Life at the National Archives

I arrived today at the National Archives in College Park Maryland.  This is a world like no other.  If you’d like to visit here and look at some of these records for yourself, it’s a wonderful place.  It’s a wonderful place with it’s own rules, pace, and structure.  Because of a parking shortage, your encouraged to arrive early, preferably by 8am, then at 8:30 you get to get a photo ID identifying yourself as a researcher.  Wait around some more and you can store your stuff in a locker (you can’t bring anything but a computer or approved scanner into the archives), and wait until the archives open at 9am.  From 9am until 9:55am you research tombs of written record indexes and you get to write ‘requests’ for stuff you’d like to see.

It takes about an hour, from 10am until 11am for your records to be pulled.  So about 10:50 you get to see the first records.  Did you guess correctly?  You have 4 chances a day at record roulette!

I spent today looking at 3 major record collections for the Boston, the Deck Log,  the War Diary, and a variety of Action files.  I’ll blog more about content later.  The photo I included here is the bottom of first page of the Deck Log on commissioning day of the USS Boston.

If you come to the National Archives, bring a quarter for each person, so you can store things in the lockers, and be prepared to ask dumb questions; the people here are very helpful, but they generally get experienced people, so us greenhorns get to ask questions like, “How do I know when my records arrive from the archives? Do you announce them?” or “Who do I ask how to make a copy?”  The archives have a process for everything, you just have to figure it out, then you can follow it!