This week’s blog post comes once again from guest blogger Diane Petro, Archives Technician in the Research Support Branch at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC.  Diane is working on reference activities relating to the upcoming 1940 census release. Researchers often go to the Instructions to the Enumerator when trying to interpret a question [...]

Founded in 1936, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. During the week of August 22, almost 1,800 archives professionals from all over the globe gathered in Chicago, Illinois for SAA’s annual meeting and anniversary celebration. Today’s blog features my introductory remarks for SAA session #701 that I chaired, “New Perspectives for the 1940 Census” providing a quick history of innovative technologies used for processing and accessing census data.

The more we interact with the public, whether at national conferences or NARA-sponsored events such at the annual Genealogy Fair, the more we hear how much researchers would like to see our finding aids available online.  Well, this seems like a good opportunity to point out that two of our most popular genealogy Reference Information [...]

At the NAGARA plenary address in Nashville a few weeks ago, I was asked to talk about NARA’s new Applied Research Division, which wandered into an explanation about why we haven’t been ERA Research for the past two years. Folks were encouraged to attend my 1940 Census session, featuring NARA research partners who are using cool smart tools to make sense out of scanned images—there was not an empty chair in the room, leading to fruitful discussions and promising collaborations…and that’s what you missed at NAGARA! Read the full story here…

The National Archives will be here to answer all your archival questions on June 9th!  Known as Ask Archivists Day, this worldwide event on Twitter will bring together the people who collect, care for, and research archival records in one space where questions from general research practices to whether a repository has your ancestor’s information [...]

Are you a genealogy blogger?  Do you have questions for NARA, whether it be about blogging or records?  Then we have the event for you!  This year at the 7th Annual Genealogy Fair, The National Archives will be hosting a meet-up to bring together genealogist bloggers and spark some good conversation about the records you [...]

Have you ever looked at a Civil War pension file and wondered, what does this all REALLY mean? More specifically, have you ever tried to figure out what each document or slip of paper actually was, where it came from, and what relevance it had to the file as a whole?  Believe it or not, [...]

As a way to wrap up the discussion about records relating to military service in the 20th century, it would be a good idea to check out the electronic records available on NARA’s Access to Archival Databases (AAD) . AAD is an online resource available on the NARA web site at http://aad.archives.gov/aad/ and contains a [...]

In the NARA Coast-to Coast post last week, we discussed the general process for naturalization. This week we will focus on some of the exceptions to the normal process for minors, women, and aliens serving in the U.S. military. Naturalization and Minors (Children) Minor children were granted derivative citizenship when their father, or after 1922 [...]

We’re launching a public wiki pilot project that will allow researchers, historians, archivists, and citizen archivists to create pages on records or themes. We need your ideas and enthusiasm to make the wiki a success.  Please join us for the second planning meeting at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, on Wednesday, May 19th from [...]