Fifty years ago, a fire ripped through the National Personnel Records Center
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In the US we lost basically or entire 1890s census due to fire. San Francisco lost most of its historical documents in the 1906 earthquake and fires. The UK lost the 1931 census due to fire (and then didn't do one in 1941 because of the war). Millions of European church records have been thrown out. Often times these are the only record that someone existed at all.
We are now in an age where things can be easily scanned and archived, but they're are still millions of paper records that only exist in paper form in a filling cabinet somewhere.
That being said, genealogy today is 100x earlier than it was even 20 years ago. I have been able to find documents in minutes that took my grandparents years to find because they have been OCRd and are searchable online. However there is still a lot to be learned from old fashioned research, writing letters to and visiting city clerks hoping they may have interesting records about your ancestors.
I find genealogy pretty satisfying as a hobby and I recommend it to anyone who likes dipping their toes into multiple disciplines. You can go deep in document recognition, archiving, photo restoration, face identification, genetics/DNA, data models (GEDCOM), writing, community service (lots of archiving roles are volunteers at small governments or libraries). It is great way to connect with relatives, known or unknown, and scratches the problem solving itch for me.
It is a hobby/industry where the tools are mostly ancient and there is lots of room for "disruption".
It is very powerful though and allows for near infinite configuration.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Bev%C3%B...
In any case, written records are mostly unavailable. Our personal family history from the pre-1950 period is fading, and most of our history from before the 20th century is lost. We have our own stories to tell, and they'll eventually be forgotten too. It's sad to see older relatives grow frail, forget things, and die, but I've never felt a sense of historical loss.
Maybe I'm not old enough, and I'm not sure whether it is appropriate to generalize to all Indian families or whether it is only our family which is an oddball, but I've always been curious about the western interest in recording genealogies.
If feels like we of European descent have all of the genealogical advantages. For most other folks, gleaning their family data seems to vary between brutal and impossible.
During the Battle for Odesa and the following occupation by the Axis forces many records were lost. My grandmother on my dad's side grew up during the occupation. Thankfully my mom's side evacuated (Jewish) potentially due to my maternal great grandmother having been part of the defense as a field doctor and helped organize evacuation via ships. She received medals for her efforts including Order of the Red Star. She was able to get on the last ship to leave. After the war she counted 28 relatives lost due to war or holocaust.
Some decades later her nephew made a booklet about the widely extended family tree despite spotty records at best. I know it took many years of research on his part, I should ask where our copy is.
That maybe took a dark turn at some point - but I was thinking primarily about how armed conflict has the potential to erase history.
One notable exception was a cache of church records found in a church basement in Germany a little while back. Sixteenth to 19th century I think. Can't recall if they are Catholic or Lutheran.
They were quickly translated and put online. They included my uncle's line; the details and quality were kind of amazing.
Americans are generally fascinated with people's origins and origin stories. I am sure some of that is historically - unfortunately -racially motivated. But also we are taught from an early age that the United States is a melting pot and we are fascinated by the immigrant story. The motivations on why someone would pick up and leave everyone they know to move to a new unknown place and also the cultures they bring with them.
With that, Americans also don't accept the United States as someplace people are from. Even if you're family has been here for 500 years, people still want to know where you're family came from originally. Only the indigenous Americans are "from" America.
The United States is young and with so many people coming from somewhere else, it is also a chance to connect with history. It can be fun to find an ancestor that fought in the revolutionary war, or was part of the Salem witch trials etc. It makes our history more real, and we have a lot less history to connect to than most of the rest of the world.
For me personally, it somewhat is inspiration and motivation. If any of my ancestors lived a different life, I wouldn't be here. If my great great grandfather didn't survive dysentery in the civil war, I wouldn't be here. I have family that left Ireland during the famine, following their history helps me contextualize big historical events. And helps me realize that people who weren't
I only recently started capturing my 97 year old grandfather's stories. Making it a project had helped me connect more with him. He grew up in a completely different world. Hearing his experiences listening to WWII breaking out or even little things like seeing his first movie and then his first color movie is so much more impactful than reading about the era in a book.
Nonsense.
> Even if you're family has been here for 500 years, people still want to know where you're family came from originally.
I can only recall one person ever being unsatisfied by the name of a state when asking where I was from, and they were satisfied when I named a city.
Yeah. That one was a killer. So much unique info that wasn't in other census. At the other end of the spectrum is the 1950 census which turned out to be disappointingly uninformative.
My problem is that I have thousands of negatives and slides, in several formats, and no easy to way scan them in bulk. While there are services out there that do it, all of the ones I've found in the past are both expensive (on the order of ~$0.25-$0.50 per image) and limited in the formats they support. Most only do 35mm negatives and maybe slides. I have 35mm, APS-C, 110, 120, 220, and even a bunch of 2.25" square negatives that I believe are from a Kodak Brownie.
I've not found any service that's truly as simple as "send them a box of negatives, get back a link to an S3 bucket with your photos" - and certainly none that are capable of supporting such a wide variety of formats.
To this point, I've just been spending a Saturday afternoon here and there scanning them individually, manually, on an old (but good quality) flatbed scanner. I 3D printed some negative holders and hacked together a Python script that looks for the "crop marks" on the holders, crops, straightens them, and drops them into a folder. There's a sidecar plaintext file in that folder that describes the envelope they were in and includes anything that was written on it. There's also an image named "front.jpg" and one named "back.jpg" in each folder that is a simple scan of the envelope. All of the scanned photos are kept in lossless TIFF, which is... unwieldy. At some point I'll probably pick a format with better (lossless) compression for the "originals" and move to that.
This affected me personally when trying to find a family member's military records. When I requested them I found out they were all gone because of that fire. It's astounding how much was lost as a result.
I ended up having to piece together information from other sources. Hospital records were in a different place, safe from the fire, for example, and you could use that to infer certain things about where they were at what time, and some of the records had some information in notes. But if they weren't ill at a certain point, you would have never had that.
There's still a lot that's unknown as a result of the fire.
A lot of that going around. My wife's records were never archived. When a soldier separates from service, if they file a disability claim (at that time) their records are forwarded to the soldier's home VA office, instead of St. Louis.
When my wife separated, someone forged her signature on a disability claim application. No one knows why. We have a copy of app and it clearly isn't her signature.
The challenge is her records never arrived at any VA office she might have been associated with. We contacted them all. A US House rep opened an inquiry but even after a few years, nothing was learned. After 10 years we gave up.
I got pretty lucky with my grandfather and got about 150 pages of records from his time as a Naval aviator right after WWI. But when I tried to get my great uncle's records from WWII, all I got was a single page discharge record. Fortunately I've got his war letters from Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Tokyo Bay that fill in quite a bit of info.
No skills are needed, no special equipment, either.
I was amazed at the pushback on this, because making copies should only be done by skilled archivists with expensive machines, and as a result, no copies are made and it all goes up in smoke.
I've archived quite a bit of family letters and stuff using a phone camera. You don't even need a stand for the camera. A kitchen table on a cloudy day is perfect. The pictures are sharp and clear, even if the document isn't perfectly flat.
Don't believe me? You've got a phone in your pocket. Take it out, take a pic of a document on your desk, and see for yourself.
Nice try NSA
When I was still in the "ebookz" scene, around 2 decades ago now, "cammed" books were awful, so the pushback might be from those who experienced that era; but I agree that even phone cameras have become far better in quality since then.
If you're hiring an untrained person and your only requirement is that they have a telephone, you're going to realize pretty quick that most of the documents you wanted to scan got sold to the black market.
As for old, delicate stuff in the Vatican library - the librarians could simply sort out the stuff and give the not-so-delicate ones to the untrained photographers. The librarian can also turn the pages while the photographer can snap the pictures.
> greasy fingers
Check that they washed their hands.
> got sold to the black market.
Hire a security guard. The Vatican already has them.
These ripostes border on the absurd. Besides, look what your fears resulted in - the HP archives are ash now.
He got a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart. He’s planted in Arlington.
We have no idea how he got the two stars. He never talked about the war.
Thanks!
We had a friend of the family that is a general, looking, and he couldn't find anything.
The army certainly has records of the award, as he's buried in Arlington, and they sent us new versions of the medals for his flag case.
No records as to why he got the awards, though.
My great uncles both died in WWII and their service records were destroyed in this fire. I had been able to piece together a few details by googling their names (somewhat unique) with the services they were in, which lead me to digitized unit yearbooks and eventually other documents. For one of my great uncles, we found a unit report that included a redacted version of the silver star citation he earned.
Just sincerely curious, since as a common citizen I would nonetheless like for our government to keep accurate records (as practicality and reason allows) of the valiant people who served.
I think it's worth it and I'm glad he did.
Through his entire life, he always told us that he was "The company clerk, like Klinger" during his time in WW2. When he died we found his discharge papers, which among other things listed his two medals for valor. As far as we know, they don't give medals for valor for processing paperwork.
Sadly, we will probably never know what he did to earn those medals, as anyone who might have been around then would be nearly 100 years old or more, and as the article says, the records went up in smoke.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/newyork/news/nypd-warehouse-fire...
Does anyone have any recommendations on stuff I can read on the topic?
Perhaps some Buddhist philosophy would help bring ease for letting go of past material existence?
A week ago I got this letter in the mail...
"Thank you for contacting the National Personnel Records Center. The record needed to answer your inquiry is not in our files. if the record were here on July 12, 1973, it would have been in the area that suffered the mos damage in the fire on that date and may have been destroyed. The fire destroyed the major portion of records of Army military personnel for the period 1912 through 1959, and records of Air Force personnel with surnames Hubbard through Z for the period 1947 through 1963. Fortunately, there are alternate records sources that often contain information which can be used to reconstruct service record data lost in the fire; however, complete records cannot be reconstructed"
"Due to the pandemic and a severely decreased workforce, we are unable to completely fulfill your request at this time. Since the onset of the pandemic, we have focused all available resources to providing a Report of Separation (DD Form 214 or its equivalent) for records requests..."
They were able to provide his enlistment record and a "WD AGO 53-55" form but nothing else. I'm hoping there are actually more detailed records because his last name started with a D and I just need to resubmit a request in a few years when they are able to dig deeper.
It goes away this century.
All I know is that he was in the 7th ID in the Aleutians and S.Pacific. Really wish there was some other form of those records.
- Master Oogway
- Me