Discover History at the National Archives by Kimberly Powell
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) preserves a huge amount of information related to the history of our nation and its people — the paper documents alone would circle the earth more than fifty-seven times if laid end to end! Because the records at the National Archives (www.archives.gov) come from every branch of the federal government, almost all Americans can find themselves, their ancestors, or their community in the archival holdings.
The cost to digitize such a huge volume of materials is prohibitive, so only a small percentage of the National Archives records are available for research online. Instead, the greatest value of the site is in its research tools, such as microfilm indexes and finding aids, and articles on various record types and how to access them. There are, however, a few exceptions, such as Casualty Lists for the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and Selected Chinese Exclusion Lists. Most of the rest of the available data on their website can be accessed through one of two NARA search engines.
The Archival Research Catalog (ARC) (www.archives.gov/research/arc) is the online catalog of NARA and currently describes about 50 percent of its holdings. In some cases ARC will take you directly to an online record or database. You can search ARC by keyword, location, organization, person, or topic. You can also restrict your search to return digitized images only, which will include photographs as well as digitized copies of original documents. Useful genealogy databases that can be accessed through ARC include World War II Casualty Lists; indexes to several Native American census rolls, including the Guion-Miller Roll and Dawes Rolls; and fugitive slave case papers and petitions.
The Access to Archival Databases (AAD) (http://aad.archives.gov/aad) allows you to search for free through more than 85 million documents, including passenger lists for people who fled the Irish famine for the United States in the 1840s, photos of natural and manmade disasters, and the popular World War II army enlistment file. Be sure to check out the Search Values feature for any search field you use. In the World War II file, for example, you need to enter names as lastname, firstname (owens, james) and the year of birth as a two-digit number (such as 23).
The National Archives has partnered with Footnote.com and Ancestry.com to digitize additional records from its vast holdings, with tens of millions of pages digitized to date. Access to the digitized materials is available for no charge in the National Archives facilities, but the records are only available online at Ancestry.com and/or Footnote.com on a subscription basis. In some cases, the digitized images may be made available at no charge on the National Archives website in the future. National Archives content that is currently available on Footnote (www.footnote.com) and/or Ancestry (www.ancestry.com) is highlighted in this list from the National Archives of “Microfilm Publications and Original Records Digitized by Our Digitization Partners” (www.archives.gov/digitization/digitized-by-partners.html).
