Good morning. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States. Welcome to our Virtual Genealogy Fair. For 14 years, the National Archives has hosted an annual Genealogy Fair. And since 2013, we've been doing a live webcast on YouTube. Our sessions offer family history research tools on federal records for all skill levels. Thousands of family historians participate in the live event each year. As a virtual attendee, you can participate with the presenters and other family historians and watch individual sessions and download the materials at your convenience. Since going virtual seven years ago, we are able to have these resources and tools available for family historians in the form of lecture video recordings and handouts on our Genealogy Fair web page. This annual event is an opportunity to bring us together to share knowledge about the National Archives Holdings and research strategies. Sessions will offer guidance on the National Archives History Hub, preserving personal collections, using records relating to immigration, World War I soldiers and Marines, Bureau of Indian Affairs Schools, and the Homestead Act. As you enjoy this Genealogy Fair, I encourage you to visit our website, archives.gov. We have many other resources available, including videos from our Know Your Records programs, an ongoing series of free public programs created to show you how to use federal government records held at the National Archives for historical and genealogical research. These videos include the previous six virtual gene affairs, our National Archives catalog where you can find documents of genealogical interest to genealogists, and the research at the National Archives page on Facebook where you can follow the latest topics on genealogy. You can also connect with virtual genealogy attendees on Twitter using the hashtag shown on the screen. The dedication of National Archives staff is one of our greatest assets in carrying out the mission of this agency. And I want to thank our presenters, Rebecca Collier, Darren Cole, Kelly Osborne, Sarah Holmes, Elizabeth Burns, Nathaniel Patch, Cody White, and James Moon for their efforts. Moreover, special thanks to our research, services, workplace culture, and training manager, Vernon Smith, and the program analyst Andrea Matney for putting this all together. Our role at NARA is to preserve the records that have permanent value. We have over 15 billion pages of records, 44 million photographs, thousands of motion pictures, maps, broadsides, and electronic records. History comes to life at the National Archives through these holdings. Thank you and enjoy the Virtual Genealogy Fair. Good morning. My name is Vernon Smith, and I'm Research Services Workplace, Culture, and Training Manager. You just heard from Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero. I also welcome you to the 2019 Virtual Genealogy Fair. Before we begin our six sessions, I have three helpful tips on how to participate with chat and access the captioning and the handouts. First, because we are broadcasting live, you can chat with the other family historians and ask presenters questions. First, log into YouTube and then type your comments and questions there. Speakers will answer chat questions at the end of their talks during the question and answer time. Secondly, for live captioning, find the provided link on this page below the video screen. Open the link in a separate browser window, and if you don't currently see the link, simply click where it says Show More. Thirdly, for handouts, look for the links provided on this page. After the event, the video presentations and handouts will remain available. And I am now turning over the lecture into Andrea Matney, the coordinator of the Virtual Genealogy Fair. Andrea. Thank you, Vernon. Welcome and hello. My name is Andrea Matney. Please know that Vernon Smith, my and my coworker, Amber Forester, and I are responding to the YouTube chat and will be the voices of your questions at the end of each session. So welcome to session of, first session of the 2019 Virtual Genealogy Fair, exploring History Hub for Genealogists and Researchers by presenters Rebecca Collier, Darren Cole, and Kelly Osborne. They'll be introducing History Hub, the National Archives crowd-source platform for history and genealogy research, including some background guidance for getting started and how to join the community. Ms. Collier is the research services History Hub coordinator at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Mr. Cole is a digital engagement specialist at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Ms. Osborne is a community manager and web developer at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. I am now turning the broadcast over to Kelly Osborne. Thanks, Andrea. So History Hub is our crowd-sourcing platform for researchers. Here's kind of what it looks like. It's not just for genealogists, it's for people who are also researching any kind of historical documents or if they have questions about military records, here's what it looks like when you go to history.gov. It's very simple and Darren's gonna show you later like kind of how it works. On the homepage you can see a list of blog posts that are really helpful. They're kind of our first stop for answering questions. A lot of people are interested in finding out about it, a Native American ancestor. It's very complicated, so we have a blog post that kind of outlines first steps. And you can see a list of recent questions and then you can see a list of communities that we have. For example, we have our researchers help. It's kind of our catch-all for like, if you don't know who can best answer your question, just throw it in the researchers help and we'll redirect it. So History Hub is a platform where people can get answers from multiple sources. You can ask a question and we've got people on the site who are professors of history, amateur genealogists, like a whole community of citizen experts, people who are writing books, people who are professional researchers. It's also a knowledge base that scales and improves with time, so you can ask a question and then see how other people answered it. People can come back months later or even years later and add additional information. It's also the result of ongoing research that we did into how organizations communicate with and serve their audiences. We looked at a lot of federal agencies and also outside the federal sphere. So History Hub, the idea of it is based on trends in consumer research and it's powered by the same platform as the Apple support community. So if you have a question and you're not sure who has the answer, most likely you will Google it and if it's about a technology problem, it will take you to a community very similar to History Hub. So to kind of give you an example that is a relatable real world example that's outside of History Hub, I had a laptop that started making a disturbing noise. It's a very old MacBook. I love it, it's a workhorse, but it's very old. So started making this hideous beeping noise right before I had a big presentation where I had to like take it off. So I Googled, why is my laptop making this weird beeping noise? This is comparable to the research question that we would get in History Hub, like how do I find whatever? So I Google it and I find this is a common problem. My MacBook Pro is making a beeping noise. It was just like that, so I click the link. This is kind of comparable to the Lucky Tracin, is comparable to the researcher on History Hub and you can see that this is a common problem. So the person asked the question, why is it doing this? Within minutes they got a response from a citizen expert. This was exactly the answer to my problem and then someone provided additional information that was helpful but it didn't show up in my original search. So this was hugely successful for me. I asked a specific research question. I got an answer within minutes, seconds really. And the people who helped me were not Apple staff, which is important for the National Archives because if you ask a question of the archives and you have, it's gonna take a while for an archivist to be assigned to it and work through their workload to respond. So additionally the answer is available to anyone who Googles a similar research question. Which, so this kind of paradigm has set user expectations, not just for tech problems but for knowledge in general, for problems in general. People wanna be able to ask a specific question instead of like reading, you can, I could read the Mac manual, which I'm never gonna do ever. I wanna be able to know exactly what the problem is asking a specific question. And I wanna get help pretty immediately. I don't care who the answer comes from. And I wanna be able to ask follow-up questions and have follow-up information appended easily. And I wanna be able to search and find the answer easily because I'm not going to, like I don't wanna have to search for it. I kind of, I wanna, I don't wanna have to spend a whole lot of time finding my answer. So I'm gonna turn it over to Rebecca Collier who's gonna kind of talk about the problems that History Hub can solve for genealogists. Thank you, Kelly. So what problems can History Hub solve? At the National Archives, we respond to over 25,000, 25,000 non-personnel related questions a year on a one-to-one basis, either by email, snail mail, or telephone, plus in-person consultations to one of our research rooms. Many of the questions are similar and our responses for the same records over and over again. They may seem different to you, but they are the same for us. Here's an example on History Hub of a request that was made about a NATO operation. And since the U.S. Navy was involved, we offer deck logs for part of the information. Deck logs are one of our very popular records. But they don't contain all the information. Oops, sorry, yeah. So much for me doing this right. They'd always provide a complete answer to questions because the answers may be somewhere else. As you can see, we've referred the researchers to the Navy Historical Command, the NATO Archives for records in their custody that may contain the rest of the information that they need to complete their research. Here's another example of a request that probably won't be in the custody of NARA, but we let the researcher know that there's various universities and the university and the Library of Congress has information on their topic, so we don't leave you on limbo. Here's an example of the Library of Congress manuscript division responding to a request. And here's an example of a researcher sharing what they know with another researcher, and the researcher who got the information was very appreciative. So what are our goals with History Hub? It's an additional tool that we can use to assist researchers and genealogists in a different way for them to connect with us. Responses to requests are not limited just in our staff, but also the general public who have conducted research can also answer two things that they've already looked at and are willing to share what they know. Over time, a knowledge base will be compiled and not only will this help with customer service, but also meet the needs of knowing an answer in less time than they're currently receiving. And we hope eventually this will help decrease our reference load. And what are the most popular communities? The military records is by far the most popular and it has everything from the Revolutionary War to the present. Genealogy, which covers everything from immigration, naturalization, census, and other records that are at the National Archives, plus birth, death, and marriage records that are not. Researcher help, which is basically a catch-all, as Kelly mentioned, but it's geared to our civilian agencies such as State Department, FBI, Justice, except for those concerning Native Americans or African Americans. We have special communities set up for those questions and those topics because they have a unique community that is interested in them. And the Library of Congress has a community called Crowd on our site and they have this for their transcription project. NARA also has a transcription project under the community called Citizen Archivist. And Darren will tell you how to use History Hub. Thanks, Bucky. I'm gonna give you a quick introduction to how to search and navigate around History Hub. As Kelly showed us earlier, this is what the homepage looks like and really the main feature of the homepage is that search bar right there. That's where you can go ahead and type in your question when you first come to the site. And as this demonstrates, you just start typing in your question into the search bar and then the system will automatically start suggesting potential questions and answers that may be related to your question. So hopefully one of those suggested questions there that pop up will actually help answer your question right away so you won't have to search any further. So if you click one of those links on one of those suggested questions, I'm gonna wait for it to pop up here. It takes you down to the question page and the first thing I'd ask you is, does this help to answer your question? Yes or no, and take me back. Or you can search the entire community in more depth. So let's say maybe you're not happy with that search result. You can actually use the main search button in the top right hand corner of the page. And that will help search the entire site, so not just questions, but also blog posts and other content on the site. And then that will take you to the main search results page and that will give you options to filter your search results. You can filter it by the date, how recent it is, how relevant. You can restrict results by author or by community and help to filter your results that way. Now let's suppose that question was not answered by some of those suggested options. So then you go ahead and type your question. You say my question does not have an answer yet in this instance and then you just click the ask button. Now we're going to assume that you're probably not logged in and in order to post a question or post any content on History Hub, everyone needs to have an account. That kind of helps cut down on spam and anonymous posts and issues like that. So you'll see this prompt to either log in or create an account. And so now we'll cover really briefly how to create an account on History Hub. So you see this page where you can either log in or if you don't have an account and we'll assume that's the case here, you just go ahead and enter your email address and what will happen is the system will then send you a confirmation registration link to your email. So all you want to do is open your email and click that confirmation link and that will take you back to the site and it will provide you with the create your account page. And it has some basic fields there that you're probably familiar with, first name, last name, username, email. And you also have to create a password and one of the issues users sometimes have is creating a password that meets our requirements and because we're a federal site, we have heightened security requirements and users do sometimes have an issue with that. So there are some basic minimum requirements you need to meet. You have to have a lower case letter, uppercase letter, number, special character, minimum 12 characters. And then you have to enter the CAPTCHA code down there and again that prevents bots and other automatic registrations from spam bots and things like that. But it's a fairly simple process. And now that you're logged in, you'll see the homepage again and you'll see some custom user links in the upper right hand corner. You'll see a link that will take you to your notifications and inbox and you'll see a link that will take you to your profile and preferences page. And if you click the notifications link, this is sort of what your inbox will look like. You'll see if you're following various discussions, you'll see announcements about those. And you also get various prompts from the system such as how to update your profile and user avatar and other options like that. And if you click the profile link, you'll get options such as how to adjust your user preferences and other options. Now let's say you follow the link to customize your user profile. You have the option to upload a profile photo and that's entirely optional. You also have the option to choose a user avatar that helps sort of customize your content. And again, that's also entirely optional. You have the option of selecting from one of these sort of pre-chosen images from NARA records or you can upload your own. And again, one caveat is that all user content, whether it's a post or a photo or user avatar, all of that is all moderated for appropriateness to meet our user standards. Here's how you set your user preferences. For example, the system will email you with various notifications and you can set how often or if you get emailed at all by the system for various updates such as if your question gets answered or if there's activity on another question that you've been following. Now we wanna get to the crux of the issue which is asking that question that you had originally. So we're back on the homepage. We start typing in our question into the search box. And again, presuming there's not another question that already answers it. We'll go ahead and click that ask button and then that will take us to the question page. And this is how you write a good question post. There are some kind of tips and guidelines that we offer to help people write an accurate question that helps you get a more expedient and more accurate response. Number one you wanna use is a synced and descriptive title. Don't type your entire question into the title box. Try to summarize it as best you can. Here are some key details you wanna include and these really help us to narrow down the type of records we're looking at. Number one, who are you researching? What do you already know about them? These are really important details to share. Where did they live? When do you think they lived? Who might have been their relations and ancestors? And also super important is where have you already searched? What other archives and libraries and sources have you already checked so that we don't repeat that and make you backtrack down an avenue you've already pursued? Do you have any helpful images? Maybe you're trying to decode a census page and you can't decrypt some of the text. Maybe you wanna upload that and get some help from the community in trying to figure out what that text actually says. You can go ahead and upload a photo of that or add a link to where you found other information already. And one important aspect to note is please do not include what we call PII and that stands for Personally Identifiable Information in the Government. And really that means like social security numbers and other direct personal information such as that. That would be stripped out but it's just easier not to include it to begin with. Again, add any helpful images you might have and then there's a, you can see the small photo button and that's how you would go about adding an image to your post. And if you scroll down, you can choose the community or place where you wanna post your question. The system will default to researchers help but for the cases of this audience I assume you'd probably wanna post it in the genealogy community. But again, our moderators will usually help to sort and organize those questions when they come in and redirect them if necessary. And again, as I mentioned, all content is moderated according to our community guidelines. Questions are moderated in the order they come in depending on our workload and the volume of questions we're receiving. Moderation can take a couple of days. There is no moderation over weekends or federal holidays, days like that. Questions may be edited for clarity or again to remove content such as PII. Now getting response. Now hopefully you've asked your question and someone might have a response for you right away. So here's an example. We have a researcher question asking about naturalization records. And here you can see a response below that. And that comes in from a National Archives expert staff member. And all National Archives responses are indicated by that small little blue icon that sort of shows the columns of the main archives building. So that way you kind of know that you're getting an answer from an expert. The average response time from an expert can take a few days, often three to four working days. Now responses from other community members may come in more quickly. Again, they don't have the same workload and hopefully they might have a direct answer for you fairly soon. And once you get your answer you can go ahead and click was this helpful or not? And that sort of helps us to gauge the quality of our answers. You can click the helpful yes button. And maybe you have some additional information you need to include. So for example, you've asked a question and our expert has responded and they need more information to sort of pursue your question. So you just click that reply button and post a follow up response below that. One important issue to point out is that when you get a reply to your question you will probably get an email depending on your notification preferences. An issue users often have is they will reply directly to that email. Please don't do that. That will go into a dead end mailbox. What you need to do is come back to History Hub and post your reply on the site. Otherwise we won't receive your response. And here you can see the follow up response from the researcher with their additional information and then the follow up to the follow up from the NARA staff member. Now responding to a question. Now maybe you're on the community and you see a question where you know you've already been down that road and you can answer and provide some helpful information to the other researcher which is great. We really encourage that. We really need your help and the more information we can provide from the community the better it makes for a richer, more useful site for everybody. So you see a question that you think you can help with and you'll see the reply button down in the lower right hand corner of that question. So you just go ahead and click that and you'll see the response field and it's not unlike the post to question field. A lot of the same functionality. You can embed links, you can embed helpful images and anything that you think will help answer the question to the other researcher. Now navigating History Hub. We've seen a bit of the site already so we'll show you just a few more aspects to kind of help acclimate you. Again, this is the homepage just below the search bar and you'll see a list of recent blog posts. You'll see a list of the most recent questions and on the right hand side you'll see a list of all the various communities. Again, which Becky covered such as researchers help and military records and genealogy which again is probably the community of most interest to this audience. So you go ahead and click that and we dive into the genealogy community and this is what that homepage looks like. You'll see a list again of the most recent questions on the left. You'll see a shortcut to the ask a genealogy question field and then you'll also see a list of featured content which is often recent blog posts and we'll put up blog posts to kind of provide more detailed information on certain popular research topics to provide users a little more information so we try to list those in the right hand side there. Now maybe you want to filter the content a little more and see what else is going on in the genealogy community. You can click the content button and this will show all the content and you can filter that. You'll see various filters there. You can also see a list listing the views and the number of replies that each piece of content has received so you can kind of gauge the popularity, see where every really active conversation is happening that you want to help out with. Now getting help and technical support. Issues do pop up and we're always available to help and we do have a community set up to sort of provide some basic technical responses and help deal with various issues that you might encounter. So if you go to the technical help and support community, again you'll see a list of recent help topics that have popped up. You'll see a question bar and you'll also see a list of featured content and that really covers a lot of the common issues that users might encounter and hopefully that will help answer your issue right away. That's not always the case so if you need additional help, for example maybe you're unable to create your account so you can't even get to the point where you can post a question. You have an account where you're having trouble logging in. You're having difficulty creating a post or also maybe you represent an organization and you're interested in sort of partnering with History Hub maybe getting your organization engaged on community on History Hub and we'd love to hear about that. Please contact us. But if you have any of those issues please go ahead and email us at historyhub at nar.gov and that's purely just for these types of questions. Please do not email us a research question. We won't be able to respond. So please join us. Participation is open to anyone. Please sign up for an account. Ask your question. Please help us to answer someone else's question. We would love to have your help. We would really encourage that. So please go ahead and join us so you can visit us at history.gov and I'd like to see if there's any questions. Thank you so much. To all three of you, thank you very much for your presentation. We do have some questions that have come in from our online audience starting at the very beginning as soon as you started talking. So we have a question one. What platform is used by hub librarians in data collection? Example, Excel or specialized software? So was there a particular platform that you're using for data collection? I'm not sure I understand the questions but if the person wants to clarify, there's not data collection but the underlying software is Jive. It's the same or RA they were bought recently and it's the same software that's used by Apple support community and I think a couple of the other bigger tech companies. So all of the data resides on History Hub. That's helpful. Thank you. Do you have another question that's related? It says, can a History Hub widget be integrated into a website or app? That's a cool question. It does generate RSS feeds so if you're able to embed from an RSS feed, it doesn't have a native app. Do you wanna add anything to that? No, if you browse archives.gov, you'll see a few instances of the RSS widget where we've got embedded questions relevant to those certain pages. So on the genealogy page, you'll see a list of current History Hub genealogy questions and that's really just coming from an RSS feed so that's able to be embedded almost anywhere. There's not sort of a more dynamic widget which allows you to ask questions from a separate site. Okay, thank you. Because all three of you are up there, our audience is asking you to speak a little bit louder. I'm sorry. So go on to the next question. This is generally, there's all kinds of questions that you get and this person asks, are there old maps, quote unquote, old maps available for states like New Mexico that show the boundary changes for that state? So is that the type of question that you can have answered on History Hub? We can actually, yes and no, will guide you to cartographic, the cartographic branch that's out at the National Archives. If the record was of the change of boundary or whatever was done through federal records, then they should have the map. But other than that, we might look on Google and see if there's a map available there and give you a choice of how to find it. So that's an example of a research question that you might ask and that's an example of a research question you might receive. We don't have the data on History Hub. We're answering questions about the National Archives records and holdings and where you might find your information. Unless it's already scanned and put on a catalog and we'll look for there too and if we find a map or whatever that will answer your question, we'll put the URL into the response so that you can find it. Thank you for that thorough answer. I'd also like to put in a plug at this time for our session number six. It's at 3 p.m. Eastern as part of the Genealogy Fair. We're gonna have James Moon speaking about land records, in particular about Homestead Act. But if you're still with us at that time, you might wanna check in with us again and ask that same question. Going back to the questions specific for the History Hub, we have a question here, a question about questions. How many questions have been asked? Are public reports available on History Hub metrics? Do we have those available publicly? I'm not sure if we have them available publicly and how many questions, whoops, we'll just start tipping that forward. We've had, let's see, how many so far? Yeah, a couple thousand questions so far. Wow, actually over the past, we started this in January of 2016 and during our first year, we got roughly 200 questions. The following year, we got about 400 questions and in 2018, we got about 800 questions. This past year, up to this point, we have gotten 1600. So it seems to be doubling and so we're very happy at that and those answers and the questions are still in History Hub, so if you ask the question, even if it was answered two or three years ago, it will come up and you can see the response. Okay. So a couple thousand. A couple of thousand? A handful of thousands. It sounds like it's growing exponentially. I would think it's over 2,000. Yeah, it's over 2,000. Okay, thank you. Going on to the next question that we have from our online audience. They say, I'm seeing in the genealogy overview and in quotes, seeking records on name, are those names compiled into a list? So again, in the genealogy overview, are those names compiled into a list? They're not compiled into a list, but they are indexed by the search and by Google. So if you're thinking that there's a list of, here's a number of people who have been searched, that doesn't exist now. Okay, I'm going to give our online audience a moment to see if any more questions come up. Oh, here we go. I have something. I get frequent questions from second or third generation farm workers whose relatives came into the U.S. under the radar during World War I and II. Can you suggest resources? So again, resources for second and third generation farm workers whose relatives came into the U.S. under the radar during World War I and World War II. That's an interesting question. And usually, the person that I will send that question to to get her ideas are Elizabeth Burns. And she has a session later on today. And so if you'd like to re-say that question to Elizabeth, she'll be able to give you some better ideas than I can off the cuff. But that's also a good example of a question to ask on History Hub where it can be routed to an archivist who can help. Okay. One of the first questions you got, and I think it's worth reiterating. They asked, is the History Hub curated content or is it more like Wiki where any participant can update the content? It's not like Wiki. It doesn't operate like, you wouldn't be able to go back and edit someone else's response. It's more like a support community. So not a Wiki, but a support community where you would have someone ask a question and then their question exists as a discrete kind of thing. And then you can have answers from NARA staff or from the public or from citizen experts. So the information that is kind of grown from the question, not as a discrete article. Okay. And you can go back and edit your own request and you can also edit your own reply, but only the writer can do that. Okay. Oh, that's helpful to know. And then responding to another question, someone was asking about finding family in Civil War. Again, I would say that's a good kind of, if you can make a specific question for the online audience there, then ask your question on History Hub. So going back to the actual questions here. Are the questions in History Hub organized by National Archives locations and documents held by the locations or by research topics? Currently it's arranged by topic. And so we pick broad topics that people can do rather than worrying about what the archive structure is. Yeah, the archive structure is meaningless to most of the general public. We probably care, but like we at the National Archives care more than the public. So if you ask a military question, you won't know what part of NARA it comes from until the response is done. And we'll say you need to go to these records or to these records and this unit has them. That is helpful because if you're not with the National Archives, you'll hear us referring to record groups, so that can be confusing. So it is helpful to have it under topics. So going back to our questions. The question is what is the Library of Congress crowd community on History Hub? It is so cool. If you get a chance to check it out, please do. They have this transcription tool that is for transcribing their records. And basically it's a community of Library of Congress transcribers who they're just, you can sign up for an account on the Library of Congress's site yourself and transcribe their documents. And it's great because, and also for, please do for the National Archives as well. But it helps because a lot of these, when you digitize records, transcription is not always part of that. It usually isn't part of that. So we rely on people to kind of, the benefit of transcribing is that it becomes something that's searchable. It's more portable information. Yeah, so the Library of Congress, they have a really great community of people who are actively engaged in transcribing and then talking to each other about the problems that they're having or if they have questions. It's a pretty cool community. And if you look at 18 and 19th century records, the handwriting can be unusual. And the spelling can be unusual, especially prior to 1850s. So the transcriptions help people understand the contents of the records a lot better. Okay, so I want you to listen closely to this next question that I have because it's about paper and record keeping. How can we research black Americans suffering from paper genocide, records not on paper, who cannot trace their past from the early 1800s? That is a great question to ask on History Hub as well. Because that's the kind of question that is so interesting and kind of broad and it's not really, you really want to be able to devote some time to it. And also on NARA's website itself, we have a black history section of our website. If you kind of click down and go to where it says African Americans and it is a wonderful source that archivists from the national archives have put together. And really, they have explained how you can find things, especially about slavery and about your family if you're trying to figure it out. And also there have been places that have done oral histories and all sorts of rich material that is available that may not just be in the written form. Okay, that's terrific. I'm glad that we had that question come in. I think you'll love this next question for the History Hub. Is there a need for transcribers? Why yes, there is. Not on History Hub, but there is always a need for transcribers. The National Archives and the Library of Congress both have communities set up around people who are interested in transcribing. Go to Citizen Archivist and you can find links there. That would be amazing. And you can go through the History Hub community to get there. Okay, thank you so much. We love transcribers. So a very specific question. I think you'll again refer people to go to the History Hub community. They ask, on census from 1840s, how can you tell if the information is correct or not? Oh, well, you have to remember the people who wrote this or taking down information that has been given to them orally. They've went to different census, house to house and the census taker actually wrote things down. Now they were supposed to transcribe and use the same kind of handwriting and they had to take classes to do that so that it all looks the same. But they wrote down what people said. So if someone called their parent Peggy instead of Margaret, it may show up as Peggy in the 1840 census and in the 1850 census it might be Margaret. So there are some adaptations that you have to make. Sometimes people didn't ask how to spell a name or if they did, they didn't understand the spelling and so they kind of can get creative but that is the fun of working in the census records. So following up on that, we get this kind of question all the time about the census. So the question is, we know a spelling error has been made on the census. How can we notify National Archives to make the correction or is the misspelling just part of the legal record? It's part of the legal record but you know they are transcribing the census and so if you notice in the transcription of the census that something is spelled wrong, that can be changed. That's a great answer. Yes, you can always put that in the transcription. So our next question is very specific. They ask, I know most World War I records were lost. But where can World War I military information be found? And it continues. So World War I military information, specifically is there information on Camp Jackson, South Carolina and soldiers who had the Spanish flu in 1918? That is very specific. That's a good question and yes, there are records about the Spanish flu and specifically in that area. If they're talking about soldiers, they're talking about the army and yes, the army records were burned but the Marine Corps and the Navy were not touched. They, out in St. Louis, they have gathered records immediately from the military and records that were normally not considered permanent or saved such as payroll records and what have you and so they can find as much as they can about an individual. So yes, that is a perfect question to answer on History Hub and we'll be glad to tell you where you might be able to find some resources. Okay, you are such a generalist, Ms. Becky Collier. Thank you. We are so lucky. It comes from working on History Hub for four years. Yeah, we're lucky to have you there to answer so many different questions that are not actually specific about the History Hub. So thank you. This is a researcher question about coming in person. If I come to the National Archives in Washington, DC, will I be able to obtain records at any time or do I have to make an appointment and if able to acquire records, what form of payment do I need for any records? Oh. So an appointment and is there a cost? It's always best to contact the unit that you're going to visit prior to coming. Don't come cold, ask your question, make sure that they have the records here on site if you're going to come and you want to look at the actual records. There's also depends on whether records have been microfilmed and what have you, you may not be able to touch the actual records. So please contact the unit first and they will tell you how, you know, to come and what times records can be pulled. Right now, I believe we're on a one pool of it and it is not on a schedule. So it's best to talk to the Archives in London staff first before you come. But you should do that to no matter what part of the National Archives you go to. Please contact them first. Whether you do it through Inquirer, whether you do it through History Hub or whether you write them a letter or call. It's very important to do that so you're not wasting your time when you come to visit us. We know how important it is and we know that it can be expensive to come to the various sites. So, you know, that's why we ask you to contact us first. And we do have a number of blog posts on History Hub about how to prepare for your in-person visit. And also, my co-worker Amber just posted in the chat a website that has all of our location information so you know where to get that information on who to contact. Let's see, I think one more question came in. Okay, I'm just gonna go ahead and read it. On land owned, how do you go about how far back it was owned by the family? But if the family is related, I'm not quite sure I understand. You have a whole land records group on History Hub that you could post your question there. But if it's land, for instance, if the place where you live right now, your county will have documentation about the deed for that land and then you can go backwards beginning at the county records. And then if that original person had gotten it from like a federal bounty land grant or what have you then, it will take you there. So there's a way to do it, but it's not necessarily at the National Archives. Okay, thank you so much. Another question has come in about original documents being sent in for the census, specifically Yakima Valley Libraries Archives has original documents of the census taker for the Yakima Reservation from the early 1900s. I've never found these online. Should these be sent to the National Archives? That's a great question sign up for a account on History Hub and ask it and we'll route it to the, we'll find an answer. Okay, at this point I don't have any more questions, but if you think of something later or we just didn't get to your question because they were coming fast and furious, please submit it to our email account, historyhubatnara.gov. And for that, thank you. If our presenters, like I just said, if we didn't get to your questions send it to historyhubatnara.gov. Videos and handouts will remain available after the event from this YouTube page and from the fairs webpage. We will begin again on the hour. Thank you very much. Welcome back. My name is Amber Forrester and I'm the Archival Training Coordinator for Research Services. This is session number two of the 2019 Virtual Genealogy Fair. It's for all skill levels and entitled preserving personal collections. Our speaker is Sarah Holmes. She will discuss guilt-free ways to preserve your own family's collections by improving environment and housing of papers, photos, and other materials. Ms. Holmes works as a Management and Program Analyst at the National Archives in St. Louis. Welcome to the broadcast, Sarah Holmes. Hey, Louis. This presentation is intended to help you with decision-making processes of taking care of your family's own physical history. If it moves to slide two, please. The first thing you're going to do is to take a look at what you have. You may have photographs, movies, letters, newspaper clippings, memory books, scrapbooks, much more than that even. These are things that may have been passed on to you. They may have been things that you have kept yourself out because of sentimental reasons. These are items that are shown here that are in my own collection. I have damaged and re-rated photographs. I even have an envelope to keep my fragments in. I have different kinds of paper that you see here. There are all sorts of different kinds of things. The oversized photographs can really be a challenge to store at your home. And these are things that I haven't gotten around to really dealing with properly. So these are kind of some of my odd balls here. Any time you've got something that's in odd shape that makes it difficult. Slide three, please. Now, I'm trained as a book and paper conservator and I've been interested in my family history ever since I was a kid. So you might think my entire collection looks something like these pictures. The box on the left has photographs and polyester sleeves. And they're great for letting people handle and view the photos without getting fingerprints or scratches on the images. And my box of slides here, it's a wonderful set of boxes that fits into a larger box so that I can keep hundreds of slides all together. Now, one thing you might notice if you take a closer look here is that I don't even have labels inside these. They're just stacked in there. What I've done so far with this is to get things housed pretty much by size and type. My slides have dividers as I've sorted them by date when they have dates, at least. And fortunately for me, a lot of the photographs have been identified on the back. But at this point, what you see here is that basically I'm getting things housed more by size and type and we're trying to get them housed nicely. And these boxes are, as we call them, your archival boxes, archival housings. But I really need more time to get them organized. Slide four, please. And that's really the harsh reality for all of us. Organizing and housing to preserve collections can take a lot of time. And it can get pricey if your goal is to house everything in archival storage boxes. And that's especially true when you have all sorts of different sizes and different materials. Now, this is some more of my personal collection of family things. And there at the top is a Fruit of the Month Club box. And then I've got some of my dad's old cigar boxes. And I've even got this cute little keepsake box down in the bottom corner. It's cute, but it's not made of archival materials. I don't even know for sure what it's made of as far as its quality. What is important at this point is that the boxes are clean, they've never gotten wet, and they provide good structural support to what they're holding. And even that Fruit of the Month box meets those standards. It may have held Fruit once, but it's clean, it's odorless, and all the other boxes are the same. They've been used to hold photos and family things for a long time, to be honest. Though I'm gradually working to move them into better containers. You can't even see a stack of the photos please in that cigar box from when I was working with them. Now, here is the number one rule to know. You want to keep your collections in a stable environment. Quality containers like you saw on the previous slide will add to longevity. But don't feel guilty if you haven't overcome the need for more time and more money to buy archival quality containers. That the truth is, NARA and all of our colleagues in other institutions struggle with this at our workplaces as well. This is those boxes are a lot bigger and the number is a lot larger. So let's start with some top tips in caring for your collection so you can understand what I mean. Now, of course, here's the first one. Control your environment. Temperature and humidity are the big important factors. The wrong environment can cause mold to grow and damage your heirlooms. At high in temperature, high in humidity and low air circulation. Make sure that you're keeping your most precious items out of basements and attics, garages or barns. Places where temperature and humidity tend to fluctuate drastically. You want to avoid areas that are near showers, bathrooms, near your kitchen, near your central heating and cooling appliances. And ideally you stick to an internal wall whether than an external wall because again, more fluctuations are going to occur when you've got an external wall nearby. We don't recommend sealing things into the airtight plastic containers. You'll be sealing in whatever environment they have and they may not even be as airtight as you think. Do take note of where your pipes run. Pipe breaks, leaks, even simply condensation from pipes can cause bad problems and create bad environments very quickly. And do you have mold that is a common problem? If you open a box and see splotches on things that look fuzzy, something that looks like that picture on the left side and that mold has actually even made it turn polky because it's been there colonizing for so long. If you smell mildew even if you don't see mold then you may want to be contacting the conservator for help. Now when mold grows in full bloom it does tend to follow areas where water has dripped. So it's not unusual to see like you see in that second picture there that shows the mold growing in kind of lines. That's where the water had created channels. And slide six, please. Do try and make sure that you're keeping everything off of the floor. The floor is going to be vulnerable to water puddling when things go wrong. Ideally you will have shelving that is metal powder coated shelving braced as well. And that you're not overhanging boxes over the edge in any way. That also helps to protect if there's a shelving over it in case something happens above to bring water in. Now at home I know it's often common that you're using wood shelves. You can find liners for wood shelving in your conservation suppliers that will provide something of a buffer. You wanna do that because the wood is going to be off gassing things that will actually cause chemical reactions within your collections. Slide seven, please. And another top fit for a potential problem, pests. Pests can do permanent damage to your records. Just look at what the termites did here to these papers. You want to be sure that you're stealing possible entryways to your home and definitely to your storage area. Keep your storage area clean so that it will help you monitor it for any potential problems. You can use sticky traps to help monitor. We don't recommend using pesticides. They can be damaging to your health as well potentially. And remember that warning about keeping records away from humid wet areas just to simply control the environment and prevent mold. That can be a huge help with pest control as well because they're going to be attracted to those areas. And just as an example, I once used closet shelves for books in an old apartment that I had. And this wall that they had shelves were all backed up to a bathroom. That was a big mistake. There was a higher humidity there and it drew silverfish. So my books gave them wonderful times and feeding grounds until I realized what was happening. And remember not all pest damage comes from insects. You can be rodents. You can have mice nesting. And our pets can potentially damage things as well. You may have antique furniture that you inherited that you want to be sure that your dog and cat understands not to destroy. And you may also need to be aware that there are materials like photos and book coverings that can actually have sparkles and gelatin in them. And that's actually attractive to pets. So make sure that they don't get a chance to sample them because they may decide they taste wonderful. Now, if you have a lot of pests, then you do want to isolate the affected boxes and contact the conservator for guidance and treatment. Slide eight, please. Now, light. Light is another problem. You want to keep your objects out of light. Light damage comes from the rays of the sun as well as from the heat that it generates. Avoid direct light such as across from a window where you're getting a lot of sunlight. So recent lighting can have harmful light and heat waves as well. Any light can be damaging. Even if you're using modern LED lights, you're not going to be safe from light damage. It is prominent. Do consider making copies of any photographs or documents that you would like to have out on display so you can have a display copy that you don't have to worry about with the original safely storage. Slide nine, please. And dust is also a big problem. It holds moisture and it attracts pests and it's also acidic. And all of these things can speed degradation of any object. So you want to avoid throwing items that are near events or other places that accumulate quickly. You can brush away dust with a lint-free cloth. We don't recommend using commercial cleaners or waxes or oils. If anything, just use a little bit of water only. If you house things inside containers, that will certainly help prevent dust buildup on the objects that you're saving. You can see in this picture, there was a photograph that had glass broken and where dust settled within those cracks damaged the surface of the photograph. Slide 10, please. Now, storage, this is a big one. Now, in the conservation world, we tend to call storage housing. And we've got enclosures and folders and boxes and a whole variety of different things. Now, most boxes that you just simply obtain from various sources have an unknown content that would definitely include my forgot the month blocks. The worry in using those is the possibility of acids and oxidants that will off gas and damage your treasures. This is where the term acid-free comes from. Now, it's important to understand that pH levels don't stay static all the time. They over the years, things will tend to become more acidic. And this is just one of the things that you need to be concerned about in housing. When there's doubt about materials, do try and replace with something that you feel is more trustworthy. But at the same time, do be aware that there's no standard for what is archival or acid-free. So when you're purchasing things, do look closely at the vendors and how they present themselves. It may not be something that you just simply want to buy cheap because it says acid-free and there's nothing else that the vendor provides for information. If you're looking online, you can look for keywords like archival supplies, archival products, acid-free. And you will find things that are described as having an alkaline reserve or being buffered. And this in particular is what's referred to as acid-free. They're often referring to a calcium content and they may even state what content that is that is going to have some of the alkaline reserve to counter acid. Now for photo storage, you can look for enclosures that test the PAT, the Photographic Activity Test. Now this is an international standard test for evaluating specifically the interactions between photo images and the enclosures in which they're stored. There is a standard PAT for black and white photos and then there's a different one for color. Now using materials that test the standard one doesn't necessarily mean that it's appropriate for color. So do be aware of that little catch. Now here is a big hint.  You can get legal size if you want or even larger. Maybe get some folders as well if you have more money to spend but you're not ready to do all the boxes. You can use that paper to line boxes that aren't archival. Now don't tape them to the side or anything, just lay them in place. You can also use the paper to interweave items and the folders to let you start grouping things. Do understand that, you know, as I said, PH doesn't stay static over the years that just having a piece of paper in there if you're using it for years, you might actually wanna swap out that paper with new paper because the paper you left in there is absorbing essence potentially from both the box as well as the materials within it. Now if you have all of your materials in a archival box with an alkaline reserve and archival folders and any extra enclosures that you've got then you've got more of a full cocoon for all of your contents than you do if you're just simply lining a box with the paper. But again, if you have a poor environment, there's no box, there's no enclosure that's going to protect your contents from the bad environment and the damage that temperature and humidity will bring. Slide 11, please. You want to be sure that your housings fully support what they contain. So be sure when you're using folders that they fit inside. Don't cut or trim documents. Now, if something was already folded, you may be able to reuse that fold. Ideally, you would keep things flat because folds do indicate that fibers have been broken and that can lead to loss and tearing there. Now, if something's oversized, be sure that you roll it onto an archival safe tube and you can wrap it with alkaline buffered paper. You do want a tube that is about two inch longer on both sides than what the item is that's rolled. And you can do that for paper and textiles as well, anything that can roll. Slide 12, please. Another thing to remember is not to overstuff your boxes either. If you've got overstuffed boxes and any time that you're reaching in or refiling a box, you're going to be causing damage and wear and tear. So if it's swollen and the lid doesn't quite fit, you're overstuffing the box. You need another box or a bigger box. Slide 13, please. Now, do watch out for problem material because even if you're storing your paper with other papers and your photos with other photos, you may notice that some things are farther along the path of degradation than others. Their acid content can potentially cause chemical transfer. News clippings are a big culprit of this. And you do want to try and you can interleave paper in between newspaper clippings. And definitely if you've got like a newspaper clipping and a letter, you might want a buffer of a sheet of paper in between them. And photographs can also create something similar where you can have mirror images like in this example where the content of the photo emulsion is actually what is chemically reacted over time. So you do want to be careful what you're putting up against next to each other when you don't have interleaving material. And again, if this happens to be a photograph that you're concerned about, do use materials from past the PAT. Slide 14, please. Now books. Books you want to be sure that you're storing or that you're not stressing their structures. If you've got a large volume like an atlas or a big plat book or possibly even one of those huge county biography collections, you want to consider whether you need to store them horizontally. If when it stands, it pulls the textbook down like you see in this picture, then you're stressing the structure of the book and you want to house it horizontally. Now smaller books, small, medium ones can easily be shown. It's best to store with the same size together so they're supporting each other. We want to avoid having a volume that reams and that will cause distortion and the covers will lose their shape. And you can see in this picture here, there's a line that is showing how most of the volumes are nice and parallel to that line, but that last one is leaning a bit and that one is vulnerable. Slide 15, please. Now handling. We want to be sure that we're handling our materials well, not just storing them. The number one thing is to make sure that you have nice, clean hands and a nice, clean work area. Avoid using lotions or hand sanitizers. If you really do have to use them, then make sure that you've given enough time for them to be fully absorbed into your skin so that you're not going to be handling things and rubbing off the lotion to contaminate the surface. Now for paper materials, we don't recommend gloves. The gloves will actually prevent you from handling things well, especially picking up a single page, turning a page in a book, and cotton gloves in particular will have fibers that will cast on the paper and it will actually be more likely to tear than if you're not using gloves. Now for photographs and metals, you could very well want to use gloves because you don't want to leave fingerprints on those materials. Nitro gloves, just like those that your doctor's office can be used for that. Slide 16, please. So how are you going to prevent things like getting scratches, like on this photograph from happening when we handle our materials? One very important thing to consider is the area that you use in handling your material. Be sure that you're not spinting yourself on space. You need a lot of room to work with one item at a time. And be sure to remember that your most important tool is to work with that nice, clean, flat surface. It's not ideal to be working in midair if you're putting things into enclosures. Just please, you want to use that flat surface. Slide 17, please. Now, photographs with them are going to be particularly susceptible to handling. So you can use polyester sleeves. They're excellent in being able to let you view the photograph while you're handling it. There are also other types of envelopes, paper envelopes, glycine that RPAT approved and can be used. They might be good choices for heavier things, like things on cabinet cards. You can see here that you can also put slides. I personally chose a box as you saw in the earlier slide in the presentation. But you can certainly find other ways to store slides using sleeves and binders. Again, be sure that the binder you use is of known content and archival material and not something questionable if you can avoid that. So there are a lot of different options for being able to store materials. Slide 18, please.  And you know, they have that adhesive that holds the photos in place. Slide 18, please. Now, if you're working with old albums, especially these magnetic albums, it holds the photos in place. And know that you can look online for suggestions on removing photos from these albums. But I really do suggest contacting your conservator if you've got this kind of album or anything that is adhered with some kind of adhesive. It's very easy to damage photos when they get removed from these pages. You can see that the separation of the lines of adhesive in here. I'm kind of lucky that some of what we use in magnetic albums were actually just friends of copied photographs. So these are the only ones we have left in my own collection. Slide 19, please. Now, objects can certainly be more difficult to decide how to handle. Now, for things that are metal, you want to be sure that you're storing them in some way so that they don't touch each other. But there's some kind of space you might choose separating them into cloth bags. I know these examples here are NARA so that they're done by somebody who has had a lot of experience and has access to foam and other materials to use and making enclosures. You could very well consider getting a conservator to help you to make enclosures in housings like these. But you can find materials that will also help you do your own at home from archival suppliers. Now, silver in particularly is a tricky item a lot. If you're very likely tarnish, you don't want to polish the silver. Any time that you're polishing that silver, you're actually removing silver from the object. So do avoid bringing silver into any long-term contact with protein-based materials. And that's going to be materials like wool or silk or leather. If you're looking for using with the silver, you can get sulfur-absorbing materials that will do the opposite of what those proteinaceous materials do. And you can find these from vendors. They come in varieties such as charcoal cloth, silver safe. There are also plastic stones that are copper impregnated with the silver. There are a lot of things that you can potentially find a look at. So if you've got silver or other metals, get them out. Get an idea of how much and what size you've got and take a look at what's available to archival in these Zine supply catalogs. Slide 20, please. No textiles. It is best for new textiles from the Zerlun feeder chest as well as making sure that you're not keeping them in this plastic cover or even if your wedding dress came with that. It's not the long-term storage material. You want to hang items with cotton padded hangers and place them in a textile cloth garment bag. You can store most textiles and boxes well easily. You will keep them flat but pad them with cotton batting wherever there are folds or creases because you don't want those to stay flat. If you don't pad those folds, the creases will eventually become tears and you may see that that's where the most rare is, where things were folded. And you can certainly place quilts and coverlets and boxes as well. Slide 21, please. Now, electronic and magnetic devices. Of course, these are increasingly more a part of our lives and in so many different varieties. Now, these come with hard plastic cases typically. If the cases are broken, then just replace them with whatever plastic cases are available online or in stores. But do be sure that you're keeping these stored in their own boxes away from paper or textiles or metals. It is best ideally to store all of these things separately. Slide 22, please. Now, while you're working with storing and housing this is a good time to remind you not to attach things together. You can use folders to keep things together, but you do not want to be using tape or rubber bands or metal fasteners of any kind. These are things that will degrade over time. At the same time, don't try and remove fasteners or tape on your own. If you remove the plastic carrier on tape then you're actually going to speed up the degradation that will occur because you are bringing it up into the air. When you're using scrapbooks or photo albums don't use clues or tapes of any kind. You can find photo corners that you can use. Now you can see in these pictures that tape itself will potentially degrade in various different ways. Sometimes it will discolor and yellow. Sometimes it will desiccate.  Now in that lower picture you see an example where the tape has actually become stickier and oozed out. That is a particular sticky mess that you might want to use better to a conservator to work with. Slide 23 please. Now here's the other part of working with modern electronic information. How are we going to keep all this stuff where we have it year after year after year? Now you can take a tip from locks. Locks of copies keep stuff safe which started at Stanford University. Now you want to have multiple copies spread them around give them to cousins aunts, uncles whoever you can find you to take copies. The other part of this is that you're going to want to be converting to new forms of media often. And you're likely going to be different forms of media. It's very common to see these flash drives now, but will they be around in five years the way they are now? Maybe not. So at least every 10 years make copies of the media and again spread copies around. Just because you have something digitized doesn't mean that you need to get rid of your original. So be sure that you have those originals in case you ever go back to them. And file naming as well. We have an organization plan for file naming and includes metadata from who, what, when, where basically. I mean just a date at a minimum is going to be so helpful. Slide 24 please. Now for things that you want to digitize yourself photographs, letters it's best to photograph these facing up rather than having them face down on a flatbed scanner. Definitely avoid any kind of machinery that has the key parts to it. And don't use auto feeders. They will jam. Slide 25 please. Now when it comes to audio visual material whether it's magnetic tape audio, video DVDs, CDs whatever you've got old home sound then these are things that you may want simply need to go to a professional because of the equipment that is involved in transferring them. There will likely be problems with sound, with the film, something that needs to be addressed as they are being transferred. So this can get technical very quickly. You want to be sure that you work with a vendor that is willing to talk with you, answer questions and will go at length about what you want. What you want to do first is to get a pilot test done get a sample done and that's going to be a way for you to know that the end result is what you are expecting and that the vendor knows that you understand what they're expecting to do. You want to ask them where they're doing the digitization. Is it in house? Are they sourcing it out? Where does it go? How is it stored? You want me to think in terms of the fact that you're getting a file not so much about a disk. You need to ask about file types in particular. Some are good for archiving but others are good for sharing. You probably want to get both. If you get one copy with the highest possible resolution that's going to get a lot of digital space requirements and then you can get a compressed one for file sharing. You may be doing something like getting an mp3 for sharing and a way for archiving. Do talk with your vendor about what they offer and how they get used and make sure you understand the different file types that they're talking about. Things can get really technical quickly. You may be talking with your vendor for adjustments for audio tapes and reels. You need different size needles for vinyl records. You may have old record recordings out there. Things that are born digital can be particularly difficult to determine what you want to do with. Things like emails, electronic journals. You can easily print those out but you will need to remember this. You're keeping the electronic files that you're going to have to transfer them to new digital formats. If you've got a disk somewhere that has a WordPress file, you're not going to be able to pop it into your current laptop that runs on this board. Slide 26, please. Now, we've covered a lot of territory here and maybe beginning to get an idea of how you can set your own priorities. Number one, as always, the environment. Be sure that you have the best possible environment. A good place to be storing them and preventing insects and other pests from damaging them. Now, once you have that you can move on to step two and work to improve your housing as much as you possibly can. Now, you're going to be determining a lot of personal priorities. No one's plan for preservation is going to be the same. There are factors that you'll need to be thinking about that may pertain personally to you alone. Now, one thing that I'm thinking about more of my own collection is that different parts of what I had be passed on to different people. And that makes a huge difference in housing and organization. And that is one reason that I'm looking more at the enclosure level like you saw, getting photographs into enclosure and I'm actually going more by size. My next big step will be organizing it into segments. And for me, working with the enclosures first is to be able to determine how many boxes I'm going to need. And do also consider getting in touch with coverings. These are very distant ones and that can help determine priorities. You may have a photograph that's very special like I've got a copy of here that's shown and this is a photograph just as an example here that's got a big crease across the front. It's missing a corner and this is a copy of a picture of my great-grandfather whose parents and 17 siblings back in Norfolk, England. Now, it's not the only copies that exist but to find the other copies you actually do have to contact cousins that stayed in England. We also have cousins in Australia so you do have to reach out if you want to see if there are duplicates and of course the joy of finding pictures you never knew existed will happen at the same time. So of course I have my copy I'm never going to part with it it has a lot of intrinsic value to me. It's the copy that emigrated with him when he came to make a new home in Iowa and it's been an awesome family since then but for digital reproduction to have it available to even more people than had original copies a different copy is actually a better choice and of course if you're working with siblings and cousins and you've got things like old home films or is that possibility that you can pull resources and work with a vendor together and get multiple copies since everyone has a current copy that is a great access copy and then you've also got copies that you can preserve as master copies. So there are going to be a lot of different things to potentially think about in looking at your collection. Slide 27 please. So there will be a question and answer period here after I'm done talking but if you're like me your best questions come well after the time that you're talking about it. So one thing that you can do is to take a look at the National Archives website preservation pages and you can reach those at www.archives.gov slash preservation you can also look at the website www.culturalheritage.org and get all sorts of information about conservation and how to locate conservators. There is a tremendous amount of information online that is available to you and of course you can certainly email us and the preservation services department at preservation at nara.gov So when you're home facing all these piles of photos and letters and home phones do seek these out to get answers to questions. Now slide 28 please. Well thank you very much for your time today. Do you have any questions? Thank you so much for your presentation Sarah we have a lot of questions so we're going to dive right in. First can you clarify what's the difference between acidic and acidic? They're basically two very synonymous terms there. The acidic will probably be seen in more technical versions while you'll see more of the acid referred to in more consumer friendly versions. Okay thank you for that. What is a safe place to keep photos and paper documents that does have air circulation as you recommended? Could you repeat that? What's a safe place to keep records that has good air circulation? Well they you want everything to be in the southern environment as you possibly can. Now they're it's going to vary from house to house as far as where you have it if you're trying to get the residents but basically you're going to be trying to do as I had said something that won't fluctuate and by fluctuate I do mean that within a day's time that it's not going to fluctuate from having the air conditioner go off in the middle of July and go from cool 70 degrees to 90 degrees. They are milder and that's okay to have but the physical storage is basically the primary issue getting that temperature and humidity and dry space. If we are scanning documents to preserve them what's the most stable file format to save those scanned images? Now that's a tough one because that's going to vary and again if you're doing it for yourself digital storage is also part of the equation. You may want to try and do uncompressed TIS files but again if you have a lot and you have a lot of uncompressed TIS you're going to find pretty quickly that it actually takes a tremendous amount of space so that you can be potentially looking at are you using your computer space what kind of backup do you have do you have space on the cloud that you consider safe so I would really say that digital storage will have a lot to do with what you use as what you consider your archival master it may not be as the ideal full uncompressed that large institutions use. We have a couple specific questions about conservation and preservation how do you remediate cigarette smoke smell on old paper documents? To remediate what? Cigarette smoke smell? Oh, smells and odors you can deal with that by creating the foot be one kind that you can use one of those plastic containers that have the tight lid what you would do in that case is to set up something you can get you can get kitty litter there are other materials based typically that are odor absorbers you can even use baking soda potentially and put that at the bottom of the container and then use some kind of creating something that lifts it up so that you're not putting in a direct contact and then put the letters whatever you've got above that and close it and give it time and they take days or weeks to be able to remove odor in this manner but you can do that and it can be something done at home just be sure that you're monitoring it and that you don't forget that you put this in a field container and find out after the fact that something's happened Thank you so much another one of our viewers has some 100 year old newspapers that are rolled tightly how can they unroll them and relax the paper I see so with that you've probably likely have something that's brittle um it's paper can really have tremendous differences even something that was made the same day depending on how it was made in fact it's it's a little bit different it's a little bit different depending on how it was manufactured I'm assuming that this is something brittle that's why it's more of a concern um you can humidify the paper humidification for things that are printed is typically almost always fine I would be concerned if you've got annotations, letters or something because humidification can cause problems with some media but you can use the humidification set up that would allow you to relax the paper before you unroll it so that you inject some humidity into that now if you've got something rolled and that's going to be long you may be looking to get a container even a garbage can there will be some places that you can find online and there should even be some links from our website that would give you some diagrams of this but you would be placing some water or even wet water at the bottom of the container and then like I was suggesting with the odor reduction have something like chicken crate go to the hardware store and get the cube light cravings that they use or the lights or full-wrestling lighting something like that to be sure that you've got it above the water area because when you're humidifying the thing that you've got to do is make sure that you're not getting the paper wet if you want it humid you'd be able to get a container that's right size and do this and close it to cover it for it may take as little as half an hour, it may take an hour and see that it's gotten flexible and then you'd be able to take it out onto and have a big surface ready where you can roll it out on several people asked about the best practice for documenting people, dates and places in photographs can they write that information on the back there are I find I myself but of course some surfaces don't even take that there are pens that you can get that are stable archival ink pretty much this carbon black that you can use to write on the back and the picture that I showed in the first slide actually had Henry written down there and that's something I wrote when I was young at the ballpoint pen and I kind of regret doing that but at the same time it's identified him and if no one else would know it's identified so do look for for margins for places that do test sure that you're not using too much pressure because if you are using writing on something that's then it's going to be very easy to imprint on that we had another question about storing and preserving fragile glass negatives do you have advice for that for negatives there are a variety of different storage ways that you can handle it and if you do look online and there are quite a few archival suppliers these years just again you can be looking for things that are custom for negatives and of course there can be different sizes glass negatives are going to be the most difficult to work with and there are custom enclosures that you can get for those and there are definitely a variety of sizes for all the range of negatives that you can find available and that might be something that you would give a higher priority in storing because those are master copies and negatives can even have information that even if you've got the print it wasn't printed out at a high enough intensity to see but you've got it in the negative so that would be a good ideal thing for a high priority is to seek out those sleeves or enclosures that fit those sizes and then look from dealing with that how much you've got and what kind of box you need and you can use that with photographs and negatives there are going to be a whole lot of different options there may be portfolio style boxes as well one of our viewers has heard that storing silver items in a vacuum bag or container will keep it from tarnishing is that a good practice? that basically storing anything that protection is going to be a good practice as I've shown it's my own thing to work with possibly if you've got something that you don't know how it was made or where it came from and being a reliable vendor or manufacturer then do look for something different but as far as having there are some things as I mentioned with the books that you want so horizontally rather than vertically but for smaller selections as long as you're getting the support it's typically just a personal choice in how you want to store it so you can use the portfolio style or something that stores on them thanks we also have some questions about cleaning slides and photographs dusting them they've heard that they can use air puffs or microfiber cloths but what do you recommend I personally try and avoid cleaning unless there's actually something that's genuinely a problem in the first place to be honest photographs can be extremely difficult because of the whole variety of different development types that are out there and so if you really do want to to clean it then I would make sure that you're using something that comes from an archival supplier or if you're lucky to still have a bit cameras nearby they would also have those in spots that you can find some wipes that are there but if there's something that is especially bad with a photograph I really would recommend working with a conservator I know but you have such a potential to lose the image and importantly I think we have time for one more question what about laminating paper documents laminating is a big note that is using a piece of and a piece of things that find things together in the first place tends to be where the biggest problems come do not laminate things that you want to save as family or when you buy any means you can use it for temporary ID cards and such but you don't want to do it at all for your collection lamination has been the cause of a lot of big grant funded projects that have put survivors to work for years so don't laminate thank you so much Sarah we have a lot of questions and unfortunately we didn't have time to get to all of them so if Sarah did not get to your question please send an email to preservation at narra.gov videos and handouts will remain available after the event from this YouTube page and from the fairs web page we're now going to have a short intermission and we'll return on the hour this is session number three of the 2019 virtual genealogy fair the lecture is for the beginner and experienced skill levels it is entitled immigration records more than just ship passenger arrival lists by presenter Elizabeth Burns this presentation will discuss historic immigration laws and the resulting immigration records available online and through the National Archives Ms. Burns is an archivist at the National Archives at Kansas City and Narra's subject matter expert for immigration records and I am now turning over the broadcast to Elizabeth Burns today we're going to discuss how immigration laws have changed over time and the impact this had on the records that exist today look at the different types of records available through the National Archives and address how you can get started with the National Archives next slide slide number five the National Archives holds records created by the federal government in the course of its daily work so this presentation will focus on these federally created materials keep in mind there may be resources available through state archives local historical societies etc. that could prove useful to your searches especially if the events of interest occurred prior to the formation next slide slide number six now slide number seven our discussion of immigrant laws starts in the 1789 to 1819 time frame when documentation varied significantly because there was not a single entity creating and maintaining records of immigrants the customs bureau oversaw court starting in 1789 but with limited exception such as New Orleans and Philadelphia which consistently recorded arrivals for spans of multiple years it's difficult to find documentation of immigrants to the U.S. next slide slide number eight the steerage act of 1819 changes this until January 1820 the U.S. government did not require passenger lists but the new steerage act required the master of a ship to provide a manifest of passengers boarded at foreign ports and it required each vessel to carry a specific quantity of provisions for each passenger with an entitlement to compensation should supplies prove deficient next slide slide number nine the immigration act of 1891 introduced further documentation as it required that information be collected about immigrants entering the U.S. overland from Canada and Mexico it's interesting to note that approximately 40% of the foreign passengers arriving in Canada were actually bound for the U.S. so the creation of border crossing records began capturing a large pool of immigrants that likely would not have shown up on previous arrival documents the act also created a superintendent of immigration who oversaw immigrant inspectors at ports of entry and barred polygamous persons convicted of crimes of moral turpitude and those suffering from diseases creating a provision for medical examination next slide slide number ten the immigration act of 1921 in 1924 add another layer of documentation for individuals entering the U.S. as they imposed a national origins quota which limited the number of visas issued to individuals from different countries by the State Department each year only immigrants with valid visas were permitted entry next slide slide number eleven this graphic shows immigration trends to the U.S. 1821 to 1995 you can see how the immigration acts from the 1920s dramatically shaped the quantity and geographic origin of immigrants to the U.S. throughout the mid 1900s the laws I introduced are only a small handful of the multitude of immigration regulations and statues that have existed in the U.S. but you will see as we continue how even these few laws shaped the records available for genealogists today it's important to consider the laws that may have been in place at the time your immigrant ancestor entered and resided within the U.S. as there is often a direct correlation to what you may or may not find in your research next slide slide number twelve now slide number thirteen passenger arrival lists are a good place to start our conversation about immigrant records the forms have changed over time and these changes often mean that there may be unfamiliar notations on the records I always suggest that researchers should look for the instructions to the collector that are often found among the forms for a given arrival these can be a valuable tool for understanding notes that the collector may have added to entries researchers are lucky because many of the arrival records have been digitized and are available online through the National Archives Catalog www.narsimmigration.com or familysearch.org so digital searching and browsing functions are much more accessible you can visit NARA's immigration overview web page to learn more next slide slide number fourteen passenger lists can include a variety of information for the subjects recorded including name, physical description age, occupation place of birth name and address of closest living relative in the U.S. and so on next slide slide number fifteen as you search passenger records there are several tips to keep in mind if you're having trouble using name searching but you have a general idea of when and where someone may have entered the U.S. it can be worthwhile to browse the list when browsing it's often beneficial to read the list from back to front because they're normally ordered based on cabin class first, second, third unless you know that your ancestor had the means to pay for first class it's more common that individuals traveled third class meaning that their entries would be closer to the end of the passenger list keep in mind that port names are often misremembered as the name of the ship for example SS Bremen Hamburg or Rotterdam if the individual that you're researching could have entered under a different name be sure that you're checking the last residence in destination column in case the locations listed there resonate with your research I actually had a researcher who was able to track down his ancestors in the passenger list based on the small town in Iowa that was recorded in the destination field where he knew that the family had migrated to if an immigrant was rejected and returned from Ellis Island check to see if they arrived approximately two weeks later at Philadelphia Baltimore or via Canadian border crossing Ellis Island was known to be one of the most stringent of the ports and you can sometimes find immigrants who failed to pass through Ellis Island successfully entering at another location a couple weeks later keep in mind that a rejection at Ellis Island was not deportation as the individual never officially entered the country so they were readily allowed to attempt entry at another location next slide slide number 16 final tip to keep in mind is that name variations are common so you have to be open minded about interchanging letters or considering additional names an individual may have traveled under for example Scandinavians were known to travel under their fathers given or middle name or even under the name of the village where they were born next slide slide number 17 there are also a number of common misconceptions and research errors that you should work to avoid it is false that all passenger list records survive and are available for online research unfortunately for any number of reasons like water, fire, etc. not every record survives it is false that there is a list for every shift that arrived at a US port and that all passengers were listed in some cases you can see that only the first cabin passengers are listed or the list may even be very clearly incomplete because it only records a handful of names for a vessel that obviously carried hundreds of passengers it is false that passengers participated in the creation of the list and it is also false that the list were created at Ellis Island or the port of entry lists of individuals purchasing tickets were kept by the ticket brokers and these lists were submitted at the port of departure where the captain created the vessel's passenger list this also means that any change in name did not occur at Ellis Island but rather at the point of ticket purchase you need to be careful about any assumptions regarding ship report as recounting of arrival was often many years removed from the event and it was common to confuse ship name with port of arrival or departure you also need to be careful about blanket statements like this record is not my immigrant because the name, age, nationality destination, etc. is wrong just as with any genealogical research you have to come in with an open mind and look at all the clues and context before making an assumption that a record couldn't possibly match the person that you're seeking the link I provided on this slide is to an article that goes more in depth into some of the most common passenger manifest errors that researchers make the first part of the article is specific to certain nationalities but into the article is actually pertinent to any researcher so it's well worth time to read it next slide, slide number 18 if you have an inclination that your immigrant ancestor may have been a seaman vessel crew list may be a useful resource for your search the list exists because of an early 19th century law that required masters of American vessels leaving or arriving at U.S. ports to file crew list with the customs agent foreign vessels were initially exempt from the law but the immigration act of 1917 required specific documentation about all alien seaman on vessels entering the U.S. many of these lists have been digitized and are available in our online catalog and on ancestry.com or familysearch.org next slide slide number 19 vessel crew lists are similar to standard passenger arrival records but there are normally fewer pieces of biographical information recorded information listed could include name birth date and birth place last residence nationality and details about the vessel where they served next slide slide number 20 if you are able to locate an immigrant ancestor on an arrival list a good next step is to track down any existing ship photo the photo may not give you specific insight into the individuals that you're researching but what it does provide is a glimpse into what their travels into the U.S. were like many ship photos have been digitized and can be found on ancestry.com or through a Google search on the vessel name one of my colleagues was researching her great-great-grandmother Francesca Beck's entry to the U.S. Frances, as she was later known and is shown here with her husband Colstein-Shupbar after discovering that Frances entered the U.S. on October 7th 1891 in New York aboard the SS Friesland we were able to locate a number of photos on both ancestry.com and online through a site dedicated to the red star align that the ship was part of next slide slide number 21 some immigrants entered the U.S. through land-based ports of entry border crossing records from along the Mexican and Canadian borders can be a wonderful genealogical resource and many have been digitized through ancestry.com and familysearch.org seeing ship lines and rail companies agreed to treat all passengers destined to the U.S. port of entry and Immigration Act of 1891 required that information about immigrants entering the U.S. overland be recorded at land border ports inspectors prepared manifest lists take note that prior to October of 1906 this excluded native-born Canadians crossing the northern border also important to understand was that only those passengers declaring a U.S. destination donation will be listed on the records of arrivals next slide, slide number 22 here are two sample Mexico to U.S. border crossing records for artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera you can see these documents record many of the same details as the standard vessel passenger arrival records we discussed earlier but the information was recorded on individual cards rather than a manifest listing NARA's website provides some great information about utilizing Mexican border crossing records if you visit the link I provided on this session's handout next slide, slide number 23 Canada to U.S. border crossing records can seem confusing at first glance the records are often found in a record set titled manifest of passengers arriving at St. Albin's Vermont District through Canadian Pacific and Atlantic ports 1895 to 1954 often called the St. Albin's list these records actually reflect a variety of ports in Idaho, Maine, Minnesota Montana, New York North Dakota, Vermont and Washington I worked with a researcher who located a record for an ancestor who entered at Buffalo, New York Buffalo, New York and St. Albin's Vermont are 700 miles apart but you can't discount these records just because someone may not have entered at Buffalo's Vermont if you have not had luck locating your ancestor in a vessel passenger manifest it doesn't hurt to check the St. Albin's list next slide, slide number 24 passport applications are a record set that may not cross your mind when researching immigrant ancestors but they can be a great source of biographical data such as birth date and birth place information about spouse and or father, date and birth time early passports were generally valid for two years or less so you have to keep in mind that it's worth checking throughout an individual's entire lifetime because the same person may have had multiple passport applications next slide, slide number 25 there are some specific rules to keep in mind as you begin a search for passport records first until 1941 US citizens were not required to travel abroad two exceptions to this rule were brief periods of time during the Civil War and World War I second the US government only issued passports to US citizens two exceptions to this rule were years between 1863 to 1866 and 1907 to 1920 when aliens who had declared their intent to become naturalized US citizens could obtain a passport under congressional tax next slide, slide number 26 passport applications from 1795 to 1925 are maintained in their original paper format at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland with digital copies available online through ancestry.com and fold3.com of note fold3 only has through 1905 posted online if you're looking for a passport issued April 25th, April 1925 through the present your request will go through the US State Department next slide, slide number 27 set for a brief period of time during the Civil War before World War I, alien visitors were not required to have visas in order to enter the US the practice of requiring all aliens to obtain visas from US officials abroad before departure to the US began in 1917 as a war measure during World War I and has continued since then NARA maintains visa applications created and maintained by the US State Department for the years 1914 to 1940 but it's important to note that with the exception of precedent cases and files that contain policy material individual case files for 1914 to 1932 were destroyed by the Department of State NARA has a site specific to genealogical research including state department records that I've provided a link to in the session handout if visa records are of interest to your research work especially for immigrants entering the US from 1924 to 1944 timeframe I would suggest looking at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services genealogy program which I'll address further later in the session next slide slide number 28 naturalization is another big area of interest for researchers for immigrant ancestors September 27th 1906 is an important date to keep in mind if you're diving into naturalization records prior to that date any court of record county, state, criminal federal and so on could complete naturalization proceeding after that date the responsibility for naturalization procedures was given to federal courts with uniform rules and standardized forms following although it took time for the lower courts to let go of the practice we've actually seen courts in more remote parts of the country continuing the work up into the 1970s and 80s you can generally use 1906 as a date to shape where you start and focus your naturalization search be sure to visit the federal court site I've listed to determine what national archives office maintains the records for the federal courts covering the state where your ancestor resided although some of these records have been digitized and made available online there are many records that are only available in paper format at NARA locations next slide, slide number 29 our discussion of naturalization records is best shaped by looking at the kinds of records created during the process and where those records exist the declaration of intention also called first papers declared an individual's intention to file a formal petition to become a citizen in 1906 act, aliens had to receive a certificate of arrival that verified legal immigration to the US and you will often see the certificate of arrival with the declaration of intention in our holding early declarations are very limited in the details recorded it could literally just be the individual's name country of origin and the dates that they appeared in court later documents like the one for Chin-Wing Soo that's on the slide right now include details about family entry to the US and even have a photo attached it is worthwhile to note that starting in the mid-1950s declarations were no longer required so you begin to see only the petition for naturalization available next slide slide number 30 the petition for naturalization also called final papers or second papers is the final step toward becoming a citizen file the minimum of two years after the declaration immigrants petitioned before the judge and were either granted or denied citizenship the petition did not need to be completed at the same court as the declaration and in many cases if the petition was filed at a federal court the declaration was consolidated with the petition when the actions took place at different locations as with declarations early records tend to record very little detail about the subject of the record unlike declarations where graphical information is recorded on later forms you will not find photos attached to these documents next slide slide number 31 once citizenship was granted an individual was issued a certificate as proof of citizenship if the individual petitioned and received citizenship through the court a certificate of naturalization was issued if the individual derived citizenship through another individual such as a parent or spouse a certificate of citizenship was issued two copies of certificates were created one was given to the individual the other was kept by the court and transferred to the immigration and naturalization service INS normally certificates are not available through NARA though especially within our federal court holding but there are occasions where certificates issued April 1956 and after can appear within an INS file which is a set of records we will touch on soon next slide slide number 32 pre-September 1906 you may need to contact county or state courts or even reach out through archives or county historical societies to track down the declaration of petition of course there are also handfuls of exceptions where the National Archives receive naturalization records from county courts but you can't count on that just as September 1906 as an important date for determining what court created an early naturalization record October 1991 is another important date because responsibility for naturalization proceedings again shifted hands moving from the courts to the immigration and naturalization service for naturalization records created after October 1991 you have to place a request through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service U.S. CIS for any naturalization after September 1906 it is helpful to note that U.S. CIS should have records of the actions taken so if you've hit dead end trying to determine the correct court it may be worthwhile to submit a request through their agency and see what you're able to find U.S. CIS has exclusive authority over any matters concerning citizenship after 1906 we are the ultimate resource to confirm whether an immigrant received citizenship in the 1906 to present time frame regardless of time frame when you're looking for naturalization records it's helpful if you can provide the individual's name including any variance and their country of origin an approximate date range of when the naturalization could have occurred and where the individual would have been living at the time that could include city, county, state next slide number 33 final set of records I'd like to address are alien files more commonly called A files the 1940 alien registration act required all immigrants residing in the U.S. to visit their local post office and register their alien status with the federal government as part of this process the immigration and naturalization service began issuing each alien an alien registration number and on April 1st, 1944 began using this number to create individual case files A files were originally created to house all records of an alien not yet naturalized as they passed through the immigration and inspection process next slide, slide number 34 ultimately though the files can potentially reflect information dating from the birth of the subject through their entry to the U.S. and subsequent interactions with the federal government during their time in the U.S. leading up to any final action like death, naturalization permanent resident status or deportation documents on the files vary drastically from subject to subject as they were dependent on an individual's interactions with the federal government but they can include applications affidavits, correspondence, photographs and more beginning in April of 1956 the immigration and naturalization service streamlined their filing systems and the A file became the single point application for immigrants starting at this point the files can even include documentation of the naturalization process including preparatory applications copies of the declaration and petition and the final certificate next slide slide number 35 all A files currently maintained by the National Archives are indexed in our online catalog and as new files are added to our holdings each year the catalog will be updated using first name and or surname and will be looking for results with the title alien case file for persons name or A file for persons name with one exception the A files for the entire country including U.S. territories are being consolidated at the National Archives at Kansas City it's important to note that some of the A files from INS district offices in San Francisco, Honolulu Reno and Guam are maintained by the National Archives at San Francisco be sure to take note of the location of record listed for each result in the catalog to confirm that you are submitting your request to the correct NARA office A files are eligible for transfer to NARA for permanent retention when 100 years has passed since the subject's year of birth currently we maintain A files for individuals born 1918 and prior remind that NARA does not yet have all of the A files for individuals born in that time frame any A files that have not yet transferred to NARA can be requested through the U.S. citizenship and immigration service next slide slide number 36 now slide number 37 jumping off points for your immigrant ancestor research can show up in lots of places from federal records like census naturalization and military service to family records like naturalization certificates bibles and church records newspapers, obituaries and grave sites and even vital records you really have to take time to consider what you can do with the information you find because even small details can set you on a path next slide slide number 38 the citizenship column on U.S. Census forms can provide clues to an individual's immigration date and citizenship status that first appeared on the 1900 U.S. Census although you always need to take the information with a grain of salt the details recorded can start to give you a clear idea of time frames when actions may have occurred and the kinds of records that you'll want to look for for example if you see 1903 as a year of immigration and AL recorded on the 1910 census you would assume that you should potentially be able to locate a 1903 passenger arrival record but you won't be looking for naturalization paperwork because the individual was still maintaining alien status in the U.S. at that time if for that same person there is a PA recorded on the 1920 census you can assume that they had started but not completed the naturalization process meaning that they had filed their first papers between 1910 and 1920 and finally if that same person has NA noted on the 1930 census you can assume that between 1920 and 1930 the individual completed the naturalization process and obtained citizenship so there should be naturalization records available through the NARA office maintaining federal court records for the state or your ancestor resided next slide slide number 39 in the same way that the census provides clues to citizenship the draft cards are another NARA record that can help you determine your immigrant ancestor status at a specific juncture in time the cards have been digitized and are available online through the National Archives catalog ancestry.com and familysearch.org next slide slide number 40 NARA's digitization partners have made a number of microphone publications and original records available through their websites through the National Archives online catalog but have not found digital images for the records you are seeking it can be helpful to review the listing of records and microfilm to see if the relevant records may have been captured by a partner organization you can click control F on your keyboard to bring up a search box for keyword searching on the page and each title includes a link out to the digital content on the partner web pages that site is actually regularly updated as new materials are scanned so you can fairly consistently trust that what you are seeing there is up to date in terms of what is available online next slide slide number 41 it is also important to keep in mind that NARA does not maintain all of the federally created records relevant to immigrant research the U.S. citizenship and immigration service U.S. DIS maintains a variety of immigration and naturalization related file types that have not yet transferred to the National Archives for permanent retention including A files and alien registration forms called AR2 forms certificate files also called C files visa files registry files etc. if you are not familiar with their agency it will be worthwhile to review their genealogy program website what they hold and how to search and request copies next slide slide number 42 thank you for joining me today for this presentation and I hope I have given you ideas for diving into research on your immigrant ancestry as a quick heads up over the next year I will be working to update all of the immigrant record related web pages throughout NARA's archives.gov site so be sure to check out the www.archives.gov slash research slash immigration web page so you can stay up to date on what NARA has available on site and online related to immigrant ancestry. Are there questions I can answer at this time? Okay Elizabeth thank you very much for a very informative presentation. Yes we received a number of questions during the course of your presentation and we are going to do the best we can to address as many of them as we can if we don't get to every question we apologize in advance but we'll see how much how many of them we can touch on here. The first set of questions we'll start with pertaining primarily to Ellis Island one question is a grandfather came and went back to Italy several times I can only find one are all records recorded and will I be able to find them all pertaining to Ellis Island? I'm not sure about gaps in Ellis Island records I believe there probably are some the other thing to keep in mind is that Ellis Island was not the only port that individuals could enter through so there is potential that you should open up your search beyond just looking at New York. Okay and another question are there reports for those who arrived in 1720? 1720 is prior to the establishment of the United States as a country so there's not going to be federal records what you're going to be looking for are something that may have been more locally created let's say that maybe a local newspaper was recording people who may have entered in through the country or other kinds of local correspondence things like that especially at that time you're going to be looking more to your state archives, your local historical societies things like that. Okay and what about immigration before Ellis Island opened? Any clues as to places to look for information on immigration that people who you would think would come to Ellis Island but it wasn't open yet it didn't exist? Yeah you know a lot of people assume that Ellis Island was where everybody came through but there are a lot of ports of entry all along the coastline so it's important to keep in mind that you should just be kind of broadly checking all the different ports that are available. There are some great resources online that give you ideas of when different ports were open so if you have an idea of time frame when somebody may have come into the country you can kind of start narrowing down what ports may have been open or not at the given time frame and that might help you narrow your search a little bit but the big thing to keep in mind when you're looking for immigrants is never to assume that somebody came in through New York Yes we got several questions along these lines. What are other ports than Ellis Island where immigrants would come into the United States could you just kind of list off a number of examples because people are asking for like are there ones for New Orleans and so forth Yeah New Orleans is a port really anywhere along the eastern and western seaboard if there was somewhere that a ship could come in you could have immigrants entering there. There are probably hundreds of ports all along the eastern and western coast. Okay yeah so there's a potential for records there possibly. Are there any ship passenger lists for immigration to Virginia and Maryland in the 1600s? Again you're getting really early and you're outside the scope of federal records so what you'd be looking for wouldn't necessarily be a passenger manifest but perhaps something else that would have documented people making the move whether it's correspondence whether it's newspaper clippings and in that case I would also suggest checking to see what might be available at the port of departure was there any documentation occurring on the other end of their trip that might be of assistance. Okay and I have a specific question about Baltimore when did immigration records start for Baltimore would you know that? I do not know that offhand but it's information that we could readily track down so it's worth going ahead and submitting that request in through inquire at narra.gov and we can track that info down for you. Yes just to repeat what Elizabeth said if there's a question we can't answer or we don't get to your question you can email us at inquire at narra.gov that's the email address for receiving reference requests and we can if you note Elizabeth Burns presentation we can get it forward to her accordingly where are the original records abstracted online for castle gardens I can get a summary for my ancestor but would like to view an original if possible I'm not familiar with castle gardens I don't know if you are just a but that was a question so I'm familiar with castle gardens but I can't I will be honest I don't know where the original records are for that where the actual paper records are that would be another one if you send it into inquire I can definitely do some looking and help you but I will say because a lot of those records have been digitized and they are old and fragile it is very rare that people access those original passenger manifests in person normally we have researchers utilize the digital copies Okay here's an interesting one getting into early World War I era and pre-World War I a way to find a passenger manifest for a ship that never arrived from Italy it was torpedoed and sunk near Italy in 1915 in that case I would actually suggest looking more on the Italian end of things I am not as familiar with what Italy was creating in terms of departure lists or things like that but I would think that maybe checking with the Italian National Archives and seeing what kinds of records they would maintain would be a good place to start unfortunately because it never entered the US you are not going to have those traditional immigrant manifests that you would have so you would be looking for something that would have indicated their departure out of Italy Okay so we have questions coming from many different areas and topics and so forth so pardon Elizabeth we are trying to address them in an organized fashion if we can but sometimes we can come in a very wildly from one to another so this question is in a different vein where would I find records for Slovakian aliens working in Pennsylvania coal mines looking roughly 1890 to 1907 I guess I would be curious what kind of records you were hoping to track down there is definitely potential for trying to look to see if any of the coal mining companies happen to have any records of individuals who worked at their locations at that point I would say you are going to be trying to look for other kinds of records do you have any indication that they might have naturalized have you looked through the court records in that area to see if anything happens to show up about them have you been able to track them down in the federal census records and what does that indicate about them things like that would be my suggestion Okay another my grandparents family first appear in the 1930 census I cannot find when they came to the United States or where they came to the US from in Europe nothing in Ellis Island or on Ancestry do you have any suggestions on other places to try or to start 1930 census have you checked in the citizenship column and what do they indicate there about immigration and citizenship status you found them in the census that at least means that you have an idea of where they resided in the US so I would certainly reach out the National Archives office covering that geographic area and see if they can be of assistance in helping guide you know are there naturalization records are there other things that you might consider but I feel like you would definitely have some avenues for continuing a search it just may be good to talk to a staff person so they can give you a more specific guidance okay and then we have a few questions that kind of cluster around the same topic and that's pre-revolutionary war and revolutionary war era do records exist for immigrants from other countries do records exist coming from other countries during those time frames and do you have what are suggestions that you may have especially when you're talking pre-war and then revolutionary war and shortly thereafter very early in the Republic yeah I mean you really have to keep in mind if you are pre-revolutionary war the United States doesn't exist at that point so you aren't going to have any federally created records because you don't have a unified organization that would be creating anything and even during the early time of the beginning of the United States up until 1819 you're really inconsistent it's just kind of port by port if they happen to be recording things at any given time like I mentioned there's only two ports that kind of consistently kept records but you know it's really hit or miss because you didn't have any single unit that was keeping record of things and at that point the whole premise of immigration wasn't necessarily something that was registering as something that they needed to be tracking really what you're going to be looking for in that early time frame are like I mentioned anything from the end of departure so the originating country did they create anything about ship leaving and then on the US then you're really going to be looking more for those local records you know are there local diaries where there's newspapers where they were recording names of people coming through you know at that time newspapers especially were much more you know here's every detail about all of the people in this area right now so you can often find names of all the people who are entering on a given vessel but you're really not going to be looking at the National Archives we are not going to be a good resource for those early time frame okay and then you noted that around 1819 records federal records do start to become a little bit more consistent can you say a little bit more about that yeah so that 1819 act is when everything got put into place that passenger lists were required so that's when you start to see beginning in January of 1820 is when you really start to see more consistency in the creation and existence of passenger lists on the US port okay we have a few naturalization related questions one is so would naturalization process paperwork be in a state archives prior to 1906 for instance like the mid 1850s in Maryland okay so it really depends I will say it's a fairly safe bet that it probably didn't occur at a federal court you really have to think when you're early especially I would say early mid 1800s you've got to think about how people would have been traveling in between locations to achieve naturalization they're not going to travel way out of their way to go to a federal court if there's a local court near them that would also complete the process for them so if you know where somebody was residing you really need to consider what would have been the closest court geographically to that person and in a lot of cases that's going to be your county, your state your criminal court that's in that local area some people did complete them at the federal court we do have federal records that are early but pre 1906 because it wasn't standardized they could go anywhere they really do see that show up now when it comes to where those records are located that varies state to state county to county in some cases you'll see copies of the records of the state archives some of them are still with those courts some of them are at local historical societies in handfuls of cases there are times where those county court records have ended up at the National Archives so you really have to be open minded about where you're looking for the records and that's kind of the unfortunate thing about the pre 1906 is that you just have to go into it knowing that you're probably going to have to reach out through multiple sources in order to find the document okay very good another question my grandmother born in the united states lost her citizenship status upon marriage to my alien grandfather in 1913 according to the 1920 census records would she have had to reapp to apply for naturalization so she actually would have had a couple options I guess just to bring everybody up to speed on this there was a law in place until 1922 that a woman's citizenship was tied to either her father or her spouse so if you were a US born woman and you married a German man in the eyes of the federal government you became a German citizen now Germany wouldn't have really seen it that way necessarily but that was how it was viewed from a US perspective in 1922 the law changed women obtained their own rights to citizenship but you had a couple options you could apply and obtain citizenship through the naturalization process but there was actually a law put into place that allowed for repatriation at a later point so in some cases you'll see naturalization paperwork at some times you'll see repatriation records and sometimes they didn't know that they had lost their citizenship and so you don't actually see any documentation of it but there's a couple different possibilities both the repatriation records and the naturalization records will show up within the federal court records that the national are okay this one's about a person's grandfather who was naturalized as a result of his World War One service the person says they can't find World War One files they were destroyed in a fire and they haven't checked the local court files but might NARA or the State Department have records yeah there's definitely potential and we do have military petitions show up in our court records so even though his military personnel file may not exist anymore that doesn't mean that there's not documentation of his citizenship I would definitely reach out through the National Archives office that covers the geographic area where he was living okay I'm just looking through remaining questions that we have here that have come in is it possible to locate special investigation records for Ellis Island so what this person is referencing are special inquiries that were held when people were detained at Ellis Island there are not records for every single person that was detained but there are cases where you can find those records the files are part of the subject and policy records that exist at the National Archives in Washington DC sometimes they're called the 56,000 files there are actually a few different ways that you can track down files within that set one is a set of microfilm the T-458 that has been digitized and is available on Ancestry.com you can try name searching but sometimes you actually just have to go through it not arranged by individual's name it's actually more of a topical subject based index but it can help you narrow in on where your immigrant board of special inquiry records may exist there are some wonderful resources about tracking down those board of special inquiry records on the USCIS website so I would actually suggest shooting off an email to inquireatnara.gov and I can provide you with that direct link to give you a better idea of how to start that research okay another question my grandfather came to the United States from Trinidad in 1905 his final destination was Nebraska any idea what port he might have come through I think the person is looking for ideas of where to start to look for potential ports of entry um yeah I mean coming from in the southern part I would suggest looking at Miami, New Orleans some of the ports in that part of the country because it's very unlikely that he would have come in you know through New York or any of the kind of northeastern ports so I would focus your effort south if you know that he entered in 1905 there's a pretty good chance that you should be able to find some documentation of him if you have any idea that he might have naturalized that might be a good way to come at it if you have found him in the Federal Census that might also give you some clues there's a few different ways to approach it but I would say your kind of southeastern ports are going to be your target there okay and we have one final question for you and that is how about departure records did the United States maintain outbound manifests especially for the interwar periods I don't know for the interwar periods but there are certain windows of time and certain sets of records that do exist regarding departures out of the US that's something I would have to do some more looking into if you had a specific scenario it would be easier to look at that way okay thank you very much Elizabeth for your presentation to the audience if the presenter did not get to your question please send an email to inquire at narra.gov videos and handouts they will remain available after the event from this YouTube page and from the fair's web page we will now have a short intermission and begin on the next hour welcome back this is session number four of the 2019 virtual genealogy fair it's for all skill levels and entitled using National Archives records to research World War I naval and marine corps records for genealogical research our speaker is Nathaniel Patch during his session Mr. Patch provides you with a guide to discovering the story of your World War I sailor and marine using the records of the National Archives Nathaniel Patch is