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