000 cubic feet of records. By the time we got to 1916, before the
U.S. entered into World War I, it was about a million cubic feet of records.
And people were constantly trying to put bills before congress.
Between 1881 and 1912 alone, there were forty-two bills to establish
a National Archives. In 1913 J. Franklin Jameson, who was the president of
the American Historical Association, almost got an archives bill.
Then there came the war in Europe. The United States joined in 1917,
and that ended the movement at that time.
This is the central market at 7th and Pennsylvania.
It was built, and still is, on the Tiber River and the canal.
It was so marshy that sometimes they called this the marsh market.
Until 1850 there were slave pens on this site.
So when the president got out at the corner of 7th and Pennsylvania during
the inauguration, I think he knew what he was doing when he got out of
the car there. In 1923, 1924, and 1925, Coolidge recommended an archives in
his budget message. And as late as 1926, the United States was the only
only country – all European countries had archives, twelve Latin American
countries had archives, but the United States didn’t. And so on July 3rd,
1926, congress approved the Second Deficiency Act that provided for 7 million
dollars to build an archives. And then they later increased that to 8 million.
Now the first part of this discussion is about a national archives.
I’m now going to talk about the National Archives.
This looks like someone laying a cornerstone. It is, it’s Hoover.
Rick Blondo however told me, “Look at it closely.” This is February 20th, 1933.
And in March, FDR, who was a member of the Society for American
Archivists, was about to become president. Hoover wanted to be the one
to lay the cornerstone for the Archives. If you look closely, there’s no
building there. It’s just on a wooden platform. . So this was an honorary,
ceremonial laying of the cornerstone and they had to put it in later.
These two guys, I don’t know how heavy that thing is but they’re holding
onto it for dear life. And inside the cornerstone is a Bible, a copy of the
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the American flag, the
public acts authorizing the construction of the building, and other things.
But it wasn’t until June 19th, 1934 that congress finally provided the funding
to staff the Archives building in an act to establish a National Archives of the
United States government and for other purposes.
And the act provided for all archival records belonging to the
government to be under the charge of the Archivist.
The first Archivist of the United States was Robert D.W. Connor of the
University of North Carolina. And most of the early staff, in fact all four of
them, were historians. They weren’t archivists. For awhile the Archives
was across the street, but by the time they moved into the building there we
had a staff of eighty. So we had the building, we had the staff, but what was
it going to hold? Although the Archivist had the power to get the records, he
wasn’t going to go all around and look for all the records. So who would locate
the records and who would decide if they were permanent or temporary?
So we’re going to look at some of the records. This is a good picture.
This is in the garage of the White House. It’s War Department records.
You can see – there’s the ramp going down, there’s some metal bars here,
this is wood, and things are, well… This is also the White House garage.
This is hard to see, but there’s a door here that’s ajar.
And what can come in through doors? Mice, other animals.
Here’s a bare light bulb, that’s always good.
A tire. This is the garage floor, so you’ve got the cars with exhaust, oil spills.
And here we have wooden bookcases. Just note this one little piece of
paper right here. This is about August 3rd, 1935, and the following picture
was taken four days later. There’s that same little piece of paper.
In one lecture I gave, someone asked me what that piece of paper was.
I don’t know. The people who looked at the records in Washington D.C.
were called deputy examiners.And the WPA hired people to
look at the records throughout the country.
They found records in basements, attics, carriage houses, abandoned
buildings; anyplace they could put a record they found it.
And in the early days – the 1820’s, 1830’s – they complained that if you
walked into the Department of Treasury, the records were just piled here.
And so you might have a tour group going through and they’d say,
“Oh yeah, that looks interesting.”. And they’d walk off with it.
And there’s no law against it. Things disappeared.
You never knew what, you never knew when, you never knew how.
After opening file cabinets or something like this, they would complete a form.
And it would give you the quantity of records, the arrangements, dates,
and the research values of the records. And this is what a survey worker
wrote in the Midwest: “We then asked the custodian to show us this room.
He shuddered at the thought of entering the dungeon. He warned us that we
would be subject to possible attack by the many rats that make their home
in these quarters. Local hoards of silverfish have feasted on the bindings
of these books for so long that there are practically no records that are
securely bound. It is rather disheartening to spend time shoveling
dust and plaster off the upper part of the container and find that the bottom
contains records that are so moldy that it is almost impossible to separate
the pages.” At one point – I think these are records from Galveston –
and in fact this is a perfect example. So they’re walking down the staircase
and there’s garbage. And they see something lying there on the floor, and
it’s trash, it’s going to be thrown away. And they look at it, and it is slave
manifests from Galveston to New Orleans 1836 to 1838.
Had somebody not walked down and seen this thing lying on the floor,
those records would have been lost forever. So they picked it up and kept it.
The deputy examiners found more than 6,500 depositories or rooms in the
Washington area and about three million cubic feet of records.
43% of those records they brought to the Archives. And most of the agencies
gave up their records because they simply didn’t have the space.
The WPA survey found four million cubic feet of records, most of them in
post offices and customs houses. So after they brought them into the
Archives – here’s some post office records. And this is a little hard to see,
but see the volume right here? This huge volume, and here’s the binding,
and it’s working on that canvas bag and paper wrapping.
This is the Civil Service Commission. Fairly good storage here, but wooden
boxes here. I don’t know if these are heat pipes or water pipes, but still,
water and humidity are not good. This is the Civil Service Commission,
a little bit of red tape. But you can see how things
are bound in twine, just stuffed into corners.
These are the records arriving at the National Archives.
For those of you who were here when we moved from downtown,
remember the Mayflower buses? Trucks going on and on.
And here they are arriving at the Archives. And do you know what I just
realized? You can see there’s no Federal Trade Commission.
Here they are in the loading dock. Here they are taking them out of the trucks.
And here are the woodruff boxes, which of course are wooden, high acid,
open, dust and stuff get down. Trifolded, as the conservatists say.
Degradation in two places. And they’re smushed together with metal.
I mean, there’s nothing good about a woodruff box, but they were still using
them when I got here. Here they’re fumigating them. Years ago I was called
into the central research room on a Saturday because one of our
researchers had come down with yellow fever from the Spanish-American
War records. She also went, for those of you who remember, Mr. Jim McGronigal,
she went into her office to complain so her research card was revoked.
She had other issues. She was so busy being the Queen of England and
Norway, however, that she couldn’t contest the removal of her research
card. And here they’re fumigating them some more. Here they’re
laminating, which we wouldn’t do now. And this next one, I love this picture.
He’s ironing the records flat. My husband, who used to work here, says
that this thing used to be up in 18E or whatever,
and I’m afraid maybe it got lost during the renovation.
In 1952, the records were transferred to the –
a lot of them to the Library of Congress. But to give you some idea of what
can happen to the records, the papers of the Continental Congress went
from Philadelphia to Baltimore, from Baltimore back to Philadelphia, to
Lancaster, Pennsylvania for one day, to York, Pennsylvania, back to
Philadelphia, then to Washington, D.C. where they went to the
State Department. Then they went to the Library of Congress, and then they
came to the National Archives. Stuff had to get lost, it just had to.
But in 1952, the Library of Congress gave us a lot of the records.
And again, I have got to thank Rick Blondo for finding this for me.
This is from the annual report of the Librarian of Congress, 1953.
And Luther Evans, the Librarian, asked David Murns, the chief of the
manuscript division, to write something for the annual report.
And he wrote seven pages, but I’m just going to read this briefly.
“Procrustean logic and the inexorable requirements of the law required the
transfer. The retired but retained records of the government must be
entrusted to the National Archives. Retired, retained, they will never retire.
They will always be retained. But they must be removed.”
I feel so sorry for him. But the third annual report of the Archivist really
sums up what I want you to take away from this lecture.
Considering the strange things that happen to public records, it seems
miraculous that so many of interest and value are still in existence.
And I just want to leave you with this line from 1985. We were
with GSA for awhile, for those of you who were fairly new to the agency.
Do you have any questions? This is just sort of an introduction as to why we
don’t have anything. Any questions? Well at least you’re all smiling.
Somebody asked me yesterday in Kansas City why it took them forty-eight
hours to get microfilm. I don’t know. Yeah?
I would think when we started doing this. I don’t know how formal they
were, but they worked with the agencies. Some agencies wouldn’t give
us their records. The House and Senate and the Supreme Court did not give
us their records until after World War II. But the VA was eager to give them
to us, and they worked with a lot of the agencies.
In fact many of the early Archivists were historians or what we might now
call records managers with the agency, so they knew the arrangement and how
the records were used. Unfortunately not all of that was written down.
I think they best example is on the inside of the compiled military service records.
We don’t always know what that means. Lots of problems with customs records.
So when those people either retired or somehow left the archives or their
agency, that information went with them. Any other questions?
Well thank you very much, and I guess we’re done.
And now the poor people who were trying to get your network back up
can now get back in, because I had to use their thing here.
Nancy Wing: Thank you, Connie.
Please be sure you fill out your evaluation form and leave it on the table
that you signed in on out front. And next week we will be meeting in the old
Lecture Room B where we usually are. And that presentation will be on the
Archive Research Catalog. Thank you so much for coming.